Dispatches From the Culture Wars – Casting Couch edition

Stonewall whitewash?; Hollywood Arabesque; What the kids will learn; The Donald trumps all; Nazi-onal Review

portside
Printer friendly  
At the Stonewall Inn 1969,Fred W. McDarrah / Getty Images


Gay rights activist Larry Kramer shames boycotters of new ‘Stonewall’ movie

By Soraya Nadia McDonald
August 9, 2015
Washington Post

Prominent gay rights activist and “The Normal Heart” playwright Larry Kramer has responded to the controversy over the new movie “Stonewall.”
People across the Internet erupted over the erasure of queer women of color from key roles in the Stonewall riots. One scene in particular, in which Jeremy Irvine’s character, Danny Winters, is seen throwing a brick that sets off the evening’s events, drew the brunt of the backlash. Stormé DeLarverie, a butch lesbian who died last year, is credited by some with throwing the first punch. Others wondered why the film wouldn’t center on Marsha P. Johnson, a black transwoman who co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) with activist Sylvia Rivera.
In a comment about a Facebook post by “Stonewall” director Roland Emmerich, Kramer, 80, advised Emmerich not to pay attention to “crazies” who are boycotting the film on the grounds that it whitewashes history.


You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4

By Jon Ronson
July 26, 2015
GQ

You've heard of actors getting typecast. But there is no group more slighted, more narrowly cast, than the Muslim-American actors who earn virtually their entire livings pretending to hijack planes and slaughter infidels. Jon Ronson embarks on a soul-searching odyssey with the bad guys of Homeland, American Sniper, 24, and every other TV show and movie in which the holy warriors get mowed down before they even get to finish one good “Allahu Akbar!”
 

AP History Caves To Conservatives, Will Downplay Slavery And Focus On ‘American Exceptionalism’

By Jameson Parker
July 29, 2015
Addicting Info

If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary.

(One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.)

After recent educator-led efforts to teach more history in history class, many conservatives went into something of an unchecked rage. Long simmering with the right, things boiled over when the College Board, a non-profit group that creates the standardized “AP History” tests students take in school, encouraged teachers to discuss American history warts-and-all. Things like the American institution of slavery, the reasons the South fought in the Civil War, and the government’s ugly treatment of Native Americans, were said to make students “hate” America.
The furor reached such a point that several states – Oklahoma, Georgia, and Texas – introduced bills that would kill any course that taught students using the new framework. In a very real way, the debate wasn’t just about the AP exams, but about how America should deal with its checkered history – with clear eyes or rose-tinted glasses.
Unfortunately, it appears that the conservatives won the day. The overblown rhetoric from Ben Carson and company has apparently gotten to the organization, because they have recently announced – effective immediately – that this year’s framework will focus less on things like slavery and the plight of Native Americans and more on “American exceptionalism.”


Donald Trump, Affect, and the Conservative Mind

By Jonathan Chait
August 4, 2015
New York

Cruz has the knack for self-destructive political theater, competitive Reagan idolatry, and purer-than-pure factional infighting. But Trump has outdone him not just in celebrity appeal, but in calculated offensiveness. Trump’s crude denunciation of Mexican immigrants as criminals made him the symbol of Republican nativism in the Latino community, yet this only enhanced his appeal. The most staggering indicator of his success to date is not that he has maintained his polling lead. It is that opposition among Republican voters has actually decreased.

National Review's Bad Conscience

By Jeet Heer
July 29,2015
New Republic

National Review has a fraught relationship with National Socialism. In recent years, the magazine has taken to likening liberals and socialists to fascists and Nazis. In a much-derided article published last week, correspondent Kevin Williamson claimed that Senator Bernie Sanders is leading “a national-socialist movement, which is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was largely wiped out in the Holocaust.” Later in the article, Williamson added that Sanders is not a “national socialist in the mode of Alfred Rosenberg or Julius Streicher,” but this proviso couldn’t undo the implication that Sanders and his supporters are modern day Hitlerites.
While self-evidently absurd as a line of argument, the Williamson/Goldberg thesis is a fine example of projection, especially interesting because of their magazine’s long history of both publishing pro-fascist arguments and also resenting any accusations of being pro-Nazi. As the new documentary The Best of Enemies reminds us, the relationship between National Review and Nazism was once the stuff of national television drama in a notorious debate between Gore Vidal and National Review founder William F. Buckley.