A Trinity of Social Injustice

I don’t often go the cinema.  Perhaps it is that I am cheap.  Or that I am affronted by the whiff of popcorned butter.  Or the assault of the shockwaves of sound.  Most likely, it is that there is nothing there to see.

Except when there is.

A trinity of social injustice playing at the little hometown cinemaplex.  

My knowledge of history is fragmented, skewed, and somewhat detached from actual reality.  For that reason alone, I hate learning history in the movies where some director has taken license to recreate some supposed truth . . . if there ever was a truth to be known that was recorded by the poor and the losers.  

“Lincoln” was powerful and griping.  At first, I didn’t know all the principle characters.  I didn’t know my history.  My ignorance was my hobble.  I could not appreciate the intricacies.  I had to come home to read.  I will return to watch again.  It was frightening to see up close, in my face, the politics of the 13th Amendment.  How it nearly failed.  Who the champions for “ney’ and “aye” were.  And the reason why.  To watch the wheelbarrows of severed limbs dumped into the lime pit behind the soldier’s hospital in the Nation’s Capitol.  To look for Walt Whitman, and not see him, reading to, comforting, holding a broken soldier dying from trying to free a slave.  To watch the lobbyists bribe, cajole, threaten, plead with the lame duck Democrats to cast a vote to violate their allegiance to their slave-master God.  To wonder whatever has happened to the Party of Lincoln for it to become The Party of Hate, the Republicans of today, and likewise the promulgators of hateful bigotry of the Democrats of then into the Party of Equality for all today.  Sobering, gut-wrenching.  Humbling.  Leaving me to ask how and why did it take so long, before and after and still yet, racism camouflaged by the politically correct.  The forces to suppress equality seem to have the intensity of infinity.

The next day was “Django Unchained”.  I did not know what to expect.  Other than the ubiquitous injection of the “N” word.  The story line pre-dated the Civil War by a few years.  The story was told by a freed slave, in search of his still-in-bondage wife, and the horrific violence that ensued.  Yes, there was the gentry.  With their house niggers and their field niggers, and their niggers for fighting sport.  And the niggers who sucked the asses of that gentry and white trash holding their Bibles and beating run-away niggers.  A story of social strata formed on ignorance and bigotry and religion and hate.

Today was “Les Miserables”.  The film version of a musical with a story encased in rhyme and rhythm, the love and despair, the plight of the miserables at the fringes of the  aristocracy.  I was overwhelmed with the feeling I was watching “Occupy Wall Street”.  After reading recent accounts of the FBI investigation of OWS as a subversive terrorist threat, after learning how complacent the FBI was with the major financial institutions to protect them, after seeing these confirmations of the blatantly coordinated and brutal suppression attacks on peaceful demonstrators, and realizing the about-to-be reality of a contemporary “Les Miserables” because of the intrenched ideology of a renegade Tea Party Nation, I felt sickened.  The lady behind me was crying.  As I bought my ticket, the patrons were all old, all buying senior tickets to “Les Miz”.  Perhaps the young don’t want to know.

Three stories of social justice.  Or rather the evil of social injustice.  In each case, a rationale based on ignorance and bigotry.  Rationales reinforced by religious beliefs held with filial allegiance.  

Three stories told to people of today for entertainment.  As if today was separated from all yesterdays.  

Yet today, those Tea Party Republicans spawned by the Democrats of yore, will bring down the United States Government to spite the “liberated slave in generations to come” that now holds the office that Lincoln held.

What will I learn from this repeat of history.

Perhaps not to go back to the cinema.