Book Reviews-Smoking and Savages

Everybody Smokes in Hell by John Ridley.

John Ridley is among other things, a screenwriter. He was the screenwriter for the movies U-Turn (which was based on his book Stray Dogs) and Undercover Brother. This book has a very visual element to it. I’ve read that it was originally a movie script. Ridley does not appear to be overly fond of LA or the people in the entertainment industry. As he writes in the opening “Any similarities between the miscreants in this story and the actual insipid degenerates who populate the city I hate more than cancer are purely coincidental. “

The action is set in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.  Paris Scott is a black thirty something loser who works the night shift at an LA mini-mart. His girlfriend just dumped him. She accurately described him as too old to be a slacker and too young to be a bum.  Paris is working one night when a severely depressed and barely functional rock star named Ian Jermaine (A thinly disguised Kurt Cobain) enters the store near closing time. Feeling sorry for him Paris takes the depressed musician back to Jermaine’s hotel room. Once they arrive Jermaine commits suicide. Paris winds up with a CD of Jermaine's unreleased final recording. He returns home and hides this in his sofa.

Meanwhile Paris' roommate has just completed a rip-off of the meanest heroin dealer on the West Coast, one Daymond Evans. The roommate flees back to the apartment where he also hides the heroin in the sofa.

Of course neither roommate tells the other what he did. Each of them proceeds to negotiate a reselling of the "stolen" material to the record company and the drug dealer.  As both men are thoroughly inept at this the record company executive and Evans each independently decide that they would just rather kill them and retrieve their merchandise. When Paris’ roommate comes down with a sudden case of death both the record company and the drug dealer send their teams after Paris. Something approaching hilarity ensues as Ridley does an accurate satire of the common predatory tactics to be found in Hollywood and the underworld. Ridley has said that this book was his version of a Preston Sturges screwball mix-up. 

Ultimately the book is sort of thin. It's quite "Tarantinoesqe" for anyone who is a fan of that style. None of the characters are at all sympathetic or the kind of person you could ever root for to succeed. If this is what Hollywood is really like then no wonder Ridley seems to hate the place. The most vibrant character is not Paris (who spends most of the book whining, wishing he had money for strippers, begging for money from relatives, boasting to himself about his big plans, getting beat up or shot at), but Brice, a hyper violent Caucasian hit woman with the psychology of Luca Brasi, the looks of Scarlett Johannson and a taste for Bachmann-Turner Overdrive.

Savages by Don Winslow.
 He is also the author of The Death and Life of Frankie Z and The Winter of Frankie Machine.

This book takes place after the events of Winslow’s masterpiece book, The Power of the Dog.  Winslow makes oblique mention of occurrences in that story. However this book takes a different and much smaller focus. It’s set in California. The three protagonists are two twenty-something former childhood best friends, Ben and Chon and the rich girlfriend that they both share, Ophelia (better known as “O”).  The laid back, liberal and guilt laden Jewish Zen Buddhist Ben and the energetic, right-wing, wired and somewhat sociopathic Anglo/Irish Chon (he's an Iraq and Afghanistan SEAL veteran) have become Southern California's largest and most successful independent marijuana  growers, dealers and wholesalers. They have, at Ben's insistence, done this mostly non-violently, though there are times when Ben looks the other way while Chon handles business. The Baja Cartel has decided that it needs to expand into retail marijuana sales. To this end it sends the two men a video showing the severed heads of men who DIDN'T listen to wise and generous merger offers.

When this fails to achieve the desired effect the Cartel kidnaps O to convince the duo to submit to a hostile takeover. But Chon doesn't take kindly to threats and even non-violent latte sipping Ben has some buttons you don't want to push. But how can two Americans outfight the Cartel?

This book got very good reviews in the NYT and from fellow writers Stephen King, Janet Evanovich, James Ellroy and Christopher Reich. Oliver Stone has signed on to make a movie based on this book.  But it didn’t impress me as much.

It wasn't BAD writing but in this book Winslow uses Ellroy's short direct punchy prose. There are lots of deliberate fragments, two sentence paragraphs, single verb sentences and so on. If you like this style you may enjoy the writing.  If not then it may give you a headache.

His father taught him a lesson about trust.

Don’t.

Ever.

Anyone.

Although Winslow teases with a Sam DeStefano like Cartel enforcer as a foil for the heroes, ultimately a lot of the story relies on the Cartel leaders and members being slightly less vicious and certainly much dumber than they are in real life. This was a big problem for me. IRL organized crime cartel thugs kill people they think MIGHT be threats. They even kill people they know aren’t threats just to intimidate other folks or stay in practice.

Such folks certainly don't wait around to find proof-especially if they don't even like the person under suspicion. It didn’t make sense that the Cartel wouldn’t have crushed Ben and Chon at the first sign of any problems. That issue or the somewhat strange and graphically described triad relationship among O, Ben and Chon aside this was a so-so book. At some points it falls into the “Great White Hero” sort of storytelling which plagues a lot of American fiction and film. A century or so ago this book would have been written with Apache, Comanche or Cheyenne bad guys. It's amazing and rather bothersome that such tropes are so persistent and powerful in our culture.  It has very deliberate and obvious allusions to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  I didn't think this book was as good as his other books-especially The Power of The Dog.

The Oscars, Black Movies and Exclusion

Let’s discuss the 2010 paucity of black actors in lead roles in mainstream Hollywood movies or the lack of quality black oriented films. A recent NYT article did that.

Crammed into this year’s field of 10 best picture Oscar nominees are British aristocrats, Volvo-driving Los Angeles lesbians, a flock of swans, a gaggle of Harvard computer geeks, clans of Massachusetts fighters and Missouri meth dealers, as well as 19th-century bounty hunters, dream detectives and animated toys. It’s a fairly diverse selection in terms of genre, topic, sensibility, style and ambition. But it’s also more racially homogenous — more white — than the 10 films that were up for best picture in 1940, when Hattie McDaniel became the first black American to win an Oscar for her role as Mammy in “Gone With the Wind.” In view of recent history the whiteness of the 2011 Academy Awards is a little blinding.

This retreat from race by the big studios partly explains the emergence of a newly separate black cinema with its own stars (Morris Chestnut, Vivica A. Fox), auteurs (Ice Cube, Tyler Perry) and genres (including tales of buppie courtship like “Two Can Play That Game” and of neighborhood striving like the “Barbershop” franchise). Emerging from outside the mainstream and indie world, the prolific Mr. Perry has become one of the most successful directors and producers of any color.

Mr. Lee has been among Mr. Perry’s critics. “We’ve got a black president, and we’re going back,” Mr. Lee said in 2009. “The image is troubling, and it harkens back to Amos ’n’ Andy.” The philosopher Cornel West has been more charitable (“Brother Tyler can mature”) and last year he put a larger frame around the issue of race and the movies in America, noting that with “all the richness in black life right now,” that “the only thing Hollywood gives us is black pathology. Look at the Oscars. Even ‘Precious,’ with my dear sister Mo’Nique, what is it? Rape, violation, the marginalized. Or else you get white missionary attitudes toward black folk. ‘The Blind Side?’ Oh my God! In 2010? I respect Sandra Bullock’s work, but that is not art.”

This summoned forth exasperation and frustration from various people of differing ideologies who were tired of hearing presumably liberal whites or Blacks complain about this. Not all of these people were conservative though many of them were white. The writer Mitch Albom, who tends liberal on social issues, proclaimed on his radio show “Aren’t we over this?”  Evidently we are not.
Recently Anthony Mackie added more fuel to the fire when he said in an interview that Blacks in Hollywood were being lazy.

"To be honest I think the barriers have been broken. I think right now [blacks] are being kinda lazy on our game," Mackie said. "There are enough brothers with distribution deals and production deals where we should be making our own movies."

Mackie, who starred as Tupac Shakur in 2009's Notorious, said there is no shortage of black directors, writers or stars.

"Oprah got her own network," Mackie said. "Michael Jordan own a franchise. We got black money. So there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to tell the stories that we want to tell and portray ourselves the way we want to be portrayed."

I like Mr. Mackie and I really enjoyed his work in Night Catches Us
I’m glad to hear that he will be taking a prominent role in a film adaptation of a book I’m reading now, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith.
 

But I’m not sure he’s correct here.  As the NYT article mentioned there are some black people who are making “their own movies”. There are also various other black and biracial actors, producers, writers, and directors who have pointed out that contrary to Mackie’s statement, the barriers in Hollywood are still very much there. Spike Lee is of course the most vocal about this. But that’s really just bickering about one side of the equation-the supply side.


What’s just as important is the demand side. Although many artists in Hollywood are indeed liberal (at least publicly-right Charlie Sheen??) art can’t exist without commerce. You can make the most thoughtful film ever but if it flops, you may lose a chance to make a second one-at least with someone else’s cash. And Oprah aside, most black individuals don’t have a spare $20-100 million available to risk on a big budget film. Oprah has done that, to her credit but the financial results were mixed. Beloved lost money. The Great Debaters did ok but not great. Precious did quite well. Danny Glover has been trying to get an epic film made about the Haitian Revolution for some time. It’s difficult for him to line up financing because the movie obviously would not have any white heroes in lead roles.


The white British writer Neil Gaiman refused for a long time to have a film made of his story Anansi’s Boys, because the industry wanted to change the heroes (children of an African god) from black to white. The fantasy writer Ursula K. LeGuin did not have editorial control when a television adaptation was made of her Earthsea trilogy and MUCH to her dismay, most of her lead characters, who were people of African, Pacific Islander, or Native American appearance in her book, were changed to Caucasian appearance for the television version. So definitely something funny is going on. Someone ought to be raising an eyebrow.

And there it is. There are many stories which can be told with predominantly Black casts. But if the film only appeals to roughly 14% of the population in the US and less than that in overseas markets, all things equal it will be more difficult to convince anyone –racist or not- to put their money behind it. How do we get white or non-Black audiences to see their reflected humanity in predominantly black movies, the way that blacks have done for white movies? People talk about Chinese cinema or Bollywood but forget that those producers have a built in market of hundreds of millions of people. Black American artists don’t have that.
Like him or not Tyler Perry is the most successful black producer, director and studio head. But he still has to go through a “mainstream” distributor to get his films shown. It’s not quite as easy as just saying do your own thing. It takes time, connections and resources. And if Mackie is going to call out other people for being “lazy”, one must ask how much of his own hard won and well-deserved wealth is he using to create, produce and distribute black movies? I’m sure he must be doing that since he’s not a lazy man.

So going back to this year’s Oscars, with the possible exception of Night Catches Us I can’t really think of any films that featured Black actors or actresses in roles I thought were difficult, complex, multifaceted and were Oscar worthy.  So this year’s so-called exclusion really wasn’t. But the deeper challenges remain-both for black producers, directors, distributors and actors AND for the black audience. If the black audience doesn’t support black films those films won’t get made.
Of course some “colorblind” people will grouse why does any of this even matter and aren’t we injecting race where it doesn’t belong. To them I can only quote the late Dwayne McDuffie, the black comic book writer and media group owner who did indeed create his own company.

“You don’t feel as real if you don’t see yourself reflected in the media,” he told The Chicago Sun-Times in 1993. “There’s something very powerful about seeing yourself represented.”

What are your thoughts on the lack of Blacks in the recent Oscars? Were there any Black actors or films you thought were overlooked? Does Mackie have a point or is he not seeing the bigger picture? Do you care if you see yourself in movies or do you have more important things to worry about? Do movie images impact reality?

Book Reviews-Barnes &Due, N.K. Jemisin and Stephen King

Underwood, Due and Barnes at NAACP Image Awards

In the Night of the Heat. 

This book was written by Steven Barnes and his wife Tananarive Due with creative inspiration and some input by the actor Blair Underwood.

It's the second in a series but it can be enjoyed as a stand-alone. It's partly a retelling of the O.J. Simpson story combined with civil rights era mysteries. It features the writers' fallen hero, Tennyson Hardwick, one time ladies man, struggling actor, and informal private investigator/martial arts enthusiast. Hardwick turns down the request of an old girlfriend to help protect her cousin, the recently acquitted football star T.D. Jackson, from murder threats. Shortly afterwards T.D. Jackson is found dead from apparent suicide. Hardwick gets drawn into the case, much to the displeasure of the LAPD, and other more sinister parties.

Barnes lives in California and also works in the entertainment industry. Barnes has said that he thought O.J. was guilty as hell and that if he did have any hearsay inside information or ideas about how O.J. would have committed the crime and gotten away with it, a mystery novel certainly would be the place he'd put it...

So that part was fun. It was also fun trying to pick out the book sections that were written by Barnes and the ones written by Due. Both writers have pretty distinctive tones but do a good job at making the shifts in the book close to seamless. There's a lot of backstory about how Hollywood really works from the POV of disposable actors or writers. 

Thinly veiled versions of Farrah Fawcett and Bruce Willis have cameos. YMMV on that stuff.

Barnes & Due do a good job of making the violence work as part of the story. My only quibble was that I think that for this book Barnes & Due may have slightly underestimated their readers' intelligence. There's a few "Scooby Doo" moments where some antagonists seem possessed to explain everything that took place so a particularly dim reader won't miss anything. That was unusual coming from these two but this is clearly their attempt to write for a more commercial market and appears to have paid off. That aside, this was fun reading.

 

 

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin.

This is the first in a trilogy. Yeine Darr, a woman who is the daughter of an exiled Arameri (think Northern Europe) princess and a Darr (think pre-Colombian Meso-American) nobleman is summoned to her mother's home city after her mother has died suspiciously.

A new heir to her grandfather's throne must be chosen and somehow she must play a part. Some of her relatives want to kill her on sight; others are more sympathetic. But no one is telling her what's really going on or why her mother, the original Heir, fled in the first place.

The Arameri-her mother's people- are great wizards who have conquered the world (All 100,000 kingdoms) via the use of enslaved gods. The gods are thoroughly amoral with regards to humans. The Arameri live in a city that literally floats in the sky. The most powerful god –who is NOT enslaved- is Black.

The author has chosen to use first person narrative throughout.  In general, Mickey Spillane aside, I’m not a fan of first person narrative. Nothing ever happens unless the narrator is there.  In addition the author is a feminist who very much wants to play with and throw out traditional genre assumptions.  There‘s nothing wrong with that of course but the book really wasn't quite entertaining enough to me.  I did perhaps learn to appreciate a little of my own male bias by having to attempt to look at everything through a woman's eyes.  

It was a challenging read which is more than I can say for some authors these days. It wasn't exactly what I was looking for but considering the simpleminded group think dreck that infects most sci-fi/fantasy sections,  it was good to see someone strike out on her own, even if I wasn't sure I liked the ending.

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

The Old Man's still got it. Recently released in hardcover this is a collection of four short stories, really novellas, that all center around secrets and revenge. It is very grim so be forewarned.The first story, 1922 concerns a dispute between a Nebraska farmer and his wife over what to do with some inherited land. The next, Big Driver details the risks to writers who take last minute speaking engagements. The third, Fair Extension updates the Needful Things motif, and the last one, A Good marriage will likely be especially enjoyed (perhaps "understood" is a better word) by those people who have been married for decades and are still alternately happy and disturbed that there are things about their spouse that they don't know. As an aside 1922 has a HUGE helping of regret, so much so that I could not help but be reminded of what I think of as King's greatest short story, The Last Rung on the Ladder. How appropriate then (and I didn't pickup on this until it was pointed out to me) that 1922 is set in the same town as The Last Rung on the Ladder.  

In the afterword King takes a few shots at unnamed writers who write for money as well as literary snobs. A bit off putting perhaps but he deserves his indulgences I guess. As he writes he takes what he does very seriously indeed and has no patience with those who don't. All of these stories are worthwhile. Get the book.

Movie Review-Winter's Bone and White Pathology

The writer Ishmael Reed had a serious issue with the HBO series "The Wire". You can read about it here.

In short Reed viewed it as relying on stereotypes about black pathology for the voyeuristic entertainment of white people who refused to critically examine their own troubles. The creator of "The Wire", David Simon, didn't care for that characterization and battle was joined. I respect Reed and have learned a lot from reading his work. But I disagree with his take on "The Wire" though I definitely see his POV. I wonder what Reed would make of the movie "Winter's Bone" which examines white pathology and poverty in the Missouri Ozarks. No Black people were stereotyped or otherwise harmed in the making of this movie. "Winter's Bone" received four Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor. It already won at Sundance.

The movie opens with Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) playing a tough as nails 17 year old who is the default leader of her family. Her brother and sister are too young to provide for themselves. Her mother is a catatonic depressive and her father is usually away selling or producing drugs. Methamphetamine is the drug of choice though cocaine is also shown. In short, this is a dysfunctional family. Like Michael in "The Wire", Ree takes care of things as best she can. We see her walking her siblings to school and making sure they do their homework.

The sheriff and bondsman arrive to inform Ree that her father Jessup has skipped bond. Ree doesn't really care about that but she learns that because her father signed over the family home to make bail, if he doesn't show for trial, the house will be forfeit. Because she is still a minor she would lose effective custody of her siblings.

This is unacceptable to Ree. Girl or not, Ree is still a Dolly and that means something to her.

Thus armed with nothing more than a stubborn streak, pride and an decided unwillingness to take no for an answer, Ree sets out on an epic search for her father among the local underworld members, most of whom are her own relatives (close and distant) and all of whom seem decidedly and dangerously disinclined to answer any questions or offer any assistance to help her keep her family together.

"Talking just causes witnesses" as one person sagely observes.

This movie was directed by Debra Granik and much like "The Wire" it was shot on location with many local non-actors performing in background roles and acting as formal or informal advisors to keep the movie grounded in reality. The movie captures an unpleasant part of America, from aggressive dogs kept chained in front yards to a sort of ugly Scots-Irish clannish pugnacity that underlies the actions of many characters. Stereotypical signifiers float around, such as the ubiquitous pick-up trucks, broken down machinery, outdoor laundry lines and a living room banjo-led hoedown. But Granik's skill as a director and her interest in the source material ensure that none of this ever goes over the top. The viewer never gets the feeling that she is pointing and laughing at anyone. 

The lighting of the movie is a little dim at times but other than that the cinematography is stark and gorgeous. It's the little things that let you know how dirt poor these people are. Although the defining motif for this movie is bleakness there are still a few people willing to help. Again the little touches, like bringing over food to a hungry family, teaching children how to hunt and dress squirrels, or trying to talk someone out of a bad decision really make this film work.

Taking two strong supporting roles are Dale Dickey who plays the pitiless and relentless Merab, the wife of the local crime boss (to whom Ree is very distantly related) and John Hawkes who plays Teardrop, Ree's cocaine snorting, tatted up uncle. Merab is a mirror image of Ree, older and much harder. Merab is who Ree will be in about 30 years if she remains in that area.  

Teardrop warns Ree away from any investigation. Judging by other people's reactions to him, Teardrop is evidently an extremely dangerous individual. Ree tells him that she's always been scared of him. "That's cause you're smart" is his terse response. Teardrop is not a man you want to get crossways with but Granik shows the human cost of his lifestyle.

There are a few scenes of sudden violence but this film makes its mark with the emotional pain of people refusing to care about this seventeen year old or her family. In the hands of a typical Hollywood director Ree would have been transformed into a riot grrrl capable of kicking behind and taking names in her search for her father. We would have seen cartoonish fight scenes like those of Angelina Jolie in "Salt" or Scarlett Johannson in "Iron Man 2". Fortunately the director didn't take that route. Ree's strength is not in violence but endurance.

It's what's not shown that makes this movie powerful. Violence hurts. It hurts more when it comes from people you thought you could trust. Check this one out.



Music Review -Jimi Hendrix West Coast Seattle Boy

This release features four CD's and DVD footage from a man widely considered to be the greatest guitarist who ever walked the Earth (not that I really believe in "greatest" anything when it comes to art and music). It is also a deliberate attempt to emphasize Hendrix’s overlooked R&B, soul and jazz roots. So what's not to like? This must be the Holy Grail. Yes? Everyone should run out and get this, right? Not necessarily.

First off let me say what this release isn't. Unlike say How the West was Won by Led Zeppelin or Agharta by Miles Davis this is emphatically NOT a cohesive set of concert recordings or a fabled lost album.

This release will probably be of interest primarily to hardcore Hendrix fans or obsessive collectors. For the first person the desirability of this may depend on price. It opened at $69 on Amazon and is now fluctuating between $47 and $53. The stripped down version can be had for between $13 and $20.

 The second type of person obviously will buy it no matter what I write but he/she should at least pick it up used. Ok, enough caution, what about the music?

CD1

This features Hendrix as a sideman to sixties era Black American rock-n-roll/R&B stars. If you happen to like this sort of music (and I do) then you will enjoy hearing Hendrix play on cuts by Little Richard, The Isley Brothers, Don Covay, Rosa Lee Brooks, King Curtis and more. If, on the other hand, you don't like this sort of old school R&B this CD may not impress. Standouts include an intense Hendrix solo on the Isley Brothers' "Have you ever been disappointed" that is reminiscent of Duane Allman's later solo on "Please lend me a dime" and Hendrix's riff on Ray Sharpe's "Help me Get the Feeling", which was later sold to Atlantic, scrubbed of Hendrix's guitar and reworked by Aretha Franklin into "Save Me". 

 

CD2

This disc focuses on Hendrix's early work with The Experience. Virtually everything here has been released before. These are alternate or acoustic versions and solo arrangements. Hendrix had a very heavy Dylan influence. This shows in his fanciful cover of "Tears of Rage", which almost redeems the entire release all by itself. Also included are an acoustic guitar rendition of "1983", "Little One" (not Little Wing) and a guitar/harmonica version of "Hear my Train A-coming".

CD3

This CD covers the transition from the Experience to the Band of Gypsys or as I like to think of it from a frustrated guitarist trying and failing to play bass (Noel Redding) to an actual bassist (Billy Cox) who understood where the “One” was. Noel Redding couldn't get groove if you tied him to a train track. With Cox on bass and Miles on drums, Hendrix speeds toward funk and soul. A few cuts sound eerily like Sly Stone without a horn section. The Hendrix connection to groups like P-Funk is obvious.

There are more unreleased items here. This includes "Hear my Freedom" with Lee Michaels on organ, live concerts with the Experience, and a 20 minute jam with jazz organist Larry Young.

Unfortunately this also includes "Mastermind" with Hendrix buddy Larry Lee on rhythm guitar and lead vocals. Sorry Mr. Lee but if I'm going to criticize Redding for being allergic to holding down the bottom, I have to take you to task being a bad singer. You need to be in the proper key and stay in tune. Yikes. This was the only cut that I stopped listening to and pressed next.

CD4

This last disc is mostly Band of Gypsys and then the later reconstituted band with Cox and Mitchell and without Buddy Miles.

The cd consists of projects Hendrix was working on before he passed away. This includes a long version of "Everlasting First", a song with Love frontman Arthur Lee on vocals. Standouts include "Suddenly November Morning", "Peter Gunn" and "All God's Children". This is the good stuff.

Final Call

Janie Hendrix, (Hendrix's sister and the executor of his estate) has said there's enough unreleased material to produce at least one new CD every 12-18 months for the next decade. While I admit that's good for her bank account I wish that they'd just put out the quality stuff now. There's actually a live Band of Gypsys studio jam that I have on cassette tape (taped off radio) as well as an Experience concert in Germany that I was hoping would be on this release. Oh well. Overall this was just barely worth it. I had heard too much of it before. I would advise others to buy it at a DEEP discount-IF you are a rabid Hendrix fanatic. If you're not, don't spend your money on this. But do pick up Band of Gypsys, not least for Hendrix’s improv on Auld Lang Syne , Who Knows and most especially his antiwar masterpiece Machine Gun . Unfortunately that last song is all too relevant today.

Nathan Bedford Forrest

“Alabama's gotten me so upset

Tennessee made me lose my rest

And everybody knows about Mississippi G****m”

-Nina Simone

JACKSON, Miss. - A fight is brewing in Mississippi over a proposal to issue specialty license plates honoring Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan. The Mississippi Division of Sons of Confederate Veterans wants to sponsor a series of state-issued license plates to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, which it calls the "War Between the States." The group proposes a different design each year between now and 2015, with Forrest slated for 2014.

"Seriously?" state NAACP president Derrick Johnson said when he was told about the Forrest plate. "Wow."

Forrest, a Tennessee native, is revered by some as a military genius and reviled by others for leading an 1864 massacre of black Union troops at Fort Pillow, Tenn. Forrest was a Klan grand wizard in Tennessee after the war.

Sons of Confederate Veterans member Greg Stewart said he believes Forrest distanced himself from the Klan later in life. It's a point many historians agree upon, though some believe it was too little, too late, because the Klan had already turned violent before Forrest left.

"If Christian redemption means anything — and we all want redemption, I think — he redeemed himself in his own time, in his own actions, in his own words," Stewart said. "We should respect that."

And here we go again.  As Faulkner wrote “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”.  This is true of America in general, the South in particular and perhaps Mississippi most of all.  This is ultimately what these constant battles over history are about-whether it is textbooks in Texas,  Michele Bachmann’s whitewashing of the Founding Fathers or the never ending battles over the Civil War and associated symbols.  Who gets to define history?  Who gets to tell the story? That’s the question.  Here’s what one eyewitness had to say about the Fort Pillow massacre:

Achilles Clark, a soldier with the 20th Tennessee cavalry, wrote to his sister immediately after the battle: "The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor, deluded, negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. I, with several others, tried to stop the butchery, and at one time had partially succeeded, but General Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs and the carnage continued. Finally our men became sick of blood and the firing ceased.”

From my POV there is simply no way to take nuanced views on the Civil War.  

The Confederates tried to break up the nation because they were concerned about their ability to keep slaves. They wanted to extend and protect slavery throughout the entire nation.  Don’t take my word for it. Read what they wrote.

The Civil War was the bloodiest war this nation ever fought.  More Americans died in the Civil War than died in World War II. The South lost. Slavery was ended. That was a good thing.  Not only did the South lose, it got its collective a$$ kicked, militarily speaking.  However a horrible thing happened postbellum. For a variety of reasons- political, pragmatic, racial and cultural- the South never really admitted that it was wrong.  

 

Unlike post-WWII Germany the South never had to face up to its crimes and indeed the North ultimately lacked the interest or resources to force it to do so. These were after all Americans. There was money to be made and reconciliation to accomplish. So the Black narrative of what the war was about or what slavery was like was ignored and the myth of the Lost Cause and the gentlemanly rebel took hold. Obviously these myths still resonate with many people today. The US thus lost a chance to save itself another 100 or so years of segregation, murder and exploitation.

Now I really don’t care what people put on their vehicle or what sort of shirt they wear.  

But I do draw the line at state endorsement of a man who led an armed rebellion against the United States. 

Ironically however Forrest's last recorded speech in 1875 was given to an early Black civil rights group. In this speech he supposedly urged racial reconciliation and may have defended voting rights for Blacks.

Go figure.

Is this just a question of if you don’t like the proposed license plate don’t get one?

Do you see any First Amendment issue here?   

Why are there some Americans who grasp so tightly to a belief that the Confederacy was a good thing?

Where are the Germans who hold similar views about the Nazis?   

If John Newton (slave trader and author of Amazing Grace) can be redeemed , why not Nathan Bedford Forrest?