20.01.15 Blog326 From Selma, Alabama, to Barack Obama The Oscar Academy’s snub of the pseudo-bio-historical drama depicting the seminal march in Selma, Alabama, 1965, for the right to vote, the franchise that is, compelled me to do what I ordinarily would not, watch a film outside the cabin of an airplane where, cooped, I have no other diversion with which to kill time. Right off I need to pardon the Award panel from not nominating the actors who were constrained by the roles they played in portraying civil rights figures, once vilified by the white majority in Dixie, now sanctified, whatever their individual foibles and errors in the noble attempt to create African-American heroes worthy, at least one, martyred Martin Luther King Jr, of a federally decreed public holiday. As a buff of that episode which culminated in President Lyndon B. Johnson forcing through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, I pardon nevertheless the inaccuracies just so to propel along the narrative and enlighten especially the young, many of whom had but the vaguest knowledge of what happened last week let along half a century ago. Dare anyone say King had to be among the most complex personalities belied by the panegyrics which sprang up after his murder in Memphis while trying to organize striking the sanitation workers and, after that, a poor man campaign that would end at the steps of the National Monument so to illustrate the plight of the indigents and indignant regardless of race, ethnicity, age or gender. King of course had long envisaged his own violent end as ironic as it was and a mirror to the assassination of his pacifist model, Mahatma Gandhi, slain by a Muslim zealot. I do not want, ever, to blaspheme Saint Martin but the truth about him must be aired as he would have wished it. While, yes, the protests in Selma, as had those in Birmingham, Montgomery, Greensboro, had etched their images into the American public consciences and galvanized generations to a cause, King, the inspired orator and Nobel laureate, was not the leader in many of these struggles. Nor was he, as the film has alluded, a paragon of virtue, not only with his philandering but, far worse, his compromises along the way that his admirers say still today were manifestations of his pragmatic side so as to sway the powers of the land, arch among them being LBJ, a racist from Texas who gauged correctly how he could make political capital – and a legacy – by siding with the progressives and liberals, even if only to convince them that, the Vietnam War aside, he was the true heir to the JFK mantle in any least one aspect. More than JFK, LBJ was the consummate political hack. What Selma fails to achieve is to narrate more cogently the events that led to the pursuit for the vote and an end to the Jim Crow law to enforce segregation, a work of scrutiny better done if left to documentarists without resort to the tedious acting out of a story that rightly should already be enshrined in American lore for everyone to recite. The drama, as it is, distracts rather than accentuates the tale in the perfecting of the Union to which Barack Obama had cited almost seven years ago when his presidential quest faltered. As a footnote must have it, Obama had lied about his father having participated in the Selma uprising but then he is hardly the one and only black leader to steal the thunder from those who risked their lives and limbs for the right to vote upon which they then come along to reap the benefits. Ava DuVernay, the director, is disingenuous if not deceitful not to provide a disclaimer to the production to say her film is meant to be a dramatization, a fable, than a telling in full of a story in all its nuances. Nor has she explained why – for political expedience? – she has excised Jesse Jackson from the narrative, even though, aged 24, the future minister had gone to Alabama from his native South Carolina to lay his body down at the side of King, whom he later aspired in vain to succeed. Nor does the film discuss the dynamics, the rivalry indeed, between King and Malcolm X who, the latter, by 1965 had well been ousted from the Nation of Black Muslims and had a change of heart about the “white devil” for which he would pay with his life – perhaps with a hand from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI, of the ever so vile J. Edgar Hoover. King merits now not any more tributes, tedious and tiresome as these have become upon constant repetition of hosannas, but a film that would unravel the plot to murder him by sniper fire at the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel that was ascribed to the patsy James Earl Ray whom the widow Coretta had interviewed and excused, knowing the framed man’s innocence. By probing into the darkest recesses of power – how it is wielded and abused – such a documentary would truly reveal the true character of a nation, supposedly principled, corrupted by a cabal to which King and his ilk were bane. Rather than plunge into the abyss, Selma the movie does no more than rehash the legend and render bland the paramount civil rights leader without whose loss, as tragic and as unresolved as it was, the Obama presidency would not have happened in 2009. I enclose here an eerily prophetic sermon by King practically at the eve of his destruction while endeavoring to save the soul of the country he loved, loved so much that he could not but condemn its wickedness which he had striven to divest so that it would begin to heal itself; convalescence not yet complete.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 05:32:51 +0000
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