The complex racial views of Jess Robin

As far as I know, "The Jazz Singer" (1980) is the only mainstream Hollywood film that can be considered Yom Kippur-themed. (No, "Atonement" doesn't count.) Thus I find myself thinking about the Neil Diamond film every year on Yom Kippur. Just FYI, despite the fact that the film is broadly labeled a bomb and that Lawrence Olivier himself derided it as a "piece of shit," it is considered a classic in my family and can be quoted from liberally by my relatives just as easily as "Godfather" and "Princess Bride."

This year, I found myself stewing over the film's bizarre racial message. To wit:

• Jess Robin's (Neil Diamond) best friend in the film is an African American singer named Bubba, who is trying to make a living as a member of an all-black band called the Four Brothers. When one of the Brothers gets arrested, Robin fills in at a gig at an all-black nightclub by wearing blackface (see picture above). Yes, blackface. Now, I know this is a shout-out to the 1927 Al Jolson version of the film, but still, blackface.
• In this same scene, an audience member outs Robin as caucasian. He notices this not from the fact that it's Neil Freaking Diamond on stage wearing shoe polish on his face (no, that was apparently convincing enough), but because the singer doesn't have any pigment on the back of his hands. The audience member (a pre-"Ghostbusters" Ernie Hudson) shouts, "He ain't no brother; he's a white boy!" A riot ensues. Yes, a riot. This was 1980. Every person in that audience could remember race riots in the 1960s fought over things like poverty, injustice, bigotry, assassinations.... This riot occurred because someone discovered that Neil Diamond was white.
• Robin later moves to L.A. (where Bubba has already gone) to try to break into popular music. His first audition is a big failure, so he, the Four Brothers, his manager Molly (Lucie Arnaz), and others decide to throw a really lame party. This involves Robin singing an idyllic song about the postbellum South ("The Robert E. Lee") right in Bubba's face.
• Later, after a taste of success, Robin freaks out and hitchhikes to the Deep South, where he fronts a country/western band in local honky-tonk. While he's told no one where he went, Bubba nonetheless finds him, presumably due to some magical negro powers or something.

Yeah, it's a weird movie. It's also ripe for a remake. Maybe they should mix things up a bit and cast Natalie Portman as the cantor longing to stray from her Brooklyn roots. Streisand could play her cantor mother. Just a thought.

The best of the best

• Ezra Klein does a beautiful job investigating the flawed (if somewhat defensible) economic assumptions of the incoming Obama administration in 2008-09 and asks whether things could have gone differently.
• Steven Greene: "[George] Will is not particularly bright. He’s just got a good vocabulary and wears bow ties. That’s enough to fool most people."
• Christie and Palin decided not to run for president? Jonathan Bernstein thinks they actually were running (see here and here), and got selected out by the invisible primary.
• Greg Koger provides some context for what happened in the Senate last week. See also Sarah Binder, a.k.a. The Senate Whisperer.
• John Sides provides a Moneyball-esque perspective to campaign finance.
• Great interview with Steven Pinker about declining violence worldwide. Interesting quote: "Even if you subtract all the killings with firearms and count only the ones with rope, knives, lead pipes, wrenches, candlesticks, and so on, Americans still kill at a higher rate than Europeans."
• Via Chris Federico, a Soviet-era ad for Aeroflot. It's not obvious to me why a government enterprise with no competitor needed to advertise, nor why the Russians couldn't find any better dancers.
• How to carve a Death Star Jack-o-lantern and turn your dog into an ATAT.
• White people had a hard week.

How quickly we forget

A busy schedule and a tight budget unfortunately kept me from attending last weekend's Clinton '92 campaign reunion in Little Rock. I have no idea if the Washington Post's coverage of the event is representative of what really went on there, but I really hope not:

The class of ’92 cast its reunion as a tacit — and sometimes not so tacit — rebuke of the current president and his un-Clintonian aversion to the political fray. Some erstwhile Clinton aides wore “I Miss Bill” T-shirts and “It’s Still About the [Expletive] Economy, Stupid” buttons. Others privately regretted Hillary Rodham Clinton’s acceptance of the secretary of state post — the theory being that she would be better positioned to replace Obama if she had stayed in the Senate.

I'm pleased to see President Clinton himself in the article dismissing the Obama comparisons as off-base. But really, do these folks remember what that first term was like? I remember showing up to work when Clinton's approval ratings were in the 30s, lower than Obama's have ever been. And yeah, there was a lot of soul searching -- Were we doing it right? Why wasn't his message getting through? Did we misread the voters in 1992? Was he doomed to be a one-termer? But I don't remember any of us saying that the country would have been better if we'd backed Harkin or Tsongas or Brown.

I would agree that Clinton had more of a love for the rough-and-tumble of partisan politics than Obama does, but exactly what did he have to show for it by this point in his first term? Yes, Clinton's first budget passed, including a tax hike on upper income earners, but he lost on the stimulus that year. Health reform was in ruins. Don't-ask-don't-tell was a compromise that no one liked. His only other big legislative wins were NAFTA and the crime bill, both of which were staunchly opposed by sizable chunks of liberal congressional Democrats. Contrast that with Obama's record on health reform, student loan reform, financial sector reform, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, the end of DADT... it's really quite impressive, and not something liberals should be dismissing. Sure, liberals have plenty of reasons to be upset with Obama's concessions to Republicans on budgetary matters, but does no one remember Clinton's concessions? His triangulations after the 1994 election? His hiring of Dick Morris?

This is not to disparage Clinton's accomplishments as president. There were many, and I am proud of the very small role I played in them. But the fierce partisan fighter some folks seem to recall is largely fictitious, and to the extent it was real, just how great was it? Winning the news cycle is not the same as enacting an agenda.

In a world where jurors are dyspeptic...

Here's the theatrical trailer for "12 Angry Men." I've seen many cases where the trailer is far better than the film, but this is one of the few where the film absolutely buries the trailer. They try to make it look like an action movie, for Heaven's sake. I can only imagine audiences walking out saying, "But it was just some guys talking!"

Looking presidential

Sullivan's been very good to me, but I've got to disagree with him here when he decides that Chris Christie's weight may be a disqualifying factor:

Presidents in the modern age are increasingly required to look presidential. No baldies or beards, for example, since Eisenhower and some dude in the nineteenth century. Perry and Romney are almost made in a presidential Ken factory - and both presumably dye their hair (as, obviously, did Reagan). Looks, in other words, matter on an unconscious level in a president. We respond to these signals before our frontal cortexes kick in.

As John Sides reminds us, this is empirically wrong on the specific area of girth: overweight male candidates are evaluated somewhat more positively than thin ones (although overweight female candidates suffer a penalty). Besides, we've actually had overweight presidents. Taft was enormous (this was hardly a secret even before television), and Clinton struggled with his weight before heart troubles forced him onto a strict low-fat diet. (Does he look more presidential now that's he's gaunt?) So to say that overweight men don't look presidential seems a bit odd when we've had overweight presidents.

More generally, though, the idea that candidates have to "look presidential" is highly problematic, giving sanction to all sorts of bigotry. It's hard to separate "looking presidential" from "looking like the presidents we've already had," which leads to some uncomfortable areas. It wasn't too long ago that a sizable chunk of Americans wouldn't have found an African American "presidential" looking. No doubt many feel that way about women today. And Jews. And short people. And people with disabilities. Would that ultimately affect many people's votes? My guess is that it would be hard to find a measurable "presidential-looking" effect that moves votes beyond the major influences we can detect (economic growth/recession, war/peace, extremism/moderation). But maybe there is such an effect. Should we cater to it?

Do parties consciously nominate slim candidates, concerned that voters will be turned off by heavy ones? I really don't know. But if so, this sounds like bigotry, plain and simple. It's no different from Spencer Tracy in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" opposing his daughter's marriage to a black man, not because he had any problem with blacks, but because he was concerned that other people did. Any way you slice it, you're disqualifying someone based on physical appearance.

Misplaced nostalgia

An actual tweet:

I LOVE PANAM. WISH I COULD HAVE LIVED BACK THEN AND BECOME A PANAM STEWARDESS. HOW EXCITING !!! #PanAm

This was posted after last night's episode of "Pan Am," in which Christina Ricci's character used a fork to fend off an attempted rape by a drunken passenger only to be hushed by her colleagues (warning her to not jeopardize her job) and ridiculed by a pilot (who tries to mollify the rapist with a scotch). The show doesn't handle the subplot particularly well -- Ricci gets a little you-go-girl moment toward the end of the episode, and I'm assuming that's the last we'll hear of that. And, of course, it's just a minor subplot, not meant to distract from the overall glamor of the show or its basic message, "It was really cool to be a servant." The message apparently got through to the tweeter above.

Compare this attempted rape scene to the portrayal of the rape of Joan by her husband in "Mad Men." It's a truly terrifying scene, even though much of the action occurs off-camera; not only does Joan have no way to stop the assault, but she has no recourse for it afterwards. There was not event a concept of spousal rape for her to report to anyone. It was simply one of those things that some women had to endure in exchange for the security of married life.

"Mad Men" demonstrates the dangers women (even white, educated, relatively successful women) faced fifty years ago by virtue of being women in the United States. "Pan Am" suggests that it was glamorous being a woman then, and that the dangers, while real, could be fended off with utensils and a little pluck.

It's not fair to say that "Pan Am" sucks because it's not as good as "Mad Men" -– few shows are. But it seems to be nostalgic for an era that doesn't necessarily deserve it.

Party before government

It looks like some enterprising individuals are trying to construct parties in Libya:

As Libya's new leaders work on setting the country right and eliminating the last holdouts of Muammar Gaddafi’s loyalists, budding politicians are looking forward to the planned elections.

"Our party is being formed," said Abdel Dayem al-Gharabli, a lawyer from Zawiyah, west of Tripoli, after lengthy talks in a cafe with a group of friends. 

To be called the National Democratic Encounter, it aims to be broad-based, supporting the rule of law and respect for liberties, he said.

The really interesting thing here, of course, is that there's not yet a government for the parties to influence, a legislature to which to recruit members, or elections in which to participate. There's a provisional government, and there will likely be a constitutional convention next year, followed a year later by some sort of legislative and presidential elections. Parties are forming now with an eye to influencing the process of creating a government.

This is reminiscent (to me, anyway) of the argument advanced in The Party Decides that America's constitutional Founders were essentially a party. They built a government that would protect and advance their interests, and deliberately made that government very hard to change (the amendment procedure is a very high wall, and the separation of powers structure is filled with veto points making it difficult to pass sweeping laws). Importantly, they organized and planned to control a government prior to that government's existence.

In Libya, it is not entirely clear on what basis these parties are being formed. They certainly have their roots in geography and ethnicity, but some sorts of ideological claims may be built on top of those.

(h/t Marc Herman)