End of Slavery

June 19, 1865 is the last day of institutional slavery in the United States and a day worth celebrating. The 21st century reckoning with that past is as important to recognize as it is to mark the historical event. White supremacy is an integral part of the history of the United States from the very beginning. All but two US Presidents who were adults prior to the Civil War owned slaves. The White House, the home of the President, the highest office in the land, was built by enslaved people. I know all this, and yet I was still niave enough to think that we had come a long way. That was before I did a deep dive into Balzac's The Human Comedy, where man is stripped down to the basest and most common of desires, and religion is an instrument of the rich and powerful. We are indeed doomed to repeat our mistakes unless we are loud and clear that this is indeed who we were and who we will continue to be unless we do an about face.

Da Five Bloods (2020)

Wow, this is a difficult movie to watch. On some level it starts out as a love letter to a fallen comrade, and an attempt to recapture a youth lost as soldiers in Vietnam. On another level it is about greed and the power of money in general and gold in particular to corrupt. It is a combination of Apocalypse Now and The Treasure of Sierra Madre, so close that there are deliberate references and imagery from both movies. Then there is the irony that these black American soldiers were fighting for something that they themselves did not have in their home country--freedoms that they lacked because of the color of their skin. The other irony that we can see much better from the distance of years is that we were of course fighting on the wrong side all along, that the protection of the colonialist French who exploited the country and it's workers had far less to offer the people of Vietnam than the brutal colonialists, and in the end we just left, providing little in the way of an exit strategy for those who supported the South Vietnam war effort. All of this sounds complicated and it is, but in the hands of Spike Lee we are guided through it. He even manages to bring in the current civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter, and weaves that deftly into the take home message. The story is that a band of five black soldiers, led by Norman (Chadwick Boseman, in his last role), leaned upon each other to survive. Norman is killed in action, at the sight of a helicopter crash where they find a trunk full of gold. They bury both the gold and Norman with the intention of coming back some day to retrieve them both. That is the mission they embark on, and it turns out about as well as you would guess. Very powerful, a 1/2 hour too long, and do not skip over it. Lee always has something worth listening to to say.