I normally would put this on my other blog, but I went ahead and posted it here so that more would see it.
It’s a review of The Butler, by a white, right wing, whatever in the hell else they call themselves. Though I have no desire to see The Butler, after reading this story and these comments, I feel I may need to go and see it just so I’m not in the company of these people.
This from Taki’s Magazine:
In last week’s Radio Derb I uttered some unkind words about Oprah Winfrey. The week before that, in a VDARE column, I had been uncharitable about the movie Ms. Winfrey has been so vigorously promoting recently and in which she takes a leading role. The movie’s called The Butler and tells the story of a black man from humble origins who becomes a White House butler, serving presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan. In that VDARE piece I described the movie, on indirect evidence, as “black grievance porn.”
It’s not good journalistic integrity to insult a movie one hasn’t actually seen; and besides, Ms. Winfrey has friends in high places. I therefore decided to go and see The Butler in hopes I might spare myself an IRS audit by finding something positive to say about the movie.
Not to keep you in suspense, gentle reader, but I couldn’t. The Butler is dreck. It’s dreck in a way that will bear a few hundred words of commentary, though, so here goes with a sort-of review.
Preparing this column in my mind before seeing the movie, I thought it would be neat to open by telling readers something about the demographics of the audience. Who goes to see black grievance porn? Just blacks? Aging white hippies?
Young metrosexual products of
college white-guilt indoctrination sessions?
Sorry, I still don’t know. The showing I caught was at 1PM on a weekday in my mostly white suburb. I counted 36 in the audience. There was just one twentysomething black couple; everyone else was white and old. Movie-schedule-wise, I guess I got the Early Bird Special.
The opening scene of The Butler shows the title character, Cecil Gaines, as a child in 1926 Georgia. He is picking cotton with his mom and dad and many other blacks. Young White Master swings by the field and with a sneer of cold command orders mom off to a nearby hut for a very audible quickie. Dad dare not object, but when Young White Master comes out adjusting his clothing, dad glares at him. For that, YWM shoots dad dead and suffers no penalty for the crime. “Any white man can kill any of us at any time,” the child Gaines is told.
What nonsense! Even in slave times, a white man who killed a black slave in the South could expect some measure of justice. “Ten-year sentences were common, and occasionally the death penalty was invoked,” says Eugene Genovese in Roll, Jordan, Roll. Were matters actually worse in 1926? Could the producers of The Butler not afford a historical consultant—not even one who was, like Genovese when he wrote that book, a Marxist?
Well, well, I guess all is permitted in the promotion of black grievance culture. Stick around: Another movie or two, and we shall see the white folks at dinner served up with a black baby that is roasted, basted, and stuffed.
The Butler goes downhill from there. Gaines ends up in the Eisenhower White House just as Ike is ordering federal troops into Little Rock. We are then taken on a plodding tour of the civil-rights battlefield: lunch counters, Freedom Riders, dogs ‘n’ hoses, MLK, Selma, the Voting Rights Act, Malcolm X, the Panthers….
Speaking to Parade magazine about the movie, Ms. Winfrey opined that young people “don’t know diddly-squat about the civil rights movement.” Speaking as the parent of two young Americans who, in their passage through public high schools, experienced twelve Black History Months apiece, I’ll see Ms. Winfrey’s diddly-squat and raise her a fiddle-de-dee.
The only non-civil-rights issue that passes before our eyes is the Vietnam War, in which Gaines loses a son. I braced myself for the old quip about Vietnam being the war in which black men were sent to kill yellow men on behalf of the country that white men stole from red men, but the producers unaccountably omitted it. (In fact: “Overall, blacks suffered 12.5% of the deaths in Vietnam when the percentage of blacks of military age was 13.5% of the population.”)
Eisenhower, who did after all send those troops to Little Rock, is given a fair shake, and JFK is of course cool and sympathetic, but the other presidents are cartoon characters from the Cultural Marxist comic book: Nixon a creepy drunk, LBJ a crude boor (well…), Ford a cipher. It seems for a while, incredibly, that Reagan might get fair coverage, but then he vows to veto sanctions against South Africa. See?—just another white devil determined to keep the black man down.
The movie’s non-presidential whites are snarling, spitting bullies, except for a handful of non-talking parts: Pablo Casals, for example, is praised for his hostility to General Franco. That would be the General Franco who saved Spain from becoming Stalin’s first European satellite.
The Butler is romantic in the precise sense given by Webster’s Third: “marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of the heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized characteristics of things, places, people.”
Watching it and reading what Ms. Winfrey has said about it, you realize how deeply and narcissistically absorbed American blacks are in this romance—the romance of American blackness. Nothing else really exists for them. Ms. Winfrey has endorsed three politicians, to my knowledge: Barack Obama, Michael Tubbs, and Cory Booker. Notice anything?
If there are few likeable whites in The Butler, there are no unlikeable blacks at all. Everyone is well-spoken and well-behaved except when righteously angry. All are struggling to keep their honor and self-respect in a society whose every hand is against them. The proverbial visitor from Mars, given only this movie to work from, would be baffled why prejudice against blacks exists.
Where, you find yourself wondering, are the other blacks: the feral, criminal, ebonics-jabbering lumpen-negrotariat of the slums? Where are their innumerable white victims? Wasn’t there any room for these souls in Oprah Winfrey’s movie? Not romantic enough, perhaps.
THEY SAID:
InsidiousLexicon: I’m sure this historically-blind agitprop will be lauded by the usual disciples of the First Church of the Perpetually Aggrieved.
But, as for the rest of the unwashed masses out there…I think they’re starting to notice the discrepancies between the saint-like blacks on the silver screen, and the snarling savages outside their screen doors.
reply John: Outside their screen doors? More like armed fortresses.
reply Florida_resident: We actually have screen doors.
For 7 years, after moving to Florida and until kids finished High School, we did not lock entrance door to the house during day time, being afraid that kids can loose the key. We live in un-gated community.
reply Huperetes: “‘ Any white man can kill any of us at any time.'” , the rallying cry of the Trayvonistas.
The timing and intent of that premeditation is about as subtle as the timing of the Oprah “cannibalizing” (Thanks JD!) that poor Swiss shop girl just in time for the release date.As realtors tell you: “Location, location, location”.
reply Erasmus: The murder of the Australian baseball player in Oklahoma with the ensuing silence from Obama, Jackson and Sharpton are changing how many people look at the state of race relations in America and pushing them to ask very hard, previously unutterable questions.
It seems the country is being polarized, but if that means people are at last supporting truth over left-wing agitprop, we should be pleased.
reply John Jeremiah Smith: No way that Australian baseball player coulda been Obama, 25 years ago. Obama played basketball! The press conference is waiting on some baseball-playing white staffer to step forward and say “If I had a son, he would look like Christopher Lane.”
reply Erasmus: If Obama had a son, he’d look a lot like the perps.
reply tdrag: It’s time for an end to White Guilt.
reply tdrag: This movie will be played in countless high school classrooms across the country and will be the only version of the events depicted. It will be the go to guide the Race Pimps use to implant the fungus of White Guilt into young white kid’s brains.
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bigone4u: I see Oscars in “The Butler’s” future. Since “Sacheen Littlefeather” (real name Marie Louise Cruz) picked up Brando’s Oscar for him in 73, the Oscars are mostly vehicles for endorsing Hollywood’s loathsomely boring self-righteousness. The way to success in La-La Land is to pick someone “oppressed” by whitey and then spin a yarn about how the noble beast triumphs in the end. Two thumbs down from me, as creepy Siskel and Ebert used to say.
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NakedJusticeLeague: The only thing attractive about Oprah Winfrey is her bank account and life insurance policy. Otherwise, it is galling that she would help create this agitprop when she made her zillions off of moronic white women.
Yet the next Oscars should be watched by bulimics everywhere. You know that the sycophantic claptrap for this rubbish will produce vomiting.
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flitetym: White women are “bobbleheads” for their daily dose of Oprag … meaning force-feeding the masses crap-cinema ain’t gonna end anytime soon ….
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Daniel Williams: Making blackness central to one’s work is a sensible move for a writer, director, or performer. It makes them invulnerable.
After all…
IF blackness pervades every aspect of your being/art project/whatever
AND blackness is inherently uncriticizable (as explained in depth in the “Reign of Fear” discussion at VFR a while back)
THEN your being/art project/whatever cannot be insulted, only praised. Any other response would be to condemn blackness itself, which (as we all know) is Good.
Indeed, in our world of relativism, it may be the only Good there is!
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John1943: I had an old pal that went to school with Oprah. He said I would never have remembered her, except for her unusual name. I always used to introduce him as Oprah’s first white boy friend. He was a good sport about the kidding. This movie is a total farce as both John and Steve Sailer have shown in the last 2 days. In the last 50 or 60 years blacks have been given everything but the kitchen sink. They could have built paradise, instead they destroyed Detroit. They took a nice story about a man who worked hard and got along with people and made it to a racist hate film. The cultural Marxists of the Hollywood Tribe hate anything about traditional America. There goal is to tear it down. They have no sane plan to replace it
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UncleElmer: She is a professional black producing important films about black professionals. She is a Super Black Friend to legions of fat white ladies who otherwise would have no exposure to actual blacks. No wonder she seethes with hatred for them. Yet she carries on, despite herself being repeatedly victimized by white racism, which harbors no respect for even well-known professional blacks.
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Florida_resident: I recently watched movie “The Paperboy” by the same director Lee Daniels. My wife ordered it via Netflix to watch Nicole Kidman and others. She (what a sad family situation) liked it. I watched it separately, and got sick. All whites are either homosexual with particular passion for black genitalia (Matthew McConaughey), or sadistic convict waiting for electric chair (John Cusack), or white crackers living in the swamps of my Florida, or stupid white chick (Kidman) with letter-romance toward said murderer. The book, on which the movie is based, is written by Pete Dexter, who is apparently himself white (at least Wikipedia does not count him as black.) Awful movie. ** I must say that I was positively impressed by the movie “Precious” by the same director. So was my wife, to that matter. I even bought (and we both read) the book on which it is based. As Steve Sailer noted in his review of “The Butler”,http://takimag.com/article/but… , the “Precious’ ” book’s author is himself black, and therefore is allowed (by PC police) to say things, which are forbidden to whites. (Almost wrote “verboten”, but decided not to attempt to look stylish.) Screenplay of “The Butler” is by white author. ** I must note that it becomes a nice routine: my favorite authors Sailer and Derbyshire sequentially write about the same movie, see their reviews of “Waiting for Superman”
http://takimag.com/article/whe… and
http://takimag.com/article/whe… ,
and each have different (and nontrivial) things to say.
Best to Derbs in Long Island and in all other places. F.r.
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I grew tired of these folks and their wise ways. If you want to read the rest of this outpouring of the America spirit you can go here. http://takimag.com/article/the_romance_of_american_blackness_john_derbyshire/print#disqus_thread
janet tamaro@JanetTamaro
Oatmeal, Milk 'N Honey
DEPRESSION: my muse 