The Real Meaning of Columbusing

Posted on October 12, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today; thought I’d rerun it here for Columbus Day.
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To Columbus. It’s a verb meaning to discover something (especially if you’re white) that’s already been discovered. The term was coined by College Humor last month, and it’s useful. Miley Columbused twerking; Elvis Columbused rock ‘n’ roll; Richard Burton Columbused the source of the Nile; the protagonist in that College Humor video Columbuses a mostly non-white bar. Columbusing—everybody’s doing it.

Still, for all its benefits, the term is also a bit misleading. “To Columbus,” suggests that the funny/icky think about Columbus was cultural appropriation. The problem with Columbus, “Columbusing” tells you, is that the guy, Columbus, took credit for stuff that he didn’t do. And taking credit for something that you didn’t do is unpleasant, there’s no doubt. But it’s not really as unpleasant as murder, slavery, torture, and genocide. Which is what “Columbusing” should actually mean if we wanted to be honest.

Christopher Columbus, the great explorer, is one of the monsters of history. That’s not because he claimed to discover something that he didn’t discover. It’s because he was a vicious, evil murderer. When he first landed in the Bahamas, Columbus met the Arawak Indians (or the Taino), and commented on their generosity and friendliness. He also ominously said, “[T]hey would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” And sure enough, right off the boat he kidnapped a number of them and took them back to Europe.

Most of the kidnapped Arawaks died from disease and mistreatment, but Columbus was not deterred. He returned to the Bahamas, determined to get precious metals. He commanded all Arawaks over 14 to bring him a quota of gold every three months. Those who didn’t were, according to Columbus’ son, “punished by having their hands cut off,” and left to bleed to death. Since there wasn’t much gold in the Bahamas, few people could bring Columbus what he wanted. Some estimates suggest that the Spaniards, in their greed, maimed and killed as many as 10,000 people.

Historian and priest Bartolome de las Casas recorded additional atrocities. The Spaniards turned their hunting dogs loose to tear Arawak apart; de las Cases says “Arawak babies were killed for dog food.” Children had their legs cut off when they attempted to run away; some Arawaks were roasted on spits. Columbus rewarded his men for their services by giving them Arawak women and girls of as young as nine and 10 years old to rape.

Thanks to these atrocities, the Arawak population dropped from as many as a million to only 60,000 by 1507, and less than 500 by the middle of the 1500s. Many of these deaths were from disease, but given the evidence of Columbus’ widespread spree of murder and cruelty, it’s fair to call this a vicious genocide. Columbus’ crimes were so glaring that he was arrested and sent back to Spain, where he was convicted… only to receive a royal pardon.

Ideally, then, “to Columbus” would not mean, “to claim to have discovered twerking.” It would mean, “to enslave people and amputate their hands,” or “to rape 10-year-olds,” or, more generally, “to commit a genocide.” Columbus shouldn’t be a cute term for cultural appropriation; he should be a synonym for Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot.

I don’t mean to dismiss the problem of cultural appropriation altogether. People borrow from each other all the time, and that’s not a bad thing. Unless, as Brenda Salinas notes, you borrow only bits and pieces while continuing to indulge in racist contempt for the people from whom you’re borrowing. “It seems like a paradox to relish your fajitas,” Salinas says, “while believing the line cook should get deported.”

The issue then, isn’t cultural mixing, but cultural mixing in a context of racism and systematic disproportions of power. And the irony is that the term “Columbusing,” which is supposed to highlight those disproportions of power, actually works to erase them. Columbus isn’t a hero; he’s not a joke. He’s the genocidal rapist and murderer who our government has decided to honor as the iconic founder of our country and polity. Imperialism may work in part by giving people credit for things they didn’t do, but it works even more insidiously by conveniently forgetting to give people credit for the unpleasant stuff they did. Maybe that’s really what “to Columbus” should mean—to forget the atrocities you’ve committed so thoroughly that you don’t even know when you’re joking about them.

Theodor de Bry, illustration for Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552)

The Shadow Done Gone

Posted on October 11, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Alice Randall’s “The Wind Done Gone” is superior to the Margaret Mitchell novel it is based on in many respects. Though Mitchell’s prose is quite good, Randall’s is better , earthier and more poetic at once (“It’s a pissed bed on a cold night to read words on paper saying your name and a price.”) Randall’s economical, short book also avoids Mitchell’s tendency to ramble. But perhaps most surprising in a sequel/parody, Randall’s book makes more sense.

It’s a staple of fan fiction to fill in the blank spaces and plot holes. Still, Randall manages to do so with unusual grace. Much of Mitchell’s drawn out plot and her surprise twists are built on her characters lack of self-knowledge. Rhett is so afraid of giving power to Scarlett that he won’t tell her he loves her, even after they marry — and then, finally, he falls out of love with her, thump. Scarlett, for her part, thinks she loves Ashley and hates Mellie, until Mellie dies and she realizes, no that was all a mistake. Ashley has a similar storyline; he loves Scarlett until he realizes he doesn’t and never did. Mellie thinks Scarlett is her best friend even though Scarlett spends most of her life loathing her. Everyone seems utterly severed from their own emotional life. It strains credulity that one character could be this gob-smackingly dumb; but two? three? four? It starts to seem like carelessness.

In Randall’s book the source of the stupidity isn’t carelessness. It’s racism. The main characters in Gone With the Wind can’t know themselves, because if they knew themselves, they’d have to know about black people, and then their world would collapse. Mitchell’s characters, as seen by Randall, aren’t dumb; they live in a society of secrets and lies, in which not knowing is the basis of their existence. So Rhett doesn’t just fall out of love with Scarlett; rather, he always was in love with her half-sister, Mammy’s daughter Cynara, and his vacillations in love are the result of his painful uncertainty about marrying, or loving, a black woman. Ashley, for his part, never declares for Scarlett not because he’s a dishmop, but because he’s gay; Mellie has his black lover whipped to death at one point. And Scarlett, so set on not knowing herself, is not just stubborn, but has a real secret or two — a lifetime spent refusing to think about the fact that her beloved maid and surrogate mother slept with her father, and a lifetime spent refusing to think about her sister.

You’d think that looking unflinchingly at the racism in Gone With the Wind would make the white characters unsympathetic. In fact, though, Randall’s Scarlett, and Rhett,and Ashley are all significantly less awful than Mitchell’s. In Mitchell’s version, they’re all just horrible people, indecisive, whining, opaque to themselves, and fighting ceaselessly on behalf of slavery because they suck. Randall, in contrast, grants them the context that has deformed them. Rhett’s decision to become a Confederate soldier at the last minute, for example, is seen in GWTW as a triumph, and is therefore unforgivable. In Wind Done Gone, it’s portrayed as a painful lapse; a mark of how much racism touches even a man who, in many respects, has been able and willing to get beyond the prejudices of his society. (“R. fought and tried to die in a Confederate uniform to save this place,” Cynara thinks of her lover, and later husband. “I have tried to forget this, but I remember.”) Scarlett’s blank self-centeredness becomes more understandable when we see her parents’ marriage as loveless, and lack of self-knowledge seems more understandable when we learn her life was in no small part a lie. Her mother was partially black,and concealed her past and her own emotional investments from family, and especially from her daughter. GWTW famously (and counter-intuitively for a romance) concludes in bitterness and the break-up of a marriage; Randall’s is the book with the not exactly traditional, but still happy ending. The Wind Done Gone can manage forgiveness because it is able to talk about what needs to be forgiven; GWTW is filled with too much hate to arrive at love.

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Ruthanna Emrys’ novella “The Litany of Earth is version of “The Wind Done Gone” for evil fish-creatures. Where Randall presents GWTW from the perspective of the slaves and freed blacks, Emrys looks at H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos, particularly his Innsmouth stories, from the perspective of the monsters — and from the perspective of Lovecraft’s own vile racism. The main character, Aphra Marsh, has had much of her family hunted down and killed by the authorities, who also subjected them to brutal medical testing. Innsmouth people are still regularly policed by government spies; the parallels to the U.S. Japanese concentration camps, and to Hitler’s genocide, are drawn explicitly.

In discussions of Lovecraft, I’ve often seen fans argue that the horror in his stories is not linked directly to the racism. Instead, they say, the terror is tied to his atheism — to the apprehension of an infinite, indifferent cosmos, which was not built for humans and does not care about them.

Emrys keeps the cosmic emptiness in her story. Marsh’s people repeat a litany, in which they number the people of earth, from the distant past to the distant future, who have lived and will live and will all pass away. ““After the last race leaves, there will be fire and unremembering emptiness. Where the stories of Earth will survive, none have told us.” But the emptiness and meaninglessness don’t lead to horror. Instead, “In times of hardship or joy, when a child sickened or a fisherman drowned too young for metamorphosis, at the new year and every solstice, the Litany gave us comfort and humility.”

I think that’s right; knowing the universe is alien isn’t a horrible or fearful thing unless you first believe, as Lovecraft did, that the other and the alien are terrifying. The cosmic horror is horror not because the cosmos is intrinsically horrible, but because Lovecraft was racist. The indescribable gibbering darkness, the unnameable monstrosities; they’re indescribable and unnameable for the same reason that Scarlett and Rhett are irritatingly dense — because racism means you’re not allowed to know those other people, over there, which means you also can’t know yourself. Racism poisons Gone With the Wind, and it poisons Lovecraft’s world too. In Lovecraft and Mitchell that’s the shadow that can’t be named, and that neither wind nor war can blow away.

Utilitarian Review 10/11/14

Posted on October 11, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Allan Haverholm on comics definitions.

A few of us talked about the best music of the year so far.

Me on Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call.

Nicholas Labarre on the history of the history of meta-Godzilla.

Me on Alexis Coe’s book about a lesbian murder in Memphis, Alice and Freda Forever.

Ng Suat Tong on the crappiness of the Dishonorable Woman.

Christopher Lehman on warnings about racist content on Tom and Jerry episodes.

Chris Gavaler on Les Mis, superheroes, and the closet.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Reason I wrote about how Internet activism helps sex workers.

At Pacific Standard I wrote about

—Emma Watson being wrong about Beyoncé performing for the male gaze

— Steven Salaita and how the university doesn’t care about teaching

At Splice Today:

— I finally saw the Avengers and it sucked.

— I finally saw the Game of Thrones pilot and it wasn’t so great either.Center for Digital Ethics I argued that it’s unethical to look at stolen celebrity nudes.

At the Chicago Reader, a brief review of Marketa Irglova.

A short music mix for Publik Private.

Other Links

A comic on stripping and stigma.

Samantha Field on Buffy and Riley’s abusive relationship.

Jamie Nesbitt Golden on grieving for her mom.

Olga Khazan on Nickelodeon and white guys.

How to Out Yourself

Posted on October 10, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

I don’t know if Victor Hugo was gay. But I do know he wrote some of his most influential work from exile—including political pamphlets, three books of poetry, and Les Misérables, a historical novel about the French Revolution that he “meant for everyone.” Hugo describes it like a superhero answering a cry for aid: “Wherever men go in ignorance or despair, wherever women sell themselves for bread, wherever children lack a book to learn from or a warm hearth, Les Miserables knocks at the door and says: ‘open up, I am here for you.’”

I did not see Les Mis, either on stage or on screen, but my kids went with their Nana after my wife and I escaped for our own outing: fancy dinner (turns out steak tartare is a raw hamburger), romantic movie (Jennifer Lawrence is a shape-shifting genius even when not playing a blue-skinned mutant), and historic B&B (former haunt of musical legend Oscar Hammerstein). We had a better time than the kids. My son was not wooed by Hugh “Wolverine” Jackman, and my daughter would not list on-set singing among his superpowers.

But the X-Men casting choice did spotlight some secrets in the musical’s origin story. Both literary blogger Chrisbookarama and Slate culture editor David Haglund declared Jean Valjean a “superhero.” They note his dual identity (alias “Monsieur Madeleine”), his superpowers (the strength of “four men”), and his arch nemesis, Inspector Javert (inspired by real-life detective Eugène François Vidocq). There’s even an unmasking scene:

“One morning M. Madeleine was passing through an unpaved alley” where an “old man named Father Fauchelevent had just fallen beneath his cart.” A jack-screw would arrive in fifteen minutes, but “his ribs would be broken in five.” Madeleine sees “there is still room enough under the cart to allow a man to crawl beneath it and raise it with his back,” and he offers five, ten, then “twenty louis” to anyone willing to try. Javert, “staring fixedly at M. Madeleine,” declares: “I have never known but one man capable of doing what you ask.”

Although Valjean is breaking the law by disguising his past as a convict, he “fell on his knees, and before the crowd had even had time to utter a cry, he was underneath the vehicle.” Even the old man, “one of the few enemies” Valjean has made as Madeleine and then only from jealousy, is begging him to give up, when “Suddenly the enormous mass was seen to quiver, the cart rose slowly, the wheels half emerged from the ruts,” and “Old Fauchelevent was saved.”

“Just like a superhero,” writes Haglund, “outed by the noble use of his super strength.”

My daughter assured me the film framed it as a burst of Hulk-like adrenaline, but Victor Hugo was going for much more. Although Valjean emerges in torn clothes and “dripping with perspiration,” he “bore upon his countenance an indescribable expression of happy and celestial suffering” as the old man calls him “the good God.”

It’s the self-sacrificing yet self-ennobling choice saviors make every day. Even Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ wants to hide in a mild-mannered lifestyle, before fully accepting the job of super-savior. Ditto for Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker and Michael Chiklis’s Ben Grimm. A hundred years earlier, O. Henry’s safe-popping Jimmy Valentine outs his Valjean past by saving a child from suffocating in the town bank vault. Philip Wylie’s superhuman Hugo Danner longs for the quiet life too, but fate slams another would-be victim into another character-revealing bank vault.

And there’s always a Javert standing right there trying to glimpse your secret self. Jimmy has detective Price on his trail (though in a typical O. Henry twist, he lets his Valjean go). That pesky tabloid reporter followed Bill Bixby for five seasons, always ready to snap a picture when Lou Ferrigno burst out during the emergency-of-the-week. Like Les Mis director Tom Hooper, the CBS team decided their Incredible Hulk was just a burst of green adrenaline, the kind that allows Clark Kents to shoulder cars off endangered loved ones. That’s the phenomenon Bixby’s Banner is researching before his laboratory mishap, his atonement for failing to save his wife when fate dropped Fauchelevent’s oxcart on her.

But Haglund’s comment unmasks another kind of outing. When my former department colleague and next door neighbor Chris Matthews read that Slate article “Why Tween Boys Love Les Miz,” he emailed me about Hagland’s “silent premise,” the implication “that there’s something weird about boys liking musicals.” And we know what alter ego lurks under that tale-tell proclivity. “The figure of the musical-loving boy or man,” says Chris, “has long functioned as both an element of gay male identity and as a handy stereotype for mocking ‘effeminate’ men, gay or not.”

I noticed plenty of family photos decorating the Hammerstein B&B, evidence that Rodgers was his partner in the strictly professional sense. But it did occur to me to check. GLBTQ, the online encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender & queer culture, lists Hammerstein as “apparently quite straight,” but the site still can’t explain “the attachment many gay men have to the musical theater or the fact that in the popular imagination a passion for showtunes is practically a marker for homosexuality.”

Les Misérables premiered in 1980, twenty years after Hammerstein’s death, ninety-five after Victor Hugo’s. I was fourteen, Chris’s age when he saw it on stage. Haglund was nine his first time, so his pubescent body wasn’t bursting through his sweaty clothes just yet. Maybe that’s why he remains a tone-deaf Javert when it comes to identity-shifting. He sounds relieved that a superheroic explanation for Miz-loving boys hit him while watching Jackman belting it out. Why Do Tween Boys Love Superheroes? Because they’re not “weird.” He thinks his men-in-tights insight is “more particular” to boys, even though both sexes get equally erotic eyefuls of Jackman’s shirtless flexing. Sorry, David, but as my former neighbor points out: Hugh is hot.

Chris, by the way, is not gay. At least not in the I-like-to-have-sex-with-other-men sense. Like my and Hammmerstein’s homes, his is decorated with family photos. He claims to be “terribly low on football-related and power-tool-based conversation,” but wow can he unman me on a racquetball court—an advantage none of my Hulk-like adrenaline can match. Chris also grew up in the apparently quite straight world of comic books. While his tween-self was singing along to the Les Mis soundtrack, he was flipping pages of Spider-Man and Moon Knight. “Superheroes were not the guise of normalcy I wore over the shameful secret of loving a musical,” he says, “they were yet another way of getting around the pressures to be normal.”

Saturday October 11 is National Coming Out Day. It’s not a Revolution. It’s just a celebration of the superheroic who continue to overthrow the pressures of the so-called normal. I wish them all a safe return from their personal exiles.

How Should Tom & Jerry’s Ethnic Humor Be Packaged Today?

Posted on October 9, 2014 by Christopher Lehman

Amazon Prime and iTunes have included a warning with their packaging of Tom and Jerry – Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s series of theatrical cartoons starring Tom Cat and Jerry Mouse. From 1940 to 1952, an African American female domestic servant appeared in episodes, and in that period the characters often appeared in blackface. These images undoubtedly are the reason why the warning says that the cartoons may contain “ethnic and racial prejudices that were once commonplace in American society.”

The warning has its detractors. Some of them find the disclaimer unnecessary because to them Tom and Jerry is not racist, and others dismiss the warning as another example of contemporary excessive political correctness. The problem is that detractors are using personal feelings to try to stop a potentially useful discussion about ethnic depictions in American entertainment. Their knee-jerk “It’s not racist” and “liberal political correctness” reactions are only opinions that disregard the facts concerning the cartoons.

In my book The Colored Cartoon: Black Presentation in American Animated Short Films, 1907-1954, I chronicled the servant character’s development from her debut to her final episode. I noted that in her twelve years in the series, MGM never changed her dialect. The writers of the scripts gave her the same mis-conjugated verbs and spelled her mispronounced words exactly the same throughout that period, refusing to develop her at all. Also, none of the scripts give the character a name. She is the “maid” or “colored maid,” and the denial of an identity is part of her lack of development over a decade’s time.

I also looked at the blackface scenes in MGM’s cartoons, most of which have a character darkened after an explosion. Again, the scripts are stereotypically charged, using phrases like “looking like a pickaninny” and walking “a la Stepin Fetchit.” Thus, the MGM artists made these cartoons with ethnic jokes at African Americans’ expense very much in mind. Even one of the series’ animators I interviewed called the maid an “outright racist cartoon character.”

tandj1

As for the cries of modern political correctness, it’s not that modern. In my book I note that civil rights groups protested the showing of Tom and Jerry episodes in theaters as early as 1949. They claimed that the exhibitions of the maid character harmed the minds of children, and they occasionally convinced theater-owners to withdraw the cartoons.

Such protests became so impactful to Hollywood that MGM eventually became proactive about the maid. The studio reanimated the 1948 episode The Little Orphan in wide-screen format as Feedin’ the Kiddie in 1957. The original episode featured the maid, but the remake omitted her entirely. Then in 1965, MGM prepared the series for Saturday morning network television by reanimating all of the maid’s appearances. The studio replaced her with a European American maid character in all of her scenes. In recent years, the original scenes returned for cable television broadcast on Cartoon Network and Boomerang, bur MGM overdubbed Lillian Randolph’s stereotyped vocal performance with Thea Vidale’s dialect-free delivery.

The 2014 warning is just the latest attempt to make Tom and Jerry commercially viable in a changing ethnic American landscape. The disclaimer is a new approach in that it does not censor or gloss over but instead informs. It allows an opportunity for education about the films, while the detractors get to enjoy the uncensored original episodes.

Does the warning do enough to address the ethnic content of the series? Are other solutions besides disclaimers possible?

The Dishonourable Woman

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

Let me attempt to describe the experience of watching the BBC’s widely acclaimed 8 part mini-series, The Honourable Woman. Imagine walking into a five star restaurant and being ushered to your seat by a beaming maitre d’ with a cultivated English accent. The immaculate dinner service is laid out on a pristine white tablet cloth and the wine is served to you in fine crystal goblets. The initial tasting seems quite promising. Then you take a full mouthful of the fine red wine and it leaves you with the distinct impression of pure unadulterated piss. The only thing that could have possibly made this experience more memorable is if a cockroach had crawled down your throat as you swished the wine around in your mouth. Was this a mistake? Did you do something to offend the gods or the owners of the restaurant? Did you deserve it? (maybe) Or is this all they’re capable of—excellent table settings in the service of excrement.

The Honourable Woman is the brain child of Hugo Blick who was also responsible for the somewhat overrated crime drama, The Shadow Line. It stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as a Jewish heiress named Nessa Stein who witnesses the brutal assassination of her father as a child. He is ostensibly killed by radical Palestinians in revenge for selling arms to Israel. Now fully grown and the CEO of her father’s company, she is in the final phases of a plan to lay a fiber optic cable network throughout the West Bank. But that enterprise only forms one part of her larger project of altruism and reconciliation. Her educational foundation (run by her brother) also funds a series of universities throughout Israel with a mind to providing equal access to higher education for both Arabs and Jews.

Yet her righteousness and sense of ethical obligation is of an even high order then is shown by these acts. As is revealed in later episodes (but well telegraphed to viewers from at least the second episode), she was kidnapped and raped during a visit to Gaza some 8 years back, and forced to have the child of her Palestinian rapist.

For some inexplicable reason, a number of reviewers have highlighted Nessa’s sense of agency and ability to outwit the various machinations of the organizations which circle her (MI6, the CIA, the Israelis, and various shadowy Palestinian organizations). Nothing of the sort occurs in The Honourable Woman.

Nessa is persistently caught on the back foot and is almost always at the mercy of her tormentors. This is by no means a subset of the “realism” which Blick presumes to have foisted on his audience, for Nessa is entirely positioned as a self-sacrificing martyr. She is twice kidnapped, twice raped, physically abused on several occasions, betrayed at every point, constantly threatened with murder, and so thoroughly psychologically tormented that she sleeps in a safe room every night. She faces all of this with the equanimity of a modern day saint; all cropped hair and rays of light shining down on her stained, anguished face like the light of God.

In her sexual torment, she joins a select group of female saints, for there are precious few of these who are recorded as having been raped (though no doubt many were). It is no coincidence then that Gyllenhaal frequently appears to be channeling Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, one of the few saints to have been thus abused. In the penultimate episode of Blick’s concoction, Nessa even wears a white pant suit to a groundbreaking ceremony in Hebron just as was Joan’s wont. She is very nearly offered up to the flames when a bomb goes off at the same ceremony, the shrapnel tearing into her back leaving the marks of a flagellant.

Nessa initially resists her rape at the hands of her Palestinian kidnappers but then quietly lies down and accepts her fate when she sees her friend being assaulted. Years after this, she is date raped while in a depression fueled alcoholic haze. This she seems to accept, at least at first, with a drunken pragmatism. The MI6 minder/friend who ensures her swift medical care even asks her if she has been engaging in high risk behavior over the years. When questioned by the Palestinian leader behind her rape (and her brother and father’s deaths) as to her lack of desire for revenge (as is his own desire), she babbles through tears that she has often asked herself this question following her innumerous scourgings, and has concluded that she “deserve[s] it.” It certainly helps that said evil Palestinian mastermind resembles nothing less than a James Bond villain with an intravenous line substituting for a white Persian cat and wobbly optics.

I’ve seen some talk concerning this drama’s subtlety and convoluted plotting. The first point, at least, can be quickly dispensed with. If the foregoing description hasn’t already made this clear, Blick’s ideas are wielded like cudgels. For instance, we understand that Nessa has daddy issues because her father scrutinizes her from the heights of a family video projected on her study walls even as she fucks a MI6 mole (presumably a subset of her high risk sexual behavior).

Any talk of complex plotting certainly demands a lengthy harangue if not frequent slaps with a large wet fish. If there is one reason why the central conspiracy would never occur to the average viewer, it would be because it resides in that fantasy land lying between ignorance and pure imbecility.

The plot deserves to be spoilt quite thoroughly. In short, in the final episode, the United States is revealed to be working in concert with the Palestinians (I don’t know who; maybe Fatah and various other rogue groups) to create a climate receptive to Palestinian Statehood right under the noses of the Israelis. Following the bombing in Hebron, the U.S., who masterminded this false flag operation with the Palestinians, will no longer veto any U.N. applications with regards the recognition of the Palestinian state.

Yes, you heard that right—the writers of The Honourable Woman have the U.S. (or at least its Secretary of State) working with the Palestinians to thwart Israel in a false flag operation. This would be the same United States which opposed Palestine’s full membership in UNESCO in the face of overwhelming support (107-14) in 2011; the same United States which cast the single “No” vote in July 2014 on the issue of investigating war crimes committed in Gaza; the same United States which voted overwhelmingly to send more funding to Israel for the Iron Dome missile defense system and to allow Israel to raid its arms stockpiles to rain more misery on the Palestinians.

To add even more salt to the wound, one of the closing scenes has a news report stating that China and Russia might veto said U.S. plans not to oppose Palestinian statehood. Let me see, this would be the same China and Russia which have voted “yes” to Palestinian recognition, “for” UNESCO membership and “for” non-member observer state status. Care to guess how the U.S. voted on all these issues? These two nations also voted decisively to support the investigation into war crimes in Gaza in 2014. But do we really have any right to be surprised at this in a delusionary world where rape is martyrdom, and a device to give depth and agency to women? The asinine logic on display here derives from the same place as those who feel that Schindler’s List was about Nazis saving the world from Jews.

Zionist commentators are of course horrified at the abuse meted out at Israel in The Honourable Woman. But let us count the ways in which the state of Israel has been denigrated. Firstly, Jews are portrayed as arms merchants which is certainly an injustice since Israel doesn’t traffic in arms. The Israelis (Shin Bet? Mossad?) are also shown tapping into Palestinian cell phone traffic through Nessa Stein’s fiber optic cable which is of course absolutely disgusting and unthinkable! The Israeli representative in London also admits to plans to capture and interrogate a Palestinian businessman who is making deals with the U.S. Secretary of State, but guess what? They’re so ineffectual that they’re beaten to the punch by the nefarious U.S.-Palestinian cabals running amok throughout London. The latter elite agents fake the suicide of one of their own in order to silence him. These same Palestinians have the ear of politicians and secret agents throughout the English speaking world, which must explain why U.S. and U.K. have been such “fine” supporters of their cause through the years.

The Palestinians have it much easier. They’re portrayed as drug addled rapists, general haters of women, mass murderers of their own countrymen, criminal masterminds consumed by vengeance, and as generally confused with regards to morals. Nice Palestinians? I don’t think they exist in the world of The Honourable Woman. The only good Palestinian in Blick’s masterwork of blockheadness is a dead Palestinian or at least a silent one. Even the Arab-Muslim hating worlds of Homeland and 24 didn’t hit rock bottom quite so hard. The BBC is often said to have a balance issue with regards Palestine, but on the basis of the dramas which they have commissioned, I think we can safely say which side of the scale they have their thumbs on.

There is a more charitable way to read Blick’s drama, and that is to see in it a call for reconciliation and a (wishful) metaphor for Israeli-Palestinian relations. This is most clearly seen in the narrative path taken by Nessa’s Palestinian confidant, Atika. Atika turns out to be a vengeful subversive lying in wait to do harm to Nessa and her family. Among other things, she leads Nessa’s brother to his doom in the penultimate episode of the series. Yet her demands for violent compensation stop short of Nessa’s rape (which she tries to stop) and she is the only person with sufficient compassion to care for the product of that assault. In the final act, she is killed while saving Nessa and her kidnapped child from some fellow conspirators less enlightened (presumably) than herself.

If viewed from a biblical standpoint, both Nessa and Atika can be seen as scapegoats with the former “offering” sent into the wilderness (for Azazel, see Leviticus 16:8) and the latter given as a blood sacrifice to God. This explains Nessa’s constant position of suffering in this farce as well as her sense of culpability; they are acts of contrition on behalf of the nation of Israel. Yet the twisted nature of the characterizations and political drama overwhelm any such noble intentions. Any fixation on this line of reasoning will inevitably lead the viewer to wonder why the only “saint” allowed for in The Honourable Woman is a Jewish one.

The Honourable Woman is certainly sufficient cause for the donning of sackcloth in shameful repentance, and no doubt obscene enough to earn a host of Emmy and BAFTA nominations come award season. It is an embarrassment for all involved whatever their declared political leanings—a beautifully composed addition to the annals of degenerate propaganda.

Alice and Freda Forever, Whoever They Are

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Identities are made out of stories, and stories are made out of identities. That’s certainly the case in Alexis Coe’s new book, Alice and Freda Forever, about 1892 century Memphis murder of Freda Ward by her lover and fiancé, Alice Mitchell. Alice and Freda were both well-to-do young women; they’d met at the Higbee School for Girls. Freda had agreed to marry Alice, but their families had discovered the plan and put a stop to it. Alice feared Freda would forget her and perhaps marry a man. So she stole her father’s razor and slit her ex’s throat; she was stopped before she could kill herself as well.

The murder was a massive story at the time — the O.J. Simpson trial of its day — precisely because of the identities of the killer and her victim. “Journalists knew that the story would be far less consequential to readers if the murderer and victim had been male, not white, or of lesser economic means,” Coe says. Identity for the public at the time was the story — as it is, in a different way for us. Would Coe, or her readers, be interested in this particular trial if it weren’t for the fact that Alice and Freda were lesbians?

Alice and Freda planned a same-sex wedding before the term, or even the concept, existed. As a result, it’s easy to identify with them; they seem like they’re part of a familiar story. But that familiarity can be deceptive. A firm lesbian identity didn’t really exist for Americans in the 1800s. As Sharon Marcus says in her book Between Women (focusing on England, but the general argument seems to apply to the U.S. as well), passionate same-sex relationships between women in the Victorian Era were accepted and even encouraged as part of a normal, mainstream heterosexual identity. Those relationships could include kissing, hugging, passionate declarations of love, and even, on occasion (as with Freda and Alice) sex. But people at the time didn’t organize any of those actions into an identity. Same-sex relationships between women were not policed, or codified. As a result, for most practical purposes, they were invisible.

If Alice had murdered someone in the 1950s, when homophobia was widespread and virulent, her violence probably would have been blamed immediately on her dangerous deviant lesbianism. But in the 1890s, Coe reports, people seemed to have difficulty even understanding the relationship between Freda and Alice. Their plan to marry was seen as impossible. One psychological expert, foreshadowing future anti-marriage-equality argument asked her incredulously how she could think of marrying Freda when the two of them couldn’t have children.

Those psychological experts were there in the courtroom less to evaluate Alice than to make sense of her; they weren’t figuring out if she was sick so much as they were figuring out what to do with her. Just as the Oscar Wilde trial a couple of years later solidified homosexual identity in England, the Mitchell trial — haltingly, hesitantly — took steps towards creating and defining a lesbian identity. That definition, at this point, was medical and marginal. The defense argument, which prevailed, was that Alice’s love for Freda was a sign of insanity. To buttress that argument, the lawyers made her love for Freda into her identity, playing up her childhood interest in sports and her later lack of attachment to men. She was masculine, disordered, and wrong. The argument was that her identity was not (jealous) murderer, but (lesbian) madwoman. The jury bought it — and so gave her a story that ended, not on the gallows, but in an insane asylum (and a few years later, in death, though whether by tuberculosis or drowning suicide remains unknown to this day.)

Coe is very sensitive to the ways in which Alice’s identity and her story wrap around one another. As an upper-middle class white woman, Alice’s range of movement and actions were extremely limited. Her plot to dress and pass as a man to marry Freda seems, from what Coe could determine, to have had little to do with a trans identity, and much more to do with economics. White women of Mitchell’s class weren’t supposed to, or allowed to, work, and Alice and Freda needed an income if they were going to live together as a couple. On the other hand, Alice’s race and resources ensured high powered lawyers and a sympathetic jury — luxuries which certainly wouldn’t have been afforded to anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, who, as Coe discusses, was forced to flee Memphis at around the same time as Alice’s trial. White Memphis found it easier to empathize with a white killer than with a black opponent of murder.

Even as she points to the ways in which Alice’s race and class shaped her story for her contemporaries, though, Coe can’t help but write her own narrative around our current reading of Alice’s identity. Very near the end of the book, Coe describes how Alice, before being sent off to the asylum, asked to be allowed to visit Freda’s grave.

We will never know what Alice was thinking at Elmwood that day, and neither did the journalists who watched from afar. But they did report what they saw, and what they wrote seemed believable: Alice dropped to her knees and, for the woman she loved without shame, wept openly.

It’s a moving scene — not least because, in that reference to “without shame”, Coe connects Alice to the current gay rights struggle, and its narrative of pride and identity. There’s no question that Alice was a startlingly brave young women, willing to own her own love and work towards a life that her family, and society, could barely conceive of or imagine. She was heroic. And yet, at the same time — she murdered her lover out of jealousy. If she were a man, she would be seen as participating, not in the narrative of gay rights, but in the long, ugly, misogynist narrative of domestic violence, in which the infidelity of a wife (and Freda was to be a traditional wife, Alice’s letters make clear) gives the husband the right to kill. That’s not to criticize Coe, who certainly doesn’t downplay or excuse Alice’s crime. It’s just a reminder that people often don’t fit neatly into the identities we use to tell their stories, nor into the stories we use to create their identities.

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