Ebony and Ivory live together in perfect harmony.
Side by side on my piano keyboard, Oh lord, why don't we?
We all know that people are the same wherever you go...
William Shatner has an unfair reputation for being a ham actor. His name plus ham plugged into the googler returns over 44 thousand hits. What many people might not realise is he was trained as a Shakespearean actor.
I stumbled across a little-known classic of his which is now in the public domain. It will be embedded at the end of this post. It is a must see movie. It should be shown in every high school civics class. It is similar to Salt of the Earth, in that it reached a level of leftier than thouism that yours truly can only dream of attaining. It showed the connection between racism and inequality. Both movies did not do well in the box office. Both are classics despite having had low budgets and employing local, untrained residents as actors to work along some proven actors. It is a mix that worked.
Shatner's character would have never kissed Uhura. He played a Huey Long type racist, using oratory skills to manipulate the unwashed, white masses. He used doublespeak. It was the African-Americans who were the threat to their way of life and not unhealthy, inorganic bigotry. He drooled out that Washington was encroaching on their freedoms by forcing integration. Shatner preached to the rednecks that it was their responsibility to protect the whitey American way of life from Jooos and communists.
It's a very unsettling movie. The N word is utilised throughout clearly showing why those who hate its naked ugliness are not hiding behind skirts of political correctness. It is a word that shouldn't be thrown around too often.
looks can be deceiving
There's an odd internet poster who goes by the handle fairleft. He should really call himself fakeleft, or failreft as the donkeytale troll refers to him via the misspellicism schtick.
Fairleft describes Richard Nixon as the last liberal President. He is vehemently anti-immigration, to the point of proudly linking to rightwing sources with racist and neo-fascist ties.
The strangest fake leftiness coming out of him has to be with revisionism concerning Huey Long. Talk about right woos left. Here are a couple links proving how that dude is anything but on the left.
Share the Wealth Now, Obama
Fact: Huey pressured FDR from the left
Eric S. as sid's buddy did an excellent job debunking fairleft's disgusting glorification of Huey Long. As did donkeytale.
The first link clearly shows Pffugeecamp jumping the shark. Strangely enough the blog owner was in agreement with fairleft insinuating that all the negatives written about Huey Long have been merely smear attacks. When they couldn't beat Eric through debate, they made up unproven crap about him having peddled pedophilia. I quit Pffugee for a long time due to that. I returned quite a bit recently. I again ponder if I should go cold turkey and never look back. Eventually that blog will probably be whitewalled anyway. So read those threads while they're still available is what I'm suggesting, in order to understand how fake left ideology gets spewed on fake, lefty boards.
true colours
HUEY P. LONG: BAYOU FASCISM? by Lance Hill (excerpts)
It would be safe to assume that Long was forging a mass petty-bourgeois organization beyond his old constituency. Given that the adult population of the U.S. was roughly 55 million then, the 7,550,000 people on the SOWS mailing list reflect the seriousness of the movement's scope. Coupled with Huey's own personal newspaper, American Progress (peak subscription of 375,000), the Long propaganda machine presented one of the most formidable challenges to traditional bourgeois rule in the thirties.
Sitting at the administrative head of this organization was Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith. Smith was handpicked by Huey to head up SOWS, and the young radical preacher from Shreveport took up his duties with the passion of a true zealot.
He was an extremely capable organizer, in many ways the actual organizational mind of SOWS. He and Huey had extensive contact, although Smith's servile devotion to his new-found deity sometimes rubbed the Kingfish the wrong way.
Often described as a LaFollette Progressive, only a few admit that Smith was a militant anti-Semite and fascist thinker before he joined Huey's organization. Only a year before, Smith had written America's self-pronounced fuehrer, William Dudley Pelley, offering to help set up America's first fascist "silver shirts."
Some historians ruminate that Smith put aside these politics temporarily during his tenure as SOWS head. The suggestion is absurd. Smith later became a stalwart in the anti-Semitic, racist right-wing organizations agitating against the civil rights movement. Both apologists and detractors of Long are increasingly reluctant to concede that one of the largest mass organizations of the thirties was administered by an anti-Semitic fascist.
The view of many of Long's contemporaries that his movement constituted a left-wing insurgency has prevented many historians from identifying Huey with fascism as an ideology. But the European experience is replete with examples of fascist movements coming to power on populist-sounding programs with significant left-wing factions operating within them.
The example of Mussolini is enlightening since his transformation from Marxist leader to fascist ideologue paralleled the movement of large numbers of socialists into the fascist ranks. Also the Italian experience did not emphasize the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, nor was it particularly concerned with programs and ideology.
As Arendt shows in her book, all the fascist movements spent tremendous energy trying to deny they ever promoted progressive-sounding programs, since the actual tasks of salvaging capitalism demanded the opposite....
It defies all logic why there is still a debate over whether Huey was a white supremacist. He ruled a state that subjugated Blacks in virtual slavery with no political rights whatsoever. He openly proclaimed himself in favor of white-supremacist rule. The evidence that historians dredge up to substantiate their claim that Huey was a closet liberal is his apparent hesitancy to use race as an issue in his campaigns, and also the tangible benefits accruing to Blacks under the Long administration....
a kid in the trenches fighting for equality
I think this Lance Hill guy is the same one from this link.
Dr. Lance HillIt's fair to say Dr. Hill has quite a bit more credibility than anonymous bloggers named fairleft, Laura, and Blues. The latter desire for history to be rewritten concerning the American form of fascism personified by Huey Long. I would not be surprised if they have posters of him emblazoned on their fake lefty walls.
Executive Director
Southern Institute for Education and Research
Dr. Lance Hill is the Executive Director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research, a tolerance education and race relations research center based at Tulane University in New Orleans. While the Southern Institute’s primary work continues to be tolerance education, the Institute has responded to hurricane Katrina by initiating two new programs: the Katrina Research Project on Equity (KRPE), a clearinghouse on the impact of race and class in the post-Katrina recovery; and Storm Bridge Racial Healing and Reconciliation Project, a program designed to address post-Katrina racial divisions.
Shame (1962)
Shame also known as "I Hate Your Guts" "The Intruder" is a 1962 film directed by Roger Corman starring William Shatner as a racist mystery man sent to stir trouble in a southern town that is about to integrate its high school. Roger Corman claims this is the only film of the over 300 he's produced to lose money.
3 comments:
Lost the blogging bug?
In Corman's autobiography, he claimed that in the scene where Shatner stirs up the racists, the extras weren't actually aware they were extras in a fictional film.
Hi TLNL and S.M. Elliott,
I've definitely lost the blogging bug. I'm sure both of you can relate. We attract some of the craziest bloggers. Thankfully there are those few who are sane and appreciate it when we've come up with good stuff.
I've a new one in the works. I'm probably going to be mailing in most of my future blogging. Maybe it will be better reads. Perhaps I've been too intense about it over the years and has put a strain on the overall presentation.
Thanks for that comment S.M.. If true, I'd definitely love to hear more about that, as in wtf. I did read most of the extras were locals. That was the same thing done with Salt of the Earth.
It gives those movies kind of a documentary feel. As long as those locals aren't self-concious, I think it works well. Many an extra has looked foolish, imho. I tried acting in my younger days but had the same problem. Some people are just naturals. Some of th3e most amazing actors and actresses in history have been child stars in A quality flicks.
As a lefty I used to pass off movies as being part and parcel of the status quo. But there are pockets of awareness and some great movies that have been made. Unfortunately we don't hear of those as often as the dumbass ones. I'll admit some of my favourite movies have been film-noirs with apolitical themes. However, I believe the best movies of all time have a necessary condition of dealing with the human condition. I think that should be a criteria for all art.
Well, I'm gonna try and bang out a new one. It will touch on some dude named Steve Kangas. Unless someone can come up with an earlier example, he just may have been the first instance of death by internet.
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