Ta-Nehisi Coates

Talking Points Memo's Benjy Sarlin looks at perhaps the most depressing aspect of the Obama presidency:

According to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the Judiciary Committee is planning a hearing early next year to examine federal policy towards two states that legalized marijuana in November. 

Colorado and Washington each passed ballot measures in 2012 permitting residents to enjoy the drug recreationally and setting up a system to regulate and tax its use. But there's still a cloud hanging over the pot party. Federal drug laws are still unchanged and the White House has made clear that it's not on board with legalization on any level. 

President Obama and the Justice Department are still considering their best response. Options include lawsuits to block portions of the state referenda or even federal prosecution of low-level drug offenders, a job currently left to state and local governments.

In the low-income and heavily black and Latino district of Central Los Angeles, for example, people given a court appearance summons were ordered to appear at the Central Arraignment Court on Bauchet Street. The defendants often did not realize that they had been charged with a crime because the summons looks like a traffic ticket. They appeared before a judge who told them they had been charged with a misdemeanor, and that if they plead guilty they would be fined up to $100. 

The judges routinely recommended defendants waive their right to a trial. The vast majority of defendants wanted to be released and put this experience behind them. They accepted the judge's recommendation and plead guilty. Most people found the money to pay the fine and court costs and gave it little thought until they applied for a job, apartment, student loan or school and were turned down because a criminal background check revealed that they had been convicted of a "drug crime." 

Twenty years ago, misdemeanor arrest and conviction records were papers kept in court storerooms and warehouses, often impossible to locate. Ten years ago they were computerized. Now they are instantly searchable on the Internet for $20 to $40 through commercial criminal-record database services. Employers, landlords, credit agencies, licensing boards for nurses and beauticians, schools, and banks now routinely search these databases for background checks on applicants. The stigma of a criminal record has created huge barriers to employment and education for hundreds of thousands of people in California.

I haven't seen Django Unchained, and won't see it, anytime soon. With that said, I'm really happy the movie exists because of moments like this:

If you aren't naturally attuned to the frequency at which internet conservatives are currently shaking with rage, you might've been surprised when you visited right-wing aggregation site the Drudge Report this morning and were confronted with the following headline, in 40-point type: "'N*GGER. N*GGER. N*GGER. N*GGER. N*GGER. N*GGER. N*GGER.'" Clicking on the headline wouldn't satisfy your confusion: it linked to The Hollywood Reporter's review of Quentin Tarantino's new slave-revenge movie Django Unchained -- a review that barely touches on the word's use in the movie. It's just a review...

This isn't the first time Django Unchained has been on the Drudge Report this week. On Monday, it got a photo and headline above the main story: "UNCHAINED: Foxx Jokes About Killing 'All The White People' In New Movie..." Above the headline, Drudge had a production still of Foxx, in a cowboy hat, holding a revolver. 

The link took readers to Jamie Foxx's Saturday Night Live monologue, which was one of Monday's big "stories" in the online conservative media. "Black is in," Foxx had riffed. In his new movie, he said, "I play a slave. How black is that? [...] I get free. I save my wife and I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?"

This semester I was brought up to MIT through the university's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professors and Scholars Program. I am, from time to time, called to talk before students, which is always a great laugh to me, because the last thing I thought when I left school was that someone might get it in their head to bring me back.

One other accolade for Joe Haldeman's The Forever War—it was not a book about a boy trapped in a man's body. I feel like I spend too much of my life consuming art and consuming non-artistic writing obsessed with the inability of men to grow up. (Some of it on this site, I admit.) I'm just really, really tired of it. 

Yesterday I wrote about Thomas Jefferson's refusal to execute the will of his friend Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and use his American estate for the purchase and subsequent liberation of his black slaves.

The story of Kosciuszko's will is considerably more complicated than is suggested by this story. It was actually something of a legal scandal. Kosciuszko's "American will" was a letter to Jefferson with instructions for what to do in the event that he died intestate. However, he subsequently drew up multiple wills in Europe, which led to litigation upon his death. The case was in court for decades, with the beneficiaries of one of Kosciuszko's European wills eventually being awarded the bulk of the estate. 

So Jefferson had good reason not to carry out Kosciuszko's instructions. Indeed, if I recall correctly he never actually had possession of the money at any point during the litigation.

Wiencek also excoriates Jefferson for his handling of Tadeusz Kosciusko's will. Kosciusko, the Polish patriot and supporter of the American Revolution, drafted a will in 1798 that included a bequest of funds to purchase and emancipate slaves, naming Jefferson as executor. According to Wiencek, the matter was crystal clear, as it must be if he wants to present yet another example of Jefferson's implacable evil: "Kosciusko had made him the executor of the will, so Jefferson had a legal duty, as well as a personal obligation to his deceased friend, to carry out the terms of the document." Jefferson "refused" to act. 

Jefferson's legal duties, however, were inextricably paired with potential liabilities of which Wiencek seems wholly unaware. Long story short: Kosciusko screwed up. After the 1798 will, Kosciusko wrote three more wills, the last one in 1817, the year he died. In the one written in 1816, he explicitly revoked all his previous wills and made bequests to other people in Europe. He made no mention of excepting the American will from this revocation, though a reference he made in a letter to Jefferson in 1817 indicates he thought his 1798 bequest still valid. Jefferson may have believed that too. 

But he also knew that whether Kosciusko's statement revived the bequest was a legal question that would have to be answered in court--a high court, no doubt, given the large sums of money involved. Upon learning what Kosciusko had done, and that there were competing wills, Jefferson, in his mid-70s, transferred his duties (and, this is important, his potential financial exposure) to a court that then appointed an administrator. 

As Jefferson knew, this was a litigation disaster waiting to happen. Indeed, the case became an American version of Bleak House's Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, dragging on from the 1820s to final resolution before the Supreme Court in 1852, which declared that the 1816 will had, in fact, revoked the 1798 bequest. Using money from the bequest to free slaves when others had potentially valid claims on the estate would have been extremely risky. If Jefferson had done that and it was later determined that the claimants had a right to the funds, he could be liable for repayment. Once he gave his powers over to the court, Jefferson's responsibilities--and the threat of financial entanglement to his already precarious financial position--were over.

Gordon-Reed the law professor had some fun with the tragic fate of Kosciuszko's will, and may have befuddled the jury with irrelevancies. Long story short: In his will Thaddeus Kosciuszko left Jefferson a very large sum of money to free his slaves ("I beg Mr. Jefferson," he wrote, to free his slaves and give them land); Jefferson declined to carry out the will. Gordon-Reed's position is that this was a non-issue because the will was fatally defective. 

But Jefferson's grandson didn't think so: Just months after Thomas Jefferson died in 1826, Jeff Randolph tried to revive the Kosciuszko bequest, "to save some of the Slaves left by Mr Jefferson, from a Sale by his creditors." Jeff Randolph was not deterred by any potential financial risks such as Gordon-Reed darkly evoked. Furthermore, Thomas Jefferson himself thought the will would stand. When Jeff Randolph made his enquiry about saving slaves in 1826, the will's administrator, Benjamin L. Lear, replied that "I had a conversation with Mr Jefferson on the subject at Monticello about three years ago, in wh: he approved very heartily the plan I then proposed to adopt"-- a plan to free slaves from elsewhere, not Monticello. Jefferson had no interest in releasing his extremely valuable slaves, but he believed the bequest was perfectly valid. 

Kosciuszko died on October 15, 1817. After several years of vacillation, Jefferson withdrew from his pact of honor with Kosciuszko by pleading in a Virginia court in Charlottesville that he could not serve as executor of his friend's estate and would not use the money to free his slaves. As William Lloyd Garrison would say many years later, "What an all-conquering influence must have attended his illustrious example," if he had taken the lead to abolish slavery. Merrill Peterson, for all his admiration for Jefferson, was anguished by this retreat: "The object of [Kosciuszko's] will was lost. Had Jefferson felt stronger about the object, he would have ventured the experiment, despite statutory obstacles and the shortness of years, for the experiment [of freeing his slaves] was one he often commended to others and, indeed, one he may have himself suggested to Kosciuszko." 

Why did Jefferson, while throwing himself energetically into the creation of the University of Virginia, plead that he was too old and tired to carry out Kosciuszko's will and betray the trust of his Polish compatriot? One of the key reasons was Jefferson's allegiance to the Old Dominion aristocracy and his devotion to sustaining the economic and cultural leverage of the white South in national politics. He also feared offending friends, especially slaveowners already shaken by the actions of others in Virginia who had released slaves from bondage. In a time when we are accustomed to seeing the current president reject scientific analysis on fearsome problems, stack regulatory commissions with those devoted to non-regulation, and stake out policy positions on the basis of insider friends and their deep-pocket interests, this earlier abandonment of an honor-bound pact with Kosciuszko has a peculiar odor.

On June 10, 1807, the elder Coles wrote to his son that he and Edward's brother Tucker were both ill and summoned Edward home to oversee the harvest of Enniscorthy's crops. Coles left Williamsburg without a degree on June 25. In the winter of 1808, John Coles II died, leaving Rockfish, a 782-acre plantation in what was then Albemarle County (later Nelson County), to Edward Coles. His father also willed him a dozen slaves. Coles prepared to receive his inheritance knowing he would free the enslaved men and women, but he did not tell his family lest they intervene and somehow prevent the transfer of property.

[I]n the mean time are you right in abandoning this property, and your country with it? I think not. My opinion has ever been that, until more can be done for them, we should endeavor, with those whom fortune has thrown on our hands, to feed and clothe them well, protect them from all ill usage, require such reasonable labor only as is performed voluntarily by freemen, & be led by no repugnancies to abdicate them, and our duties to them. 

An alert reader points out that I missed perhaps the most disturbing angle of Thomas Jefferson's long relationship with the slave society of America. In 1798, the Revolutionary War general Tadeusz Kosciuszko, hero of America and his native Poland, named his good friend Thomas Jefferson as the executor of his will. Kosciuzko wrote the following:

Thaddeus Kosciuszko being just in my departure from America do hereby declare and direct that should I make no other testamentary disposition of my property in the United States I hereby authorise my friend Thomas Jefferson to employ the whole thereof in purchasing Negroes from among his own or any others and giving them liberty in my name, in giving them an education in trades or otherwise and in having them instructed for their new condition in the duties of morality which may make them good neighbours, good fathers or mothers, husbands or wives and in their duties as citizens teaching them to be defenders of their liberty and Country and of the good order of society and in whatsoever may make them happy and useful and I make the said Thomas Jefferson my executor of this

"The conflict between slavery and non-slavery is a conflict for life and death," a South Carolina commissioner told Virginians in February 1861. "The South cannot exist without African slavery." Mississippi's commissioner to Maryland insisted that "slavery was ordained by God and sanctioned by humanity." If slave states remained in a Union ruled by Lincoln and his party, "the safety of the rights of the South will be entirely gone." 

If these warnings were not sufficient to frighten hesitating Southerners into secession, commissioners played the race card. A Mississippi commissioner told Georgians that Republicans intended not only to abolish slavery but also to "substitute in its stead their new theory of the universal equality of the black and white races." Georgia's commissioner to Virginia dutifully assured his listeners that if Southern states stayed in the Union, "we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything." 

(As an aside, I love that last quote. Someone commented the first time I posted this "Ha Ha--You forgot black president!" Moving on.)

I finished Joe Haldeman's incredible novel The Forever War a few minutes ago, and I just want to urge anybody, and everybody, who has some time this holiday to read this book. It is easily one of my 10 favorite books ever, and if not for the rather ubiquitous presence of Doctorow on that list, it probably would be in my top five.

My aesthetics were pretty much shaped by hip-hop. I believe in art as a melange of things, and my favorite literature generally pulls from a variety of places. This is more than the idea of mashups, and perhaps even beyond sampling. I am more thinking about how the Bomb Squad in their heyday could pull from five different records and make an entirely new one. Or (to some extent) the masterful chopping of DJ Premier. Maybe some Rza too.

Haldeman is writing science fiction, in the same way that E.L. Doctorow writes historical fiction. That is, that the foundation of science and the past are there, but only as the foundation. I think this is really true of any genre, or subgenre, by the way. In 1994, Nas was doing something beyond what I had recognized MCing to be. Same for the Bomb Squad. My point is that this isn't a shot at sci-fi; transcending is ultimately the point. And there's just so much in this book—questions of war, the ghosts of Vietnam, questions of sexuality, etc.

Beyond that, I just want to, again, make a brief for the page-turner. I've read "difficult books" and I think "difficult books" should be read—especially by writers. But as I age, my bias is really toward the book that doesn't make me work as a reader, but as a thinker. In other words, I don't want to have to slug my way through in order to finish. What I want is to spend the days while I am engaged considering the thing, and then the years after turning it over.

Speaking of which, I am dying to know what those who've read the book think about its presentation of homosexuality. Thoughts?

To suppose that slavery, the accursed thing, could be abolished peacefully and laid aside innocently, after having plundered cradles, separated husbands and wives, parents and children; and after having starved to death, worked to death, whipped to death, run to death, burned to death, lied to death, kicked and cuffed to death, and grieved to death; and, worst of all, after having made prostitutes of a majority of the best women of a whole nation of people...would be the greatest ignorance under the sun.

I didn't really comment on Bob Costas's statement on handguns, mostly because I thought it was a little too broad for my tastes. I wasn't clear on what, precisely, what he was proposing. There's also something a little too easy about putting Kasandra Perkins' death on the presence of handguns. Men have been murdering their significant others since time immemorial. I understand that handguns make it easier -- much as cars make alcohol-related deaths more frequent. But it doesn't really strike me as a strong argument to speak with certainty about the counter-factual. Kasandra Perkins also liked shooting guns. Perhaps that drew them closer. I don't know and I don't see how anyone can.

Make up day is today. My apologies for last week guys. Here's your space for Walter Johnson's Soul By Soul.

The Washington Post is looking to put up a paywall according to, uhm, The Washington Post:

The model -- known as a metered paywall -- would be similar to that used by the New York Times, which started charging for online content in March 2011 and now has nearly 600,000 digital subscribers. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have similar models. Home subscribers to the print edition would have unfettered access to The Post's Web site and other digital products. 

The news was reported Thursday on the Wall Street Journal's Web site, which also said that The Post would raise the price of the paper sold in newsstands. That price has increased from 25 cents to $1 over the past several years.

The fifth installment in a roundtable discussion between Ta-Nehisi Coates, A.O. Scott, Kate Masur, and Tony Horwitz about history and Steven Spielberg's movie

All,

I want to thank you guys for spending the week with us here at the Atlantic hashing this over. I actually was worried people were all Lincolned out, but judging by the comment section over at my house, people are as interested as ever. Anyway, in our second and final round, I know you guys all have perspectives you want to explore, but I'd ask you (in addition to your own points) to grapple with another question. I'm obviously somewhat mixed on Kate's critique of race in the film. But I think her point about the portrayal of Elizabeth Keckley and William Slade is pretty dead-on. I'm not really sure how it improves the film to place Keckley and Slade there and neglect to employ their background. One might as well just use nameless black servants. I differ from Kate because I think that is a flaw in the grand sweep of damn fine film. And I also think that afterlife of Lincoln the movie might well mirror the afterlife of Lincoln the man.

Solomon Northup's story is headed to the big screen. Django Unchained is coming. Is Lincoln actually the first in a new wave?

One of the great tensions I find in progressive conversation is the uneven way in which American history unfolds. When I first started blogging about the Civil War, it was fairly common for people to critique the War from the Left and say things like "Well, given that debt-peonage followed the War, nothing really changed." It's tempting form to fall into. The Civil War was followed by a strong effort to repress labor mobility among African-Americans. It was followed by the greatest domestic terrorism campaign in American history. The only coup d'etat in American history came about in the half-century backlash to the War. Against that backdrop, looking at the slaughter of the War, it's common to default to analysis such as this one offered by the late Howard Zinn and wonder why the war was fought at all.

But whenever I get despondent about the War, the thing I remember is that in 1860, you could legally put millions of people on the market. In 1866, you couldn't. Progress comes so goddamn slow, and the way it comes is utterly frustrating. I can't imagine how, say, a Frederick Douglass would have felt watching the rollbacks as a half-hearted Reconstruction was dismantled, and the white supremacist militias of the South took over. Moreover, the very activists who make emancipation possible don't really have the option of being pragmatic. Their job is to expand our imagination of the future, not to hew to the practical present. So from that position, it's very hard to take a long view.

With that said, I'd like us to try to take a long view of the Civil War in film and beyond. Again, I feel like I can throw a pebble at a map of pop culture history and hit yet another story about the poor old Confederate, who conveniently held no slaves, done wrong by Union soldiers. Is Lincoln going to help us get pass that? Is the movie an advance? Even a limited one? Does it make it possible for all those other radicals who were left out to someday see their stories? There's some opportunity. Solomon Northup's story is headed to the big screen. Django Unchained is coming. (Though my expectations aren't very high.) Is Lincoln actually the first in a new wave? Is Hollywood finally beginning to catch up with actual history?

Previously

Tony Horwitz: "'Lincoln' Would Have Been Better if It Had Told More of Lincoln's Story"

Kate Masur: "Is 'Lincoln' Liberal? Depends on What You Mean by 'Liberal'"

A.O. Scott: "The Underrated Radicalism of 'Lincoln'"

Ta-Nehisi Coates: "Why Aren't More Liberals Defending 'Lincoln'?"

I'm a pleased as punch to see Tony Horwitz (Confederates In The Attic, Midnight Rising) joining our roundtable on Lincoln. He enjoyed the film, but thinks it really could have wrestled with the ghosts of Lincoln's evolution:

The impatient emancipator depicted in Lincoln was, in 1858, a senatorial candidate who said slavery might endure another hundred years, and that he opposed social or political equality: "I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race." In 1860, as a presidential candidate, Lincoln used John Brown as a foil, calling the abolitionist's attempt to free and arm slaves "absurd" and reiterating his pledge to leave slavery "alone where it is." As president, Lincoln clung to his long-held belief that freed blacks should be "colonized" in Africa or Latin America, because they could never live as equals to whites in this country. He urged Congress to fund such colonies, and as late as August 1862, he pressed colonization on a black delegation to the White House, prompting Frederick Douglass to call Lincoln "a genuine representative of American prejudice and Negro hatred." 

It's possible that Lincoln didn't believe his own words and uttered them out of political expedience. Or, one can argue that he was a true white supremacist who only emancipated slaves due to military necessity. I think the answer lies between. Part of what made Lincoln so remarkable was his capacity for growth. He was a self-questioning man who listened to others and heeded changed circumstance—unlike John Brown, or fire-eating Southerners. As historian James Oakes writes, "Lincoln was radicalized by the war," and influenced by men such as Douglass, to the point where he ultimately embraced Brown's mission of arming blacks and overthrowing slavery in the South. In 1865, Douglass wrote that Lincoln "had the wisdom to be instructed" by events, and went so far as to declare him "the black man's President." 

Perhaps I missed it, but I don't recall the movie giving any hint of this transformation. Lincoln seems to have always been a die-hard emancipationist, differing from radicals like Thaddeus Stevens mainly in his tenor and tactics. There's a whiff of Lincoln's doubts about the future of race relations in his conversation with Mrs. Keckley, in which he says, in essence, I guess we'll learn to tolerate each other. But that's all I remember. Movies, of course, demand compression, and I certainly wouldn't have wished Lincoln any longer. But now that I've reached the age Lincoln was when he took office, I'm struck by how rare it is for folks in their 50s to grow in the way he did.

Just a quick update from yesterday on the events leading up to the murder of Perkins. It was reported that that the couple had argued after Perkins stayed out late. Sports Illustrated reports that it's more complicated than that:

According to a law enforcement official close to the investigation—and contrary to published reports—Belcher spent Friday night "partying" with another woman at the Power and Light District, a bar area in downtown K.C. He returned home between 6:30 and 7 a.m., at which point he and Perkins argued. Then, with his own mother in the house, Belcher used a handgun to shoot the mother of his baby girl nine times. He then drove to the Chiefs' practice facility in a Bentley so new it had temporary plates.

At the facility, Belcher jumped out of the car holding a different handgun and encountered general manager Scott Pioli, who was heading into the building.

As a small aside, it was asserted by a few commenters yesterday that it was wrong of me to say that Jovan Belcher's actions were inconsistent with the notion that he "cared about" his girlfriend. I implied that this remark was made by a family member, which was my error. It was made by a police officer.

I am not sure if that makes a difference or not. But the point was made that I can't see into Belcher's heart. If one accepts this line of reasoning, then one must also say that neither can the police officer who claimed "He cared about her." If being able to see into someone's heart is the standard, then the claim itself is wrong.

But my argument rejects that standard. There is no verifiable way to know what's going on in someone's head. And so we tend to judge them by their actions. If I say "David hates his mother," and you ask me why I think that I will generally list a series of actions that evidence such hatred. If I say that "David loves his mother," presumably I can list actions evidencing that love, or at the very least offer up the general sense that this is normal for mother-child relationships among humans. When people try to assess how someone feels about them, they generally look at the person's actions.

I am not immune to notions of complexity--that people can do both uncaring and caring things at the same time, to the same person. But there are some things that assume a kind of weight that they can't be counterbalanced. I would say that killing a human being by shooting them nine times qualifies.

What bothers me here is the attempt to somehow erect a standard for domestic violence that we do not use anywhere else. If someone said that Osama bin Laden actually loved the victims of 9/11 we would generally object, in a way that we wouldn't if someone said he hated the victims. That assessment would be based on action

There is a notable difference.  In relationships we often feel violently angry toward those we profess to love. Sometimes we act on that anger. We say things that hurt, or we do things that hurt, and we do sometimes do them intentionally. I think it's fair to say we are being "unloving" when we do those things. And should we intentionally kill the person we claim to love (or care about) I think it's fair to say that this ultimate act of unlove, makes all other acts of love irrelevant.

Words must have practical meaning.  "What you do speaks so loud," wrote Emerson, "That I cannot hear what you say."

I'm running around campus and traveling much of today guys. The house is yours.

Kate Masur responds to be me and A.O. Scott, noting (among other things) that not re-making Birth of a Nation is really low hanging fruit:

Tony argues that the film is a "radical" contribution to the film history of the Civil War because it doesn't trade in Lost Cause nostalgia or the hackneyed idea of the tragic "brothers' war." I don't quite agree with that interpretation. What I want to emphasize here, however, is that by deciding to focus on Lincoln's struggle to abolish slavery, Spielberg and Kushner ensured that the film would be seen within another history: the history of films about struggles for black civil rights and equality. In that context—with its benevolent white heroes and patient, passive African Americans—the film is decidedly not innovative.

I agree that this is not a reactionary film. It does not repeat many of the historical inaccuracies and white supremacist messages of earlier films about the Civil War. It does not argue that Lincoln was a tyrant or that African Americans were better off in slavery. But isn't that setting the bar awfully low? Aren't we entitled to expect a bit more from people as smart and well-financed (and liberal) as Spielberg and Kushner?

Again, more on this tomorrow. But I'd like to know how Lincoln is playing in the South. As late as the 2003 the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Virginia were essentially endorsing his assassination.

It's yours...

Picking up on this notion that one of our great Founding Fathers was merely like every other white Virginian, I think people who make this defense really undercut themselves. Part of what makes Jefferson fascinating (and great) is that -- perhaps more than anyone of his generation -- he articulated in writing the moral and practical problems of slavery. 

It is difficult to determine on the standard by which the manners of a nation may be tried, whether catholic, or particular. It is more difficult for a native to bring to that standard the manners of his own nation, familiarized to him by habit. There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. 

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. 

This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. 

And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other. For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labour for another: in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual endeavours to the evanishment of the human race, or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him. With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. 

More »

The Kansas City Star has a story up narrating the Jovan Belcher's actions after he murdered his girlfriend and the mother of his child:

Belcher thanked Pioli for everything he had done for him. He asked if he and Clark Hunt would take care of his daughter. Chiefs Head Coach Romeo Crennel and linebackers coach Gary Gibbs arrived in the parking lot and Belcher reportedly announced, "Guys, I have to do this." 

Crennel tried to dissuade him. "I was trying to get him to understand that life is not over," Crennel told The Star. "He still has a chance and let's get this worked out.''

As Pioli and Crennel tried to reason with Belcher, the men heard police sirens closing in. Belcher then walked a few steps away with the gun still pointed at his head.

"I got to go," Belcher reportedly said. "I can't be here."

Belcher knelt behind a vehicle and made the sign of the cross across his chest before firing a single bullet into his head. Kansas City police believe Belcher killed himself because he was distraught over what he had done to Perkins.

"He cared about her," Sharp said. "I don't think he could live with himself."

I think this stretches the boundaries of the word "care." If caring about the mother of your child includes killing her, then the word "care" has no applicable meaning. We might as well use the word "hate." Your feelings are known only to you. Your actions are the only evidence we have. The most important action that Jovan Belcher took toward Kasandra Perkins was the ending of her life.

It may well be true, as the Chiefs claim to believe, that Belcher killed himself because he was "distraught" over having killed someone he claimed to care about. It may also be true that Belcher killed himself because he was "distraught" at the grave consequences he would face for having enslaved a human life, for appropriating someone else's body to serve as a vessel for his rage.

But what is indisputable is that Jovan Belcher was a murderer. Like George Huguely is a murderer. Like Clayton Whittemore is a murderer.

Self-murder does not change this.

Continuing our conversation, A.O Scott makes the liberal defense of Lincoln, to which I alluded yesterday:

The case against Lincoln (and I apologize for compressing and to some extent caricaturing arguments made by Kate, by Corey Robin at Crooked Timber, and by Aaron Bady in Jacobin, among others) is that the film's emphasis on Lincoln's leadership in pushing the 13th amendment through a recalcitrant and divided Congress narrows and therefore misrepresents the true history of how slavery was abolished. The problem is not only that there aren't enough black faces in the movie, but also that the African-American characters (notably William Slade and Elizabeth Keckley) are rendered passive and marginal, beneficiaries rather than agents of change. Abolition as a social movement—as, in effect, the revolutionary mobilization of an oppressed population acting in its own interests—is obscured by the theater of the white political elite. Change results from the action and vision of a charismatic leader, rather than from ordinary people demanding power and autonomy in their own lives. 

In this respect—let's say as a work of historiography—Lincoln could be called a conservative, or at least an old-fashioned narrative. It is Great Man, top-down history, of a kind still popular among commercial publishers and non-specialist readers that has long since gone out of fashion among scholars. But I don't think the movie is a work of biographical fetishism; it is decidedly and blessedly not a conventional biopic. And I also think that, within the history of American film and of pop-cultural depictions of the Civil War more generally, it is radical in ways that have not been sufficiently noted.

For one thing, Kushner and Spielberg leave no doubt that slavery is not only the cause and central concern of the war, but the defining issue of American politics in the 19th century, and that racial justice will continue to be at the center of the American story. For another, Lincoln is utterly devoid of any sentimentality about the Noble Cause of the South, any revisionist hokum about states' rights or the dignity of tradition, any sighing about the terrible tragedy that pitted brother against brother. In other words just about everything that has informed (with a few exceptions like Edward Zwick's Glory) just about every movie ever made about the War. There may be too few blacks on screen, but it may be more telling that there are virtually no Southerners. Robert E. Lee barely speaks a word, and the most visible representative of the Confederacy, Vice President Alexander Stephens, is played by the wonderfully creepy Jackie Earle Haley, whose recent roles include Freddie Kruger in the Nightmare on Elm Street remake and the child molester in Todd Field's Little Children. 

I have no confirmation of this from any source, but it is my hunch that some of the intention in making Lincoln was to offer a corrective to Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, films that are hardly taken seriously as history but that nonetheless still constitute part of the fantasy life of the Republic. You could say that Spielberg and Kushner propose a counter-fantasy. I don't mean because they present a made-up picture of events but because fantasy (another name for which might be ideology, or just story-telling) is the basic idiom of cinema. The evils of Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind are after all not a result of their inaccuracies, and similarly the virtues of Lincoln don't arise from its fidelity to the historical record. Filmmakers and imaginative are free—are indeed expected—to compress chronology and heighten drama, to clarify motives and spell out morals to an extent that historians are not.