Florence Foster Jenkins (Qwerty Films, BBC Films, Pathé, Paramount, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “feature” was Florence Foster Jenkins, a 2016 film that told the story of the woman sometimes considered the worst opera singer of all time — or at least the worst one that got to sing concerts and make records. Florence Foster Jenkins was born to a wealthy family on July 19, 1868 and had ambitions to be a concert singer and pianist. Her first husband, Frank Thornton Jenkins, gave her syphilis — she ended the relationship when she found out but it’s unclear when, or even whether, she divorced him. In 1909 she met the man who would become her second husband, St. Clair Bayfield, a British actor specializing in recitations from Shakespeare. In 1917 she founded an organization called the Verdi Club to promote opera in New York City and advocate for performances of opera in English. She inherited a large trust when her father died and used much of the money for musical philanthropies. She also became a singer in public, making people put her on as a condition of her generosity, and she sporadically tried for a professional career in voice. The principal documentation of her “art,” if you can call it that, comes from the last few years of her life, the early 1940’s, when she and Bayfield attempted to carve out a career for her that included a semi-private recital, records (for the small Melotone label) and a big concert at Carnegie Hall. At least some writers have speculated based on reviews of performances she gave in the ’teens that Jenkins actually once had a passable, if not great, voice, but by the time she recorded Jenkins was in her 70’s and whatever vocal talent she’d ever had had totally evaporated. Opera critic and founder of La Grand Scena Opera Company di New York (a travesty show with men in drag portraying comically bad divas) Ira Siff said, “Jenkins was exquisitely bad, so bad that it added up to quite a good evening of theater ... She would stray from the original music, and do insightful and instinctual things with her voice, but in a terribly distorted way. There was no end to the horribleness ... They say Cole Porter had to bang his cane into his foot in order not to laugh out loud when she sang. She was that bad.”

What we hear on her records — and what Meryl Streep, who played Jenkins, supplies in the film (she did all her own singing and Simon Helberg from The Big Bang Theory, who plays her long-suffering accompanist Cosmé McMoon, did his own piano playing) — is a well-meaning amateur with virtually no voice at all. She sounds O.K. in the midrange but as soon as the music goes high or requires coloratura ornamentation, she’s hopelessly bad. (I joked during the movie that if I’d met her I’d probably have advised her to go in for a career as a torch singer, where it didn’t matter if you couldn’t sing — Exhibit A: Libby Holman.) One of the arias the real Foster Jenkins recorded, and Streep gamely plows through in the film, is the Queen of the Night’s second-act aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute — a piece so challenging even professional opera singers with solid talents have trouble with it. (In one of her autobiographies, Beverly Sills acknowledged that she’d sung it perfectly only once in her whole career.) Directed by Stephen Frears, who made his bones with My Beautiful Laundrette and has specialized in stories about people trying to build their lives based on impossible dreams, and written by Nicholas Martin, Florence Foster Jenkins isn’t a great movie but it is a quite entertaining one. One can’t escape the resemblance to Citizen Kane — though with the obvious difference that Susan Alexander knew she didn’t have an opera-quality voice and it was her husband who pushed her into a vocal career she knew she didn’t have the chops for — the hopelessly untalented singer living in a huge mansion with the best professional vocal coach money could buy and being trained for a recital program she’s obviously unfit for. Dorothy Comingore in Citizen Kane made Susan Alexander a figure of real pathos, but Streep turns Florence Foster Jenkins into a dotty but lovable old lady who’s charming enough we want to see her make it even though we realize her ambition is insane.

The film also does a nice job of dramatizing the life of St. Clair Bayfield — played by Hugh Grant, who came out of what the imdb.com page on this film calls “semi-retirement” for the chance to work with Streep — who has an apartment on the side and a girlfriend named Kathleen (Rebecca Ferguson) with whom he can have sex, since he and Florence agreed to keep their relationship platonic because she had syphilis. There’s a great scene in which Foster Jenkins arrives unexpectedly at her husband’s apartment while Kathleen is there — and so is McMoon, after having passed out from too much champagne at a wild party the night before, and Agnes Stark (Nina Arianda, who plays as if she’s auditioning for yet another biopic of Marilyn Monroe), wife of 1-percenter Phineas Stark (Stanley Townsend), who has somehow let himself get roped into being part of Bayfield’s circle. I also liked the subtle way Frears and Martin depicted Cosmé McMoon’s sexuality; while we get the impression that he’s a naïve young man who hasn’t yet had sex with anybody, in two different scenes other men in the Bayfield-Jenkins circle start stroking him in an obviously cruisy way. He’s also shown working out with weights — apparently the real McMoon abandoned music after his association with Jenkins tarred him and took up a career as, of all things, a bodybuilder and personal trainer. And there’s a great scene in which New York Post columnist Earl Wilson tries to get a ticket to one of la Jenkins’  private recitals; at first Bayfield wants him barred, but later he relents and offers him a ticket in an envelope with a large-denomination bill. “I only need the ticket,” Wilson says. “It’s both or nothing,” Bayfield replies — so later, when Foster Jenkins gives her public concert at Carnegie Hall, Wilson is determined to crash it and ends up writing a scathing review which Bayfield tries and fails to keep Foster Jenkins from seeing.

The film makes it look as if the shock of the dreadful review led to her death from her long-standing syphilis infection — in fact she died of a heart attack about a week after her big concert. Also the film draws on the fact that it takes place while World War II was going on and depicts Foster Jenkins’ records getting on the air and becoming a big hit with servicemembers who need a few laughs between battles. Florence Foster Jenkins is probably a minor item in the Streep canon but she scores by making the character dotty and lovable — in some ways she’s less like Susan Alexander (or the suddenly rich woman Mae West played in Goin’ to Town who determines to become an opera singer and sings “My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice” from Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila like an amateur with a decent voice who was just out of her depth — West did her own singing for the scene, and one can tell) than like Ed Wood in Tim Burton’s film, another story of an incompetent artist with a vastly inflated idea of his own talents who has a sort of worm-turning success as a climax. Streep even gets to expire with a line attributed to the real Jenkins — “They can say I couldn’t sing, but no one can say I didn’t sing” — at the end of a film which, despite some flaws (notably the all-too-typical past-is-brown cinematography by Danny Cohen and a typically reticent musical score by Alexandre Desplat — though for once Desplat’s reticence works for his film: an all-out Korngold or Steiner assault on the senses would have taken away from the simple charms of both the music Foster Jenkins chooses to sing and the wretched way she sings it), manages to work largely on the sheer charm of Streep’s performance and Frears’ typically understated direction.

NOVA: “Mystery of Easter Island” (WGBH-TV, PBS, 2012)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. last night, with no Law and Order reruns locatable on TV (one station does them Mondays and Tuesdays, one does them Thursdays and Fridays, but Wednesday seems to be the nodal point), I ended up on PBS watching a 2012 episode of Nova called “Mystery of Easter Island,” originally aired November 7, 2012 and dealing with the legend that the famous rock statues on Easter Island — or Rapa Nui, as it’s called by the native Polynesians — actually walked to their places in the mountains. The big question the archaeological team at the center of the show, led by Carl Lipo with ethnic Polynesian Sergio A. Rapu Haoa as  his associate, were trying to answer was how the statues got moved into their ultimate positions. The statues themselves were made of tuff, a soft stone formed from volcanic ash (I’m not sure whether those would be considered igneous or sedimentary rocks — they come from volcanoes, which means igneous; but they are formed from layers of deposits of fine material, which would mean sedimentary), and cut with stone tools, so we have a pretty good idea of how the statues were made. One worker on the show illustrates how the eye sockets would have been carved, saying that with modern equipment he could do it in 45 minutes but with the tools the Rapa Nui had it would take a day or two. 

The big clue is that a lot of the statues did not make it to their final destinations but fell along the way. They were somehow dragged along roads carved into the island’s surface, and some of the roads sloped down while others sloped up. When a statue fell en route, if it were on a road going downhill it fell on its face and left its back showing, but if it fell on an uphill road it fell on its back and left its face showing. Also, the scientists did a comparison between statues that made it to their upright positions and those that didn’t, and found that the ones that didn’t had larger eye sockets that were not finished carvings; the ones that fell were also fatter and their center of gravity was lower. With this information they made an Easter Island statue of their own out of concrete and rebar, and made it 10 feet tall — about two-thirds the size of the originals — to see if they could move it vertically so it would appear to “walk” when it was dragged with ropes, as the ancient legends had described the statues walking. One of the tricks they learned is that the sculptors made the statues’ bases rounded and curved them so there’d be a slightly forward tilt. Their technique — wrapping a rope around the statue’s shoulders and having two teams pull it in alternate directions, sort of like a rowing crew (they had the team members practice by playing tug-of-war but trying to train themselves to pull with even force so the game would always be a tie) — worked on the wooden mockups but failed with the replica statue, and there’s a nice bit of suspense on this show when, with just a few hours left on the team’s last day on the island, they realize that the unfinished eye sockets looked like standards with which to hook a rope. Accordingly they tied their rope around the statue’s forehead, using the eye sockets as standards, and had three teams pull the statue instead of just two — and they managed to move it 10 yards even though at one point their statue fell down and they had to use a construction crane (obviously a piece of equipment the ancient Rapa Nuians wouldn’t have had!) to get it up again (no pun intended). 

The show was interspersed with a bit of historical analysis which attempted to explain why the original Easter Islanders disappeared and what happened to the thick rain forest of palm trees that had once covered their islands — one theory is they entered a sort of arms race to see which tribe could build the biggest and most monumental statues, and as a result they cut down all the palm trees. Other people argued that the Easter Islanders were farmers and, like a lot of farmers in the Amazon today, they were practicing slash-and-burn architecture that ultimately undid the ecological balance of their island. Another case argues that the Easter Islanders did themselves in by hunting and killing the sea birds that flew by the island for meat, thereby depriving themselves of guano — the bird-shit fertilizer they had been relying on for their own crops as well as maintaining the palm trees. Still other people argue that the real culprits were rats, imported by sailors from other parts of Polynesia, who bred uncontrollably and, with no natural predators, gobbled up the palm nuts and thereby killed what would have been the next generation of trees. It’s interesting that such an ecologically conscious show would appear with David Koch as one of the named and most prominent funders given that he’s an oil multimillionaire who’s donated heavily to the Republican and Libertarian parties and specifically to candidates who reject the idea that human beings are causing climate change — when his credit appears as “The David H. Koch Fund for the Advancement of Science,” I can’t help but think, “As opposed to the David H. Koch PAC for the End of Science.”

Reconstruction: America After the Civil War, parts 1 and 2 (PBS-TV, 2019)

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. last night I watched the first half of a fascinating PBS documentary program on Reconstruction, given the rather academic title Reconstruction: America After the Civil War for a political era that could almost be described as a second American Civil War, coming right after the first one — spanning the years 1865 to 1877 — and featuring some of the same combatants, including generals Ulysses S. Grant, William Sherman and Phil Sheridan for the North and Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest for the South. The outcome, however, was profoundly different: the South, losers of the first U.S. Civil War, won the second one and were able, through sheer tenacity and resort to violence and terrorism, to revert the South’s African-American population to a state as close to slavery as possible without violating the Thirteenth Amendment.

Reconstruction was produced under the overall supervision of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., an African-American professor at Harvard and a distinguished academic who a few years ago felt the hot breath of white supremacy up close and personal when police in Boston arrested him for trying to enter his own house. They assumed he was a burglar because they couldn’t conceive of any African-American actually being affluent enough to own a house in that neighborhood. At the time Barack Obama was President and he invited Gates and the police that arrested him to the White House, where he brokered an apology. One suspects our current President would have had the white officers to the White House on their own and congratulated them on a job well done!

Interestingly, the show is structured into four episodes, of which only the first two (the ones shown back-to-back last night) deal with what most historians consider the actual Reconstruction period, 1865 to 1877. The first hour dealt with the presidency of Andrew Johnson, who had been appointed by President Abraham Lincoln as his running mate in 1864 on a so-called “National Union” ticket (those Republicans who still insist on calling their party the “Party of Lincoln” forget that in 1864 the Republican Party actually repudiated Lincoln and failed to renominate him, then couldn’t find a candidate willing to run against him), replacing Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s first-term vice-president.

According to Gates’s narration here, two days before his assassination Lincoln gave a speech in which he advocated giving the vote to some African-Americans — mainly landowners and veterans of the Union Army — and John Wilkes Booth was in the crowd and, upon hearing that announcement, turned to the person standing next to him and said, “That’s the last public speech he’ll ever give.” Gates made it seem like Lincoln’s advocacy of at least some Black suffrage was what made Booth decide to kill him; in fact Booth was part of a conspiracy that involved at least seven other people and was an attempt by Southern bitter-enders to achieve by decapitating the Union government what they had failed to win on the battlefield.

An assassin entered the bedroom of Secretary of State William Seward and slashed his face open; Seward survived but the newspapers of the time reported the attack on Seward in the same articles in which they covered the Lincoln assassination and the reporters obviously understood the link between the two events. Andrew Johnson was spared only because his would-be assassin, George Adzerodt, got drunk and lost his nerve — ironic that Johnson, himself an alcoholic, was spared assassination because his designated killer was also fond of the bottle.

Gates points out in the program that Johnson, a poor-white Tennessean who had worked himself up (the show does not mention that Johnson grew up not knowing how to read or write: he learned those skills only as an adult, after he married a schoolteacher who taught him), hated both the rich white Southern planters who owned the slaves and the slaves themselves. The way Johnson set up Reconstruction, the Southern white aristocrats had to come to him and beg him for pardons personally, but once he had exacted his ritual humiliation against them he generally came through and restored their full civil and political rights. Frederick Douglass met Johnson early on in his presidency and noticed booze on his breath (the meeting took place at 11 a.m.); Johnson made enough racist statements that Douglass reported back on the meeting, “Whatever he is, Andrew Johnson is no friend of the Black man.”

Johnson had the advantage that he took power in April 1865 and the next session of the U.S. Congress didn’t start until that December; he decided to enact his own version of Reconstruction by executive order (sound familiar?). Oliver Howard, who had been put in charge of the Freedmen’s Bureau — the federal agency charged with responsibility for easing and ensuring the ex-slaves’ transition to freedom — wanted to break up the old Southern plantations and give 40-acre plots to former Black slaves on a three-year loan with the proviso that if the Black farmers did well enough to make enough money to pay the loan, they would own the land free and clear (the origin of the famous phrase “40 acres and a mule”).

Johnson countermanded the order and instead said that the federal government would restore the plantations to their former white owners, and he stood back as the white men of the South re-elected their old Confederate officials to the new “Union” state governments and enacted the so-called “Black Codes” by which every adult Black resident had to sign an employment contract to a white landowner or employer, and if they didn’t they would be arrested and fined, and their services would “belong” to any white person who paid their fine.

In December 1865 the U.S. Congress reconvened and, led by the so-called “Radical Republican” leaders Congressmember Thaddeus Stevens (who got mentioned in this program) and Senator Charles Sumner (who didn’t), started passing laws to clamp down on the attempts of white Southerners to force Blacks back into near-slave conditions. Their main weapon was the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which they passed over Johnson’s veto and which they soon sought to protect against judicial review by inserting it into the U.S. Constitution as the Fourteenth Amendment.

As Gates pointed out, the three constitutional amendments passed just after the Civil War — the Thirteenth, which formally abolished slavery and “involuntary servitude”; the Fourteenth, which established birthright citizenship[1] and barred state governments from denying their citizens the “equal protection” of the laws, or “due process” under law (terms that would launch seemingly endless judicial arguments over what they meant and how much they constrained states from acting against broadly defined groups of their citizens); and the Fifteenth, which said that states could not infringe on the right to vote on the basis of race[2] — basically transformed the U.S. Constitution and made it at least potentially a tool for achieving racial equality.

The first hour of Reconstruction told the story of the Johnson Administration and its clashes with Congress over who should have authority over the Southern states — in particular whether they could automatically be readmitted to the U.S. or they had to go through a process and petition for readmission as states — as well as how deeply the federal government would intervene to protect the rights of Southern Blacks against the attacks of Southern whites.

It mentions Andrew Johnson’s impeachment and narrow escape (his conviction was defeated in the U.S. Senate by just one vote) just in passing, without explaining what the motivation for it was: at a time when the U.S. had no civil service system, government jobs were patronage appointments and the people holding them were routinely fired en masse when the White House changed parties. Andrew Johnson may have run for vice-president as the running mate of the Republican Lincoln, but once he was President he thought of himself as a Democrat (indeed, in 1868 he sought the Democratic, not the Republican, nomination to continue as President — and got exactly nowhere) and fired Republican officeholders en masse and replaced them with Democrats.

The Republicans who were subject to Johnson’s purges appealed to Congress to pass the Tenure of Office Act to put the brakes on Johnson firing them and replacing them with Democrats, and Johnson really ticked off the Congressional Republicans when he tried to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. A lot of Northerners thought Stanton had been the key player in the North’s victory in the Civil War; picked by Lincoln in 1862 to replace the corrupt Simon Cameron (to whom Lincoln had promised the job in exchange for enough convention delegates to win the 1860 nomination over the party establishment’s favorite, William Seward[3]), Stanton had made sure the Union Army got the weapons and supplies Northern taxpayers were paying for, and many people attributed the victory to Stanton’s honest and effective management of the War Department.

The Stanton firing led directly to Johnson’s impeachment and near-removal from office, though the real conflict between Johnson and Congressional leaders (who won a veto-proof majority of over two-thirds in both houses in the 1866 midterms) was over the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. These acts essentially called for the division of the former Confederate states into five zones of occupation, each one under the command of a Union general, and essentially suspended local authority until new state governments could be constituted through elections in which all free men, Black as well as white, could vote. The Reconstruction Acts also required the states to petition the federal government for permission to rejoin the Union, and as a condition of doing so required them to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment.

Under the occupation, quite a number of African-American men won political office in the formerly secessionist South — and one of the most fascinating aspects of the Reconstruction program is that, though Gates’ narration doesn’t mention it, a lot of these people don’t look especially Black in their surviving photos. It seems likely some of them were the mixed-race children of white Southern planters and the Black women slaves they took as mistresses or simply raped. Aside from Louisiana, a former French colony in which the mixed-race Creoles were recognized as a distinct social class with lower standing and fewer privileges than the whites but higher standing and more privileges than the Blacks, in the rest of the South mixed-race children were considered Black (indeed, some of the most effective anti-slavery propaganda before the Civil War consisted of photos of white-looking mixed-race children which were distributed by abolitionist groups to get people angry that people who looked white were nonetheless being considered “Black” and kept in slavery).

Gates mentions several of the Black politicians who won office during the Reconstruction era, including Hiram Revels (R-Mississippi), the first African-American U.S. Senator, but the one he presents as his paradigmatic figure of Black advancement during Reconstruction is Robert Smalls. Robert Smalls escaped slavery on May 13, 1862, when he and a crew of fellow slaves commandeered a Confederate cotton steamer, sailed it to the Union blockade line and surrendered it. After the war Smalls got elected to the Mississippi state legislature and eventually to Congress, and he wrote a memoir that was one of Gates’s primary sources on the rise and fall of Black political power in the South during Reconstruction.

America looked well on its way to a peaceful resolution of the issues raised by the Civil War and an effective transition to a multi-racial society, but the white Southerners fought back with a mix of terrorism and propaganda. In 1865 white Southern bitter-enders formed the Ku Klux Klan, which Gates explains was an extension of the former white slave patrols, freelance vigilantes who had patrolled the South looking for fugitive slaves. The Klan and similar organizations like the Knights of the White Camellia launched a campaign of no-holds-barred terrorism to intimidate Black officials from taking office and rank-and-file Blacks from voting at all.

They also sought to steal the property of Blacks who had built up successful farms and businesses — one woman farmer depicted in the show said she was tied to a tree by a white mob whose leader said he would either rape her or kill her, her “choice” — and as the 1870’s continued they were largely successful in wearing down Northern resistance. The white Southerners, particular the landed aristocracy that had owned most of the slaves in the first place, not only fought a terror campaign against free Southern Blacks, especially Black landowners, business owners and politicians, they bolstered it with a two-pronged propaganda campaign.

One prong was aimed at poor Southern whites to make them identify their interests with those of the white planter class rather than poor Southern Blacks — not the first time nor the last time that lower-income whites have been induced by racist and prejudicial appeals to vote against their own economic interests (this was revived by the Republican Party, after the historical reversal of the 1960’s in which the two major political parties switched their positions on civil rights in general and African-American equality in particular, in the so-called “Southern Strategy” by which Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond neutralized the threat of George Wallace’s independent Presidential candidacy in 1968; originally intended just to stop Wallace from splitting the Right-wing vote in 1968, the appeals to racism at the heart of the “Southern Strategy” proved effective at winning Northern working-class whites as well, splitting the New Deal coalition and putting the Republican Party and the Right in general in ongoing control of American politics, with only minor and transitory interruptions, ever since).

The other prong was aimed at public opinion in the North. Part of this was a deliberate romanticization of the cause of the Confederacy — it became known as the “Lost Cause,” following the publication of a successful book of that title by Virginian author and journalist Edward Pollard in 1866 — which presented the pre-war South as a gentle, well-mannered aristocracy and said the Civil War had been fought for “State’s Rights.” Pollard’s (and his fellow “Lost Cause” authors’) attitude towards slavery and their willful ignorance of the fact (demonstrated, as Gates points out, in the ordinances of secession themselves) that the “right” the Southern states were fighting the federal government over was the “right” to own other people as slaves — is indicated in this passage from Pollard’s book, quoted on the Wikipedia page about the “lost cause” mythology generally:

We shall not enter upon the discussion of the moral question of slavery. But we may suggest a doubt here whether that odious term “slavery” which has been so long imposed, by the exaggeration of Northern writers, upon the judgment and sympathies of the world, is properly applied to that system of servitude in the South, which was really the mildest in the world; which did not rest on acts of debasement and disenfranchisement, but elevated the African, and was in the interest of human improvement; and which, by the law of the land, protected the negro in life and limb, and in many personal rights, and, by the practice of the system, bestowed upon him a sum of individual indulgences, which made him altogether the most striking type in the world of cheerfulness and contentment.

The romanticization of the Confederacy went into hyper-drive in 1870, when the death of Confederate commander Robert E. Lee was used as an occasion for both official and unofficial mourning throughout the South — Gates’ program includes a photo of a Southern courthouse in which every one of the outside columns was wrapped in a black spiral ribbon of mourning — including the erection of statues of Lee, usually on horseback, in public places throughout the South. These statues have become flash points of controversy in public life today as anti-racist Blacks and whites have demanded they be taken down, and white racists and nationalists (including President Trump) have insisted that they should remain. The bitter clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 began when a liberal mixed-race city government in Charlottesville ordered a Lee monument removed from a public park and Right-wing nationalist and racist Richard Spencer issued a nationwide call, “Unite the Right,” for white supremacists, nationalists and conservatives in general to come to Charlottesville to protect the Lee statue — which led to the death of one counter-protester and President Trump’s statement that “there were good people on both sides.”

White authors, not just in the South but the North as well, put out propaganda that said the Black-run state governments in power during the Reconstruction years had been either incompetent, corrupt or both; Gates’s program includes cartoons, some drawn by the legendary Thomas Nast, which depicted Black legislators as little more than apes. Probably the most powerful piece of propaganda for the “lost cause” mythology was D. W. Griffith’s 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation, based on a novel called The Clansman by the fanatically racist North Carolina author Thomas Dixon — which, in one of those uncomfortable bits of history, also turned out to be the finest film, from purely artistic criteria, made to that time. It depicts the Black legislators of the Reconstruction government (almost all played by white actors in blackface) as eye-rolling stereotypes playing craps on the legislative floor and lusting after innocent, virginal white women.

The good guys in Griffith’s film are the Ku Klux Klan, who seize power back from these corrupt monsters and secure renewed white rule by taking the Blacks’ guns away — all to the strains of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” (It was a silent film but it went out with a musical score to be played in the theatre as the film was shown, and for his exciting finale with the Klan saving the white South from the depradations of the Blacks, Griffith and his musical director, Joseph Carl Breil, specified the “Ride of the Valkyries.”)

Northern Republicans in Congress and the newly elected president from the 1868 election, Ulysses S. Grant, fought back. In 1871 Congress held hearings as part of an elaborate investigation into the activities of the Klan and other Southern vigilante groups, and as a result they passed the so-called “Enforcement Acts” under the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment (which has since become boilerplate in most subsequent Constitutional amendments) that “The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

Alas for the cause of racial equality in the U.S., the Grant administration also turned out to be spectacularly corrupt; while Grant himself (like later Republican President Warren G. Harding and unlike Donald Trump) was apparently personally honest, he appointed a lot of crooks and grafters to his Cabinet, The most famous scandal of the Grant administration was the Crédit Mobilier, a sham “bank” through which the Union Pacific Railroad funneled its construction contracts and created what amounted to a slush fund through which they could buy influence in Washington, D.C. through outright bribes of public officials.

The Democratic Party swept into power in both houses of Congress in the 1874 midterms — though the outgoing Republicans managed to hold out long enough that in their lame-duck session they passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which like the one a much later Congress passed in 1964 made it illegal for private businesses to discriminate in public accommodations on the basis of race. Unlike the one passed in 1964, the one passed in 1875 was thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883, saying that the government had no authority to tell private business owners whom they could or couldn’t serve.

Earlier, in 1876, the Supreme Court had gutted the Enforcement Acts by ruling that a group of private vigilantes who slaughtered African-Americans en masse could not be convicted in federal court of violating their civil rights because they were not “state actors” — i.e., part of the state government. The final blow to Reconstruction came with the 1876 Presidential election, in which the Democrats nominated New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden — who based his campaign almost exclusively on the corruption of the federal government by Northern business interests and the economic “Panic” (19^th-century speak for “depression”) of 1873 caused largely by the rampant self-dealing of the giant corporations that were taking over both the American economy and, through campaign contributions and out-and-out bribery of public officials, American politics.

The Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes, whose main qualifications seem to have been that he’d been a Union general in the Civil War and he’d somehow escaped being corrupted by the Grant administration scandals. Tilden won the popular vote but Hayes and the Republicans made a deal with the governments of three Southern states where the election was still in dispute to get their electoral votes in exchange for withdrawing the last federal troops from the South.

One curious thing about this program is that though it’s scheduled to be four hours long, only the first two hours deal with the actual Reconstruction period, 1865-1877; the rest of it deals with the success of the self-styled “Redeemers” of the South — the white politicians, activists and vigilantes who restored white supremacy after Reconstruction and kept the terror campaign going through, among other things, lynchings — along with the nationwide success of their anti-Black propaganda campaign and the efforts of African-Americans and their shrinking (and then growing) number of white allies to reverse the racist trend and win Black equality in the courts, in the law generally and in society.

The tenacity of white racists in the South in particular — and in the nation generally — is illustrated by how quickly Southern (and some Northern) states enacted laws aimed at suppressing Democratic voters in general and Black and Latino voters in particular were passed as soon as the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act and removed the “pre-clearance” requirement by which states with a history of racial discrimination in voting had to get any changes in their elections laws approved in advance by the federal government to make sure they did not have a discriminatory intent or effect.

It’s clear Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the many people (mostly Black, though one quite important white person in Reconstruction historiography — Eric Foner, who along with white historians Eric McKitrick and Kenneth Stampp and Black historian John Hope Franklin began the re-examination of Reconstruction in the early 1960’s[4] and started moving away from the pro-white, pro-“Redeemer,” anti-Black consensus that had ruled Reconstruction historiography since the 1890’s — was prominently featured) he interviewed on screen are seeing the current upsurge in white racism that helped elect Donald Trump President is merely an interruption in what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the arc of history … bend[ing] towards justice” and that the civil rights movement that started in the 1960’s (or earlier) was the beginning of a permanent trend towards racial (and other) equality in this country.

But what if it isn’t? What if Donald Trump and the racists in his coalition will be as successful in snuffing out the gains of the civil rights movement (what some historians have actually called the “Second Reconstruction”) long-term as their predecessors in the white-supremacist “Redeemer” movement were in snuffing out the gains of the first Reconstruction? What if America’s future is a so-called “nationalist populist” one in which the nation is ruled indefinitely by a Right-wing coalition who regards the ideas that whites are inherently superior to people of color, men are inherently superior to women, and Queers are pond scum who deserve jail instead of marriage? What if someday Barack Obama is viewed as as bizarre an anomaly in his historical era as Robert Smalls is viewed today in his?

If nothing else, the tragic story of Reconstruction is an object lesson in the dogged persistence of America’s racists and their determination, no matter how many strides African-Americans make towards equality, to push them back into the subservient position they regard as their inborn “nature”? At this point I’d have to say that one of those futures is as least as likely as the other!

---

[1] — The guarantee in the Fourteenth Amendment that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” — so hated by modern-day Right-wingers for granting automatic U.S. citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants if they are born on American soil — was largely intended to reverse the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 decision Dred Scott v. Sandford, which held that African-Americans were not U.S. citizens and “the Black man has no rights which the white man is obliged to respect.”

[2] — One of the most misunderstood aspects of American constitutional law is that it gives state governments virtually unlimited authority to determine who may — or may not — vote in their states. The great amendments that extended the franchise — the 15^th, which extended the vote to people of color; the 19^th, which extended it to women; the 24^th, which barred disqualification of voters for failing to pay a poll tax (a favorite device of white Southern governments to deny the vote to Blacks); and the 26^th, which lowered the minimum voting age to 18 nationwide — are all framed as specific limits on the otherwise absolute power of state government to enfranchise or disenfranchise people.

[3] — An historical parallel: in 1860 Lincoln, an upstart failed Senate candidate from Illinois, beat William Seward, based in New York and the party elite’s favorite, for his party’s Presidential nomination and then, once in office, appointed Seward Secretary of State. In 2008 Barack Obama, an upstart Senator from Illinois, beat the New York-based Hillary Clinton, the party establishment’s favorite for the nomination, and once he was elected he appointed Clinton Secretary of State.

[4] — Actually, the first serious historian to challenge the mythology of Reconstruction as an oppression against white Southerners by unworthy Blacks, white “carpetbaggers” from the North and Southern white “scalawags” who helped them was W. E. B. DuBois in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America. But because DuBois was both Black and a Communist his book was dismissed as special pleading and the challenge to the white-supremacist view of Reconstruction didn’t catch fire in academe for another quarter-century.

Jesus: His Life, episode 3 (Nutopia, Joel Osteen Ministries, History Channel, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched the fifth and sixth episodes of the interesting History Channel series Jesus: His Life, at an odd time for me to be watching this in that I just finished reading Sheldon Vanauken’s book A Severe Mercy. Vanauken was an English professor who grew up on a landed estate in England called Glenmerle but moved back and forth between Britain and the United States. During that odd interregnum from 1939 to 1941 when Britain was a combatant nation in World War II and the U.S. was not, he lived in New York City and met a woman named Jean Davis, who for some reason he and just about everyone who knew her gave the nickname “Davy.” They eventually married and he studied at Oxford University for three years — she studied, too, albeit informally since Oxford didn’t yet admit women (damn those silly prejudices the male slightly-less-than-half of humanity held for so ridiculously long against the female slightly-more-than-half, and the relentlessness with we denied our species the talents, skills, intelligences and insights of women just because of a few minor differences in reproductive plumbing!). When they met they were both intellectual agnostics, unwilling to make the several leaps of faith required to become Christians, but eventually first Davy converted and then so did Van (not wanting to deal with his mouthful of a name, he got nicknamed “Van,” so both of them went by variants of their last names), though she was a good deal more whole-hearted about it than he was. Van got help with his spiritual journey from an intriguing source: C. S. Lewis, author of the Narnia books and quite a lot of literature expressing his views on life as both an intellectual and a Christian. The cover of this book, published in 1977, ballyhoos that it contains “18 Letters by C. S. Lewis” within its text — and the inclusion of Lewis’s letters only makes Vanauken’s overstuffed, self-consciously “intellectual” prose seem even worse by comparison (he’s a mediocre prose writer and a terrible poet — there’s one surprisingly good sonnet in which he takes on the persona of the Virgin Mary but most of the rest of his poetry is trash, doggerel forced into regular meters and rhyme schemes at a time well after his countrymen, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, had shown you could write great poetry without rhyme or meter), but one thing about this book haunted me: Vanauken has a problem becoming a Christian because he believes (and Lewis confirms this when Vanauken writes him about it) you must believe that Jesus was literally both the begotten Son of God and God Incarnate, and you must believe in the historical accuracy of the Virgin Birth, the Miracles and the Resurrection. 

I was bothered by this enough that when Charles’ last Sunday school session was wrapping up I went there and asked the group, point-blank, if they believed you had to accept all those things to consider yourself a Christian. One woman in the group said, “Those were just words,” and Charles himself gave a one-word answer: “No.” (I didn’t ask the obvious follow-up question whether Charles believes in the historical truth of the Virgin Birth, the Miracles and the Resurrection. He did say that the later miracles the Roman Catholic Church attributed to the saints were far more historically dubious than the ones attributed in the New Testament to Jesus Himself.) I’m writing this extended preface to my reflections on parts five and six of Jesus: His Life because the experience of going to church a lot (mostly to St. Paul’s Cathedral in Bankers’ Hill to hear the Tuesday afternoon organ concerts, though when Charles has had Tuesdays off we’ve gone together and attended the mini-service that precedes the concert and I’ve taken Communion, even though I’ve occasionally asked myself, “What’s a nice little atheist boy like you doing in a place like this?,” and that didn’t stop me from praying for a particularly sick home-care client this afternoon while I was waiting for the concert to begin) and experiencing the company of believers has affected me in a lot of unexpected ways — including, during last Sunday’s American Country Music Awards, being a lot more tolerant of the awards recipients who thanked God (among others) for their wins, and also the presence on the program of songs with titles like “God and Country Music” and “God’s Country.” The fifth and sixth episodes of Jesus: His Life were narrated — more or less: the conceit of this program is that “for the first time, the story of Jesus is told by those who knew him best” (which made me wonder wasn’t that what Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were supposed to be doing?), which means that we get snatches of voiceover narration from some of the most important supporting characters in the Jesus story: Joseph, John the Baptist, Mary (His mother), Caiaphas, Judas, Pilate, Mary Magdalene and Peter. 

I give them points for including the villains, as well as the heroes, in the Christ story, and episodes five and six — told kinda-sorta from the viewpoints of Judas (Abhin Galeya) and Pilate, respectively — offered some interesting slants on the tale even though neither the authors of the series’ scripted portions nor the talking-head interviewees with which the cast is studded really had much of a clue as to what made Judas betray Jesus. to the extent we get an explanation, it’s that Judas’s relationship with Jesus began to go south when Mary (sister of Martha and Lazarus — the fact that three important people in the Jesus story are named Mary gets rather confusing at times) gives him a precious ointment and rubs it on his feet, and Judas gets mad because they could have sold the ointment and given the money to the poor — and really went off the rails when Jesus went to Jerusalem and attacked the money-changers outside the Temple. The script explains that Jesus had appointed Judas his treasurer, and this meant Judas would have been especially concerned about the movement’s sources of funding, not wanting either to waste a precious gift that could have added to the organization’s coffers or to alienate wealthy people who might have been persuadable to give to it — and also it suggests that when Jesus attacked the money-changers Judas saw the movement changing from the nice little peace-and-love group he’d signed on for to something more violent and more interested in taking on both the Roman authorities and the Jewish priesthood in ways that conceivably could get them killed. At the same time others among the talking heads suggested that what Judas wanted was for Jesus to spark a revolutionary uprising when he got arrested and act like the warlike figure the Messiah was depicted as in the Old Testament, and instead Jesus endured the tortures before the crucifixion with admirable patience and gave non-answers to the questions, “Are you the Son of God?,” and “Are You the King of the Jews?” 

The show depicts Judas taking the thirty pieces of silver from the Jewish high priests to betray Jesus but then trying to return them after the arrest — one of the talking heads says that was a quite sizable sum of money in those days — and what happened to the money is unclear (though the image Cecil B. DeMille depicted when he staged Judas’s suicide in the 1927 King of Kings of the pieces of silver dropping off Judas’s body as he hangs himself is the one that’s remained indelibly with me). Only one of the talking heads, Dr. Robert Gleason (though I suspect his doctorate is in divinity), mentions the uncomfortable reality that Judas had to betray Jesus for the prophecy of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection to be fulfilled — an inconvenient part of the legend that Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges grabbed hold of and used to make Judas, not Jesus, the real Messiah — which may explain Jesus’s equanimity when he dopes out at the Last Supper that Judas will be his betrayer, as if he knows he has to be betrayed so he can be executed and then rise from the dead as the final fulfillment of his mission on earth. The sixth segment deals with Pontius Pilate and — like the fourth, which dealt with Caiaphas — ran headlong into the “Jews Killed Jesus” problem, the fact that the writers of the Gospels went out of their way to absolve the Romans as much as possible and blame the Crucifixion on the Jews. This led to centuries of anti-Jewish oppression in the Christian world, Western Europe in particular, as the idea that “the Jews killed Jesus” was used as the excuse for all sorts of discrimination against them, including walling them up in ghettoes, barring them from virtually all businesses or jobs, and sometimes simply slaughtering mass numbers of them in pogroms. 

The makers of this show point out that the Gospels are simply labeled as “according to” Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; they were in fact written 50, 70 or 100 years after those original apostles had died. Their argument is by that time Christianity had spread from its base in the Holy Land and started spreading through the Roman Empire, and so in order to make the church more palatable to the Roman authorities (and also make it easier for garden-variety Romans to adopt Christianity as their religion) the Gospel writers — not Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John themselves but the scribes who took down the oral traditions and “froze” them in place by writing them down — “bent” the stories and went out of their way to make the bad guys the Jews. Not only did Judas, a Jew, betray Jesus, the actual trial that condemned him to death was carried out by Caiaphas and the Jewish Sanhedrin, and when Pilate wanted to get Jesus off the hook by invoking the ancient Jewish custom of freeing one convict sentenced to death on the eve of Passover, the crowd cried out for Barabbas (who’s often depicted as a “thief” but was in fact a political revolutionary and terrorist — usually the sort of person a Roman governor would have automatically executed without a second thought) over Jesus, a story which enabled future generations of Christians to blame Christ’s execution not just on the leaders of the Jewish priesthood but the entire Jewish people. As it happens, because he was a Roman we have historical records of Pilate outside the Christian accounts, whereas we have almost no documentary evidence of the other major players in the Jesus story outside the Gospels — and what we know about Pilate was quite different from the way the Gospels portrayed him. The Gospels depict Pilate as genuinely torn over the execution of Jesus, telling the Jewish authorities more than once, “I find no fault in this man,” and at one point trying to bail out of any responsibility for Jesus’s condemnation by sending him to Herod Antipas to see if he would kill Jesus and thereby Pilate wouldn’t have to — only Antipas sent him right back and Pilate was still on the hook. 

The historical depictions of Pilate describe him as essentially Saddam Hussein 2,000 years early, a tyrant and despot who was quite decisive and utterly without conscience in having great numbers of Jews put to death if that’s what it took to maintain the Roman authority over Palestine and scare off anyone who might even try to revolt. At the same time he was also treading on thin ice with the ultimate Roman authority, the Emperor Tiberius, because of a big boner he’d pulled earlier in his tenure as governor of Judea and Samaria. He had sent Roman legions into battle against Jewish revolutionaries carrying shields bearing the name of Tiberius and his full royal title, including his claim to godhood — and that had pissed off the Jews (and potentially added to the number of revolutionaries Pilate was trying to suppress) so much that Tiberius had threatened to have Pilate summoned back to Rome and possibly even executed for his mistake. At the same time this show argues that Pilate was particularly incensed at the idea that Jesus’s followers believed him to be the Son of God because Pilate, as a practitioner of the old Greco-Roman religion, believed that gods were coming to earth, fucking mortal women and producing demigod sons and daughters all the time. If the Jews had come to believe that Jesus was a demigod — the product of a union between a divine father and a mortal mom — he’d be even more dangerous to the official order than he was, which is no doubt one reason why Jesus never made the “Son of God” claim himself (interestingly what he did call himself was “Son of Man”!). The show solves the “Jews Killed Jesus” problem by splitting the difference between the ruthless, decisive historical Pilate and the conscience-stricken, conflicted Pilate of the Gospels, which in a show produced by evangelist Joel Osteen raises an issue of its own — if we acknowledge that the portrayal of a key character in the Jesus story was skewed for propagandistic reasons to make the Romans look better, and the Jews look worse, than the facts warranted, how can we accept that everything else about the Gospels was the infallible Revealed Word of God?

54th Annual American Country Music Awards, CBS-TV, April 7, 2019

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I put on last night’s telecast of the 54^th annual American Country Music awards show on CBS. This is the “rump” country music awards show created by Dick Clark Productions and performed at the MGM Grand Amphitheatre in that hotbed of country music, Las Vegas. It was bizarre and a bit macabre to realize that this was the same city where there was a mass shooting incident on October 1, 2017 during the final performance of a country-music festival featuring many of the same artists being honored at last night’s show, including Jason Aldean and Maren Morris, that still ranks as the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history (though the way things are going it probably won’t hold that record long), with 58 people killed (not counting the shooter, Charles Paddock, who killed himself after police traced him and barricaded the door of the hotel room from which he was shooting down at the festival-goers).

It was also fascinating that the American Country Music awards telecast began with a defiant song by Aldean with the group Florida Georgia Line; the song is called “You Can’t Hide Red” and was a bold statement that the country audience — or at least that part of it the song was aimed at — can’t hide its redneck origins and its “red” political orientation towards the Right in general and the Republican Party in particular. After that and the second song, “Look What God Gave Her” by Thomas Rhett (who had one of the hottest baskets all night but wore a full black beard which made him less attractive, and the song itself was a piece of lightweight pop that didn’t sound particularly “country” — one could readily imagine Bruno Mars covering it), Charles complained about the red lights in the backdrop and joked, “King Crimson wants their stage set back.”

The next song was actually an appealing one that was presented as an Apple commercial, “Simple” by Florida Georgia Line, though the video was a series of stupid computer animations that didn’t really reflect the song. Next up was Miranda Lambert singing a medley of her hits — and closing with “Little Red Wagon,” which came off as considerably angrier than I remember the original hit (something like the difference between Ruth Etting’s world-weary despair on the original version of “Ten Cents a Dance” and the buzzing proto-feminist anger of Doris Day on her cover from the 1955 Etting biopic Love Me or Leave Me) — and then came Luke Bryan with a clever song called “Knocking Boots.”

After that came what unexpectedly turned out to be the high point of the show: a masterpiece, “A Simple Song” by Chris Stapleton. Chris Stapleton was a behind-the-scenes songwriter who emerged as a performer and made a selling point of his scraggly-haired, bearded, overweight homeliness in the midst of all those hot, sexy hunks in their tight jeans — I used to call him the Bruce Vilanch of country music. “A Simple Song” is a, well, simple song about the power of love, and he performed it enviably simply, with just himself on vocal and guitar, a woman doing a second vocal part (I wish she’d been identified because she’s someone I’d like to hear on her own), and an acoustic bass and drums (played with brushes, not sticks) for his rhythm.

It’s the sort of song that belies country music’s reputation as a home for excessive, overwrought melodrama, and fortunately the next song up was almost as good and continued the mood: “Not Bad for a Girl Going Nowhere” by Ashley McBryde. She’s a relatively new singer and the song is the familiar trope of the singer boasting that despite all the people who told her when she was starting out that she’d never be successful, she has been. McBryde performed it on a simple stage set with just herself singing and playing acoustic guitar, and she and Stapleton both reinforced my conviction that singers who have something to say with their music don’t need elaborate costumes, flashing lights, pyrotechnics and Cirque du Soleil performers flying about above them. They can make their point just on the strength of their voices and their songs, the way the greats of yesteryear like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra did.

Next up was a duet between Maren Morris and the Brothers Osborne on a song called (at least as best as I could guess) “All My Favorite People Do.” I’ve loved Maren Morris’s music since a previous awards show presented her doing her star-making song, “My Church” — I still hope someone will hurry up and make a Janis Joplin biopic while she’s still young enough to play her — and I liked her again last night even though I was a bit disappointed that she was wearing a very brief spangled-silver outfit that made her look like a street hooker.

Then veteran George Strait came out and did a song called “God and Country Music,” presenting them as “two things that will never change” (which, at least as far as the latter is concerned, is demonstrably untrue; as I’ve pointed out before, most so-called “country music,” especially by male performers, is much closer to the sound called “Southern Rock” in the 1970’s and owes more to the Allman Brothes and Lynyrd Skynyrd than Hank Williams and Johnny Cash), and given that I’d been to church earlier in the day all these songs about God “played” quite a bit differently in my head than they probably would have if I’d had a more secular day. The next artist up was Luke Combs doing a song called “Beautiful Crazy” — it’s nice to see a beefy-looking bear-type among all the skinny tailor’s models but he doesn’t seem all that great a singer or personality.

The next song was “Keeping Score” by Dan + Shea — the duo which won Song and Single of the Year for something called “Tequila” (not the Champs’ instrumental hit, though it’s nice to hear a country song about an alcoholic beverage other than beer or whiskey!) — with Kelly Clarkson, who I keep forgetting has one of the great white soul voices of our time, joining them in mid-song and taking over with her powerful, impassioned singing.

After that was one of the best songs all night, “The Daughters” by Little Big Town, a feminist anthem about the conflicting expectations put on women as they grow up — this would have been better had the band, the producers or whoever was in charge hadn’t put up a chorus line of women in long, flowing dresses dancing behind Little Big Town in patterns that looked like emulations of Busby Berkeley, but it’s still a great song and well worth hearing. Then Blake Shelton came out and did a song called “God’s Country” — once again I marvel at how this man has been able to get two singer-songwriters of far more charisma and talent, Miranda Lambert and Gwen Stefani, to fall in love with him, but “God’s Country” was a sincere, heartfelt paean to the land and God’s dominion over it that struck me as more powerful than anything I’ve heard Shelton do before.

After that was a nice song by Old Dominion called “Make It Sweet” — I still get chills at the number of country acts, including this one and Lady Antebellum, whose names pay tribute to the pre-Civil War South (when I first heard of Lady Antebellum I rather nastily joked, “What are they going to call their album — Slavery Was Cool?”), but this was a good if not especially impressive song. Then there was a tribute to the origins of Brooks and Dunn, with Luke Combs joining them on one of their early hits, “Brand New Man” (the backdrop for their song contained a sign reading, “Est. 1990,” as if they were a whiskey brand), following which Keith Urban did a nice song called “Burden” — as in “let me help you bear yours” — and then one of the most powerful songs of the night, a duet between Eric Church and Ashley McBryde called “Rattlesnake and Copperhead” that made its effect despite the giant-sized projections, models or whatever of the two titular snakes that moved across the stage mechanically as they sang.

Then came a song called “Rival” by a new group called Lenco (I think I’m getting that right) and an O.K. number by Carrie Underwood called “Southbound” (because of their song-contest backgrounds I keep getting her and Kelly Clarkson confused, but I shouldn’t — Clarkson has real soul while Underwood is pretty much just a pop singer). Then came Kane Brown, a Black balladeer who at the start of his song sounded strikingly like Tracy Chapman, joined with the heavy-set (and not particularly country-identified) Khalid for a medley of “I Just Want to Be as Good as You” (which Brown sang solo) and “I Know What Your Parents Don’t” (the duet).

After that it was the turn of the show’s host, Reba McIntire (an infectious personality), to perform a song called “Freedom” from a new album called Stronger Than the Truth — the title makes it sound like a documentary about Donald Trump but I liked the song itself, an ode to both freedom and love, and McIntire’s no-holds-barred delivery of it. Then came a three-song performance by Jason Aldean — who in the “awards” portion of this nominal awards show was awarded the Dick Clark Award as Entertainer of the Decade — of “When the Lights Come On,” “Don’t You Want to Stay?” (for which Kelly Clarkson returned to sing a duet vocal and raised the emotional temperature considerably) and “Living Life in the Headlights.”

The next number was the highly zaftig actress Chrissy Metz from the cast of a TV show I’ve never seen, This Is Us, joined by four female country singers (including the quite interesting duo Maddie  & Tae, whom it would be worth seeking out to hear what they can do on their own), on a song called “I’m Sticking with You.” The last three songs were “Run,” an old hit by George Strait on which he duetted with Miranda Lambert; “Travelin’ Light” by Dierks Bentley and Brandi Carlile (I wish Carlile had been allowed to perform a song on her own, though this one — while hardly a patch on the similarly titled “Trav’lin’ Light” by Trummy Young, Jimmy Mundy and Johnny Mercer, a 1942 hit for Billie Holiday with Paul Whiteman, of all people — is still quite a good country lament), and the closer, Strait belting out a good-time ode to country’s past called “Every Little Honky-Tonk Bar” but, alas, only getting to do about half of it (and that over the closing credits!) before the time slot ran out and CBS pulled the plug.

I quite liked the music on the American Country Music Awards — maybe it’s just a function of my age, but modern-day country seems to deal with adult emotions and issues and speaks to me a lot more than the pajama-clad diva-ettes that clog up the mainstream pop charts today!

My Killer Client (Reel One Entertainment, Cartel Pictures, Lifetime, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime movie was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen on the network, partly because it dealt with the world of fashion (which I find profoundly uninteresting — just where does anybody actually wear the preposterously ugly clothes frequently exhibited at haute couture fashion shows?) and partly because it was so by-the-numbers an example of the Lifetime formula it failed to bring anything new to it, the way Lifetime practitioners like writer Christine Conradt and director Vanessa Parise have done in previous productions for the network. This film was shown under the title My Killer Client, though according to imdb.com it was shot under the more evocative name Killer in a Red Dress, and it was directed by Lisa France (not a credit that will help the cause of women directors any) from a script ostensibly “written” by Shanrah Wakefield but really just compiled from Lifetime clichés. The film opens with a scene set outside a high school that’s getting ready for its prom — though the scene takes place in broad daylight — and we see, at least from the waist down, a woman in a ghastly red dress approaching a group of high-school kids waiting for their prom to begin. The woman in the ghastly red dress is Kitty Niven (Emmy James) and she’s there to confront Jake Walsh (Jacob Osborne), her former boyfriend whom she’s still in love with even though he dumped her because he thought she was crazy. The confrontation between them gets so angry that Jake ends up trying to strangle Kitty and her life is saved only when his friends pull him off her. Cut.

Then the scene jumps forward several years (without Lifetime’s usual chyron to tell us how many years) and introduces the central character, Christa (Tammin Sursok, the sort of name that in classic Hollywood got changed — as I’ve pointed out in these pages before, no one at MGM in 1939 would have thought there was an audience for “The Wizard of Oz, starring Frances Gumm”). Christa is a personal shopper and free-lance fashion consultant, though she does so much hanging-out at a preposterous high-end store called “Frocks & Rocks” — an indication that they sell both clothes and jewelry — at first I got the impression that she worked there. The main reasons she hangs out there are the place’s owner, Lindsay (Donna Feldman, who stands out if only because she’s playing just about the only character we actually like), is her best friend and it’s a good location for her to meet potential personal-shopping clients. Christa is also living with an older (and, I thought, considerably hunkier) Jake Walsh than the one we met in the prologue — he’s played by a different actor, Greg Perrow, who aside from his hair having gone grey earlier is hard to identify as an older version of the same person as Jacob Osborne is he’s a head taller and considerably more butch. (He’s hot enough I welcomed the scene in which he and Christa go swimming in their pool and we got to see him in swim trunks and nothing else — yum!).

Then Kitty Niven, now calling herself “Kat Niven” and, like Jake, played by a different actor, Allison Paige, re-enters the action, showing up at Frocks & Rocks and hiring Christa to make her look stylish. Christa and Jake are living together and engaged to be married — indeed, they’re planning their wedding and Lindsay is helping them — and it’s only about one-third of the way through the movie that writer Wakefield and director France finally let us know that the “Kat” and “Jake” we’re seeing now are the older incarnations of the people who confronted each other so bitterly in the prologue. The film goes through an embarrassingly boring series of confrontations and scenes in which Christa is first lulled into a growing friendship with Kat (just when we’re beginning to wonder how Kat can afford to buy all the stuff Christa is picking up for her, we’re told that she’s the heiress of a fabulously wealthy and influential man named Aaron, though where his fortune came from remains a mystery), though that doesn’t stop her from shoplifting a pair of earrings from Frocks & Rocks just because she can. Lindsay, Frocks & Rocks’ owner (remember?), goes to Kat’s home (how does she know where it is?) to confront her and get the merchandise back; she stumbles on the truth about her — including her incarceration in a mental institution after that killer prom date — but ends up playing the Lifetime formula role of Heroine’s Best Friend Who Discovers the Villainess’s Plot but Gets Killed for Her Pains.

Much of the action centers around a hot-looking red dress which Christa had made for herself and insists is the only one of its kind in the world (and for the straight guys in the audience it sure does a good job of showing off Tammin Sursok’s tits) and which Kat wants as part of her bizarre plot to take over from Christa in Jake’s life and win his love at long last. Kat tricks a rather clueless salesgirl at Frocks & Rocks into giving her the red dress by passing herself off as Christa — one aggravating factor about this movie is Tammin Sursok and Allison Paige look so much alike it’s not always easy to tell which is which, but this scene indicates that was a deliberate choice of the filmmakers since this plot point depends on the two women looking sufficiently similar one could easily impersonate the other — and she plans to make a grand appearance at a fashion show being given by Jake’s parents at a venue Kat has donated as a benefit for a charity she’s started to help the mentally ill. Only before the event she decides to eliminate a few loose ends by going to Frocks & Rocks and shooting Christa there — she also intends to dump Lindsay’s body there (we’re supposed to believe she’s been carting it around with her for two days?) and fake the scene to make it look like both were killed by burglars whom they caught breaking into the shop. Kat duly shoots Christa, but Christa is merely wounded, not killed, and preposterously she’s able to make it to the fashion show and rescue Jake just as Kat, realizing at long last Jake will never love her, plans to kill him instead. Christa is taken into custody, and fortunately Wakefield did not put in one of the annoying epilogues they’ve become prone to of late in which the psycho bitch bides her time in a mental institution and plots her revenge. That’s about all the positive stuff I can say about this ridiculous movie, which even for Lifetime manages to reach a level of demented silliness unredeemed by any hint of a depiction of how real people behave.

Jesus: His Life, episode 2 (Nutopia, Joel Osteen Ministries, History Channel, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched the second of four parts of a sometimes compelling, sometimes maddening mini-series on the History Channel called Jesus: His Life. As I noted last week when I watched the first episode — or, rather, two episodes, since the series is structured in such a way that each two-hour episode can be further divided into two one-hour episodes for later reruns — it’s neither a documentary nor a dramatization of the life of Jesus but a weird (though rather common for the History Channel) mix of both. Oddly, imdb.com identifies the actors who portray the Biblical characters but only a handful of the religious authorities who appear as talking heads (and reflect a wide variety of ecumenical viewpoints — something of a surprise given that the show’s overall producer is evangelical TV minister Joel Osteen — even though there’s no room for doubt here that the Virgin Birth, the miracles and the Resurrection are actual historical events that occurred just as the Gospels describe them). The two parts shown last night include a narrative of the beginnings of Jesus’s ministry narrated by his mother Mary (Houda Echaoufni — I’m presuming she’s Moroccan, since that’s where the film was shot) and an account of the raising of Lazarus narrated by, of all people, the Jewish high priest Caiaphas (Gerald Kyd). One thing I’ll give the creators of Jesus: His Life credit for is that when they said in their opening narration that “for the first time, the life of Jesus is told in the words of the people who knew him best” (even though, as I joked in my comments on the last show, I thought that’s what Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were doing!) they were going to include accounts from the story’s traditional villains (Caiaphas, Pilate, Judas) as well as its heroes.

The segment dealing with Mary makes it clear that Jesus grew up with siblings, Simon, Judah and two others whose names I can’t recall, though various Christian traditions disagree about who those people were. Roman Catholics believe they were Joseph’s children by an earlier marriage — which would have made them older than Jesus — while Protestants, as one of the talking heads put it, “have no problem” with the idea that Joseph and Mary went on to have children in the normal human fashion after the miraculous birth of Jesus from her virgin’s womb. (I inevitably joked, “That’s because Protestants have no problem with their priests having sex.”) It also portrays Jesus’s family (Joseph disappears from the later accounts of Jesus’s home life in Nazareth and the presumption is he died and left Mary a widow) as highly skeptical of his mission and in particular concerned that he would bring down the wrath of the Roman occupiers on them and get them all killed. The show goes into the history of previous Jewish attempts to rebel against Rome and how viciously the Romans suppressed them — in one case they not only slaughtered the rebels but crucified 2,000 Jews and left them on their crosses on the road leading into Jerusalem just to make sure the Jews got the message of what would happen to them if they ever tried to rebel again — in ways future dictators not only could have but probably did learn from. (Remember that Benito Mussolini, who founded fascism and coined the term from the fasces, an ancient Roman symbol of power, regarded his regime as the second coming of the Roman Empire.) Jesus: His Life makes clear that, even though Jesus disclaimed any challenge to the political orthodoxy of the time (which is what the “Render unto Caesar … ” lines were about), the Romans would still have considered him a threat because by running around Palestine healing lepers, making blind people see and ultimately raising Lazarus from the dead, he was going to inspire Jewish resistance to Rome whether that was his intent or not.

The Caiaphas episode makes clear that Caiaphas was performing a delicate balancing act, trying to keep his people safe from Roman oppression and to safeguard the assets of the Temple from Roman taxation. Like just about anyone who takes on the Jesus story today, the producers of this one have to deal with the anti-Semitic aspects of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s arrest and crucifixion — the ones on which were based the long-standing accusation that “the Jews killed Christ,” which in turn inspired all manner of anti-Jewish laws and pogroms throughout Europe in the Middle Ages and on through the 19^th century. Anyone who tries to retell the story of Jesus today has to deal with the propagandistic aspects of the Gospels and find some way to reconcile the New Testament accounts with the recent historical scholarship that places more of the blame for Jesus’s fate on the Romans than the Jews and the inevitable accusations of anti-Semitism on one side and whitewashing on the other if they don’t get the balance just right. Certainly Caiaphas comes off here as a more sympathetic figure than he usually does — something like the Claude Rains character in Casablanca; he could easily have said, “I blow with the wind, and right now the wind blows from Rome.” The documentary portions of this film come off a good deal better than the dramatized ones: the acting is O.K. (though poor Greg Barnett, playing Jesus with mid-length hair instead of the hippie-ish long locks most movie and TV Jesuses have worn, is absolutely hopeless at convincing us he’s really performing miracles), the writing is poor to middling — as usual in Jesus scripts, actual Biblical lines sit uneasily alongside screenwriters’ inept concoctions — and it still jars me to hear the “up-to-date” version of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our father in Heaven, hallowed be your name/Your kingdom come,  your will be done … ”