Requiem

A lot of pretty famous and pretty good people died this week. It’s Memorial Day so let’s remember them.

First, Chuck Rangel. He was actually #8 on my obituary to-write list, but I’ve been slacking a bit on these and it didn’t happen. I didn’t quite know what I wanted to say yet. I figured it would be an interesting exploration both of the rise of Black politics in the post-60s Democratic Party and a window into a general discussion of the Party over the decades. Certainly he was one of the dominant members of Congress for a long time. Maybe he wasn’t everyone’s idea of the perfect good government liberal type, but he was an absolute force of nature, both in New York City and in Washington.

I have actually never seen The Sorrow and the Pity. And I was pretty surprised Marcel Ophuls was still alive. But he was until the other day, when he died at 97. I don’t know that I really need to watch the film, as I know the powerful work it did in blowing up the bullshit French myth about everyone resisting the Nazis, the most laughable claim in that nation’s history of laughable claims. Color me shocked that a nation that to this day refuses to allow the government to engage in statistical categorization of race would cover itself in bullshit. Ophuls outraged the French people by his truth telling.

Susan Brownmiller might be the most important of the people we are talking about here. Her work on rape and blowing up the insane myths that women actually wanted it makes her one of the all time heroes of feminism. It’s almost impossible to believe that such ideas circulated in American life, but they sure did and Brownmiller took them head on. And this quote–“Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times”–damn.

Finally, I wanted to mention Michael Roemer, whose films never did get seen much. But Nothing But a Man, starring Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln, is one of the greatest films about Black life ever made. That Roemer was white makes this even more interesting. It’s not surprising that he so often worked with Robert Young though–both of those guys were absolutely uncompromising filmmakers who often took on taboo subjects, or at least subjects that more prominent white directors or anyone in Hollywood would make. In this film, Lincoln plays the daughter of a locally elite Black family and Dixon is the itinerant worker. They fall in love and he promises to protect her, but he can’t in a society that treats Black men so poorly, so of course he takes it out on her. He made this film in Alabama in the 1960s, to give you a sense of what this production was like.

I know you thought this was all going to be about the Duck Dynasty guy…..