Friday, October 17, 2003

Shouldn't Be Off the Hook

You know, this Easterbrook thing is really pissing me off. We have people like Eric Alterman and Jonathan Alter giving their "I know him and he's a delightful chap" nonsense. Every seems to be bowled over by how sorry, so truly truly sorry, Easterbook is. He feels real bad! He says it himself! So so sorry I mangled my words and therefore you misunderstood my intentions!

I'm ready to defend all the thoughts in that paragraph. But how could I have done such a poor job of expressing them? Maybe this is an object lesson in the new blog reality. I worked on this alone and posted the piece--what you see above comes at the end of a 1,017-word column that's otherwise about why movies should not glorify violence. Twenty minutes after I pressed "send," the entire world had read it. When I reread my own words and beheld how I'd written things that could be misunderstood, I felt awful. To anyone who was offended I offer my apology, because offense was not my intent. But it was 20 minutes later, and already the whole world had seen it.
Looking back I did a terrible job through poor wording. It was terrible that I implied that the Jewishness of studio executives has anything whatsoever to do with awful movies like Kill Bill. Nothing about Eisner or Weinstein causes any movie to be bad or awful; they're just supervisors. For all I know neither of them even focused on the adoration-of-violence aspect until the reviews came out. My attempt to connect my perfectly justified horror at an ugly and corrupting movie to the religious faith and ethnic identity of certain executives was hopelessly clumsy.

Where I failed most is in the two sentences about adoration of money. I noted that many Christian executives adore money above all else, and in the 20-minute reality of blog composition, that seemed to me, writing it, fairness and fair spreading of blame. But accusing a Christian of adoring money above all else does not engage any history of ugly stereotypes. Accuse a Jewish person of this and you invoke a thousand years of stereotypes about that which Jews have specific historical reasons to fear. What I wrote here was simply wrong, and for being wrong, I apologize.


I can't believe that no one has sat poor Gregg down and explained to him that he is completely ignoring the real problem with what he wrote. Weinstein and Eisner are ethnically Jewish. They may or may not be observant Jews. They may or may not be devout believers. They may or may not believe that their religion, if they actually have one, should require them to not promote violence in the fashion Easterbrook believes they are. In short, based simply on nothing more than the ethnicity of their parents and grandparents, who themselves may or may not have been religiously observant, Easterbrook stated that these men should be held to some higher ethical standard of his own imagining.

This is one of the core issues of "identity politics" - that members of some racial/ethnic minorities are never able to escape the identity that society has imposed on them, regardless of how they choose to live their lives and who they choose to associate with. Easterbrook is pretending that his only sins were to sloppily include the coded accusation of money worship, and because he implied the Jewishness was responsible for movies he doesn't like, which he didn't even do.

His apology isn't an apology for his actual transgression - it's either a deflection or evidence that he doesn't have a clue. This non-apology is compounded by his ridiculous claim that he did the "same thing" to Mel Gibson. Here's what he said about Gibson:

THE TEST OF SINCERITY IS WHETHER THERE WILL BE THE PASSION LICENSED MERCHANDISE IN STORES FOR CHRISTMAS: Much of Mel Gibson's movie career has been that of an odious vulgarian. His Mad Max movies are an embarrassing paean to teen fantasies of violence and slaughter as fun; his Lethal Weapon movies depict criminals killing more often, and police killing far more often, than occurs in actual life. But maybe Jesus has changed Gibson. As a churchgoing Christian, I believe my redeemer Christ possesses transcendent power to enter any life and turn a thief or a murderer or a Hollywood vulgarian into a child of God. So perhaps Mel Gibson has been transformed, and his The Passion will not be a crass attempt to commercialize Jesus' death via exaggerated gore. Maybe The Passion will be a great film.

Not exactly the same thing. James Moran (rightly in my view) lost his leadership position over much much less.

By the way, the rest of the article on Gibson's film is such a deliberately selective portrayal of the controversy surrounding it, that one can only wonder what motivated it as well.

As for vulgarians - here's an example of what Easterbrook considers to be non-vulgar. I'm no prude, but we're playing by his rules not mine.

UPDATE: For some reason the ESPN link is no longer operative. Here's the google cache.