Month: October 2017

We are Live!

We are Live!

Posted by | Oct 19, 2017 | , |

Politics/Letters Live is, well… live! This is where we’ll experiment with new formats and new voices, with podcasts, interviews, and plainly weird shit between the “official” editions of the quarterly magazine.  Who knows?  Maybe next year the podcast is old hat, and Chapo Trap House brays from the dustbin of history. We feature three new voices.  Mark Bray, the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook(Melville House), talks with Bruce Robbins and me about the extreme politics of our time. Tune in to part two of our interview when it goes online on Saturday. Natalie Frazier, who was only last year a film student at Northwestern,...

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Yes Spike Lee, I’d Like My Money Back

Yes Spike Lee, I’d Like My Money Back

Posted by | Oct 18, 2017 | |

Spike Lee asked if I wanted my money back. I surveyed the auditorium full of New Balances, stale khakis and the stench of pretension seeping from under the liberal veneer. White intellectuals. Suburbanites. My oblivious white film student peers. A pitifully short row of weary black parents in t-shirts and wristbands commemorating their dead, bullet-ridden children. I did want my money back. As a proud Chicagoan, born on the southside and raised on the westside, I didn’t recognize the sloppy illustration of Chicago Lee had so haphazardly drawn. Even more offensive was the bombastic 127 minute lecture aimed at...

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Fiddler’s Green: RIP Gord Downie

Posted by | Oct 18, 2017 | , |

Gord Downie is dead.  This is a sad day.  For better or worse, the Tragically Hip have been the soundtrack of my life.  They have been the soundtrack for almost all Canadians’ lives. In 1989, I worked as a line cook at an IHOP in suburban Vancouver.  There was this dishwasher there, Greg.  He was around my age, maybe a bit older.  But he got me onto the Hip.  I had seen the video for ‘New Orleans is Sinking‘, of course, it was on heavy rotation on MuchMusic.  But Greg got me into the band, and that brilliant début album, Up To Here. Downie’s lyrics were what kept me hooked on the Hip.  Sure, the music was great, but Downie’s lyrics.  He wrote songs that seethed and snarled with energy.  He and his band also wrote some pretty ballads, one of which is the title of this post. Live, Gord Downie was something else entirely.  He was a madman.  All this energy, whirling about the stage, singing and screaming and moaning his lyrics out.  In between songs, he told us, the audience, weird things.  He told us stories.  At Another Roadside Attraction, on Seabird Island in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, he stopped in between songs.  He stopped still on the stage, crouched, looking out at the audience, his hand shielding his eyes from the light.  It was hot...

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#MeToo: A Public Service Announcement

Posted by | Oct 17, 2017 | |

Since around Sunday afternoon, women have been posting on social media that they have been victims of sexual assault and/or sexual harassment.  My Twitter and Facebook feeds are full of these brave posts, with the hashtag #MeToo.  But, almost immediately, the backlash came.  From men. Yes, men are the victims of sexual assault, too.  Around 10% of rape victims are male, and around 3% of men in the United States have been sexually assaulted.  This is a very real problem.  And the sexual assault of men does not get much coverage in our world.  To be a male survivor of sexual assault is alienating and lonely.  In fact, many of the same things women experience, men experience in the aftermath of being sexually assaulted. But. This male backlash to #MeToo smacks of an attempt to deny women their experiences. It also smacks of ‘All Lives Matter.’ A couple of years ago, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, white conservatives began the counterpoint: All Lives Matter.  Well, duh.  Of course all lives matter.  That was never open for debate. No one ever said that because Black Lives Matter, other lives don’t.  But the simple fact was that the discussion was about black lives, which were much more likely to be terminated at the hands of the police than other types of lives. In effect, saying ‘All Lives...

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The Vietnam War: Ken Burns’ ‘healing touch’

The Vietnam War: Ken Burns’ ‘healing touch’

Posted by | Oct 17, 2017 | |

The only thing you need to know about the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary series on The Vietnam War (PBS) is that it ends with the Beatles singing “Let it Be” a few minutes after Stuart Harriman muses “was it worth it?” Burns and Novick have said that they wanted the series to promote healing in America, and they did, indeed, serve up a comforting balm for the great black wound of 20th century American history. Like so many of Burns’ other documentaries, The Vietnam War treats the personal, intimate tragedies, triumphs, heartaches, and achievements of Americans with...

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