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Decent Quality Since 1847

When It All Went South

4/4/2013

1 Comment

 
I worked on three movies with David Zucker, a fellow I like very much.  His politics have changed over the years, and he's become quite conservative, but I've always gotten along with him because...well, David is just a good guy.  Even when we've gotten into some harsh political email debates (he loves sending those "Did you see this..." emails, which I tend to write back and refute, which he tends to hate), but I've always just liked him.  And I hope him me.  Though I suspect I piss him off more than the other way.

This is a good description of David.  A few years ago, William Kristol's conservative magazine Weekly Standard did a cover article on a satire of liberals that David directed and co-wrote, An American Carol.  I wrote a pretty harsh commentary about the article for the Huffington Post.  I didn't know how David would react -- we've stayed friendly, but don't talk a lot and hadn't been in touch for a couple years.  But two days later, I got an email from David saying that he thought my piece was very fair-minded, and we should have lunch.  We did, and had a great time.

Anyway, David has now joined the ranks of people writing for the hated Huffington Post.  I don't know if this was a one time thing, but I hope not.  It was a fun, wry look at doing pre-production of a movie in Atlanta. 

The whole piece is worth reading, but there was one passage that stood out.  It was whimsical, but pointedly pollitical (though more historical), which I was very pleased to read.  He commented about visiting an area called Stone Mountain, and then wrote --
But the main feature of the park is the giant bas-relief carving of three equestrian figures, the Confederate heroes, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, all atop their favorite horses. Not having spent too much time in the South, I was used to the heroes we honored in my native Wisconsin, like Abraham Lincoln, "the great emancipator" whose statue commands a spectacular view over the UW campus in Madison. But here in Georgia, this mountain honored these dashing riders who fought so valiantly to... preserve slavery? Uh, I guess. And surrounding me on the vast lawn are 13 monuments to all the Southern states who seceded from the Union, and I'm wondering, does anyone think maybe this is the least bit strange? My God, this was also the place where the KKK was reborn in 1915! I looked around quickly. Fortunately there was no plaque commemorating that. I thought for a second, wait, I'm being punked by Ashton Kutcher in revenge for "My Boss's Daughter." Nope, it's all real, I'm not in Kansas anymore.
I was thrilled to see David write this, because that has LONG been a major bugaboo of mine: the rebel yells and the waving of the Confederate flag, all of which honor seceding from the union to preserve slavery, and how the South – which declared war on the United States and seceded – has somehow tried to position itself as the bastion of true patriotism.

It's one thing to recognize the history of your past.  It's another to honor what we as a society have tried hard to move far beyond. 

No, we're not in Kansas anymore.  We're in denial.
1 Comment
Arlene Paige
4/4/2013 09:08:04 pm

I think that "predjudice" arises from real experience and observation. Nobody in their right mind wants to hate and fear someone they simply don't want to know, to the point where they have to organize society to put people in certain places that are "separate but equal," like private colleges or jail cells that require discrimination because of constant violence. I think that we have preferences, socially and otherwise, because of an assortment of visceral reasons, including simple upbringing. So what. It's not natural to embrace everything, and probably dangerous. We all expand to the limits of our education and abilities. So... if separate toilets, for example, strike a liberally raised Northern urban person as bizarre and offensive, and then, for the first time, they step out of of their boundaries and listen to some horrible insult at the door of a public toilet in a less than exclusive venue from someone who's simply cracked at strange women, for example, thanks to radical groups, and who happens to be, let's say, Black... or if a relatively sheltered person gets offered drugs for sale by someone they've never gone near in their lives who happens to be totally out of their loop, and not their kind, then prejudice starts to grow. Margaret Mitchell, in the popular novel "Gone With the Wind," wrote about newly free Blacks chasing after widows in buggies headed to and from public markets to get what they needed because they had no slaves to do it any more and because many men were dead who might have seen to such chores. And this sort of attack behavior grew like Topsy in the old South on both sides of the racial divide until discrimination was so prevalent that it had to be outlawed by Presidential policy, and so many long years after the problem itself that you wonder if the Kennedys didn't take the matter on for easy glory since they had such a difficult struggle with everything else. Thinking about what's right often has little to do with what's necessary.

So the old South still has her heroic tributes standing, I guess, because it makes simple good sense to revere those men who fought to protect a standard of life that disappeared completely with racial freedoms, and we're all often in denial of why it is we think whatever it is we do think. I think we're in a period of a kind of mass insanity and that's an issue that's newer and more important than endlessly hashed over liberal theory and concerns over how we get conservative as we grow older.

Anyway, I hope that your friendship holds.

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    Robert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. 

    Elisberg is a two-time recipient of the Lucille Ball Award for comedy screenwriting. He's written for film, TV, the stage, and two best-selling novels, is a regular columnist for the Writers Guild of America and was for
    the Huffington Post.  Among his other writing, he has a long-time column on technology (which he sometimes understands), and co-wrote a book on world travel.  As a lyricist, he is a member of ASCAP, and has contributed to numerous publications.

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