It's a great country where white and black people sit in a movie theater on a Saturday night and behold silently together Spike Lee's uncomfortable new film.
The movie is about the scourge of racism that, from slavery to Charlottesville, has rendered a great nation not great at all.
So, which is it: Are we a great country or aren't we?
It might be instructive to quote Bruce Springsteen, a rock-based American troubadour descended in some ways from Woody Guthrie. He says he tries in his lyrics to explore the gap between the American dream and the American reality.
It's a great country that acknowledges that gap and ventures into it. It's a great country that tries to bridge that gap with the election of a black president. It's a far-from-great country that then systematically tries to whitewash that presidency and go backward with the very next president.
Barack Obama got asked early in 2016 if Donald Trump's insurgent candidacy besmirched his legacy. He said to ask him after the election if Trump won, which he didn't think would happen. I don't know that anybody ever asked the follow-up. I don't know that anyone needed to ask.
Lee's film, called BlacKkKlansman, helps make America great by showing us that America has been, and can still be, sometimes evil--in this case through a still-active Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s and a police department that eventually disbands a crime-stopping undercover investigation into it.
Lee opens the film with the railyard battlefield scene from Gone with the Wind. He closes with the car-crash scene from the real-life newsreel of 2017 in Charlottesville.
He also juxtaposes these scenes: An opening segment with Alec Baldwin portraying a 1950s vintage racist delivering an all-too-familiar diatribe about the "mongrelizing" of America, and a closing segment with a real-life news clip of Trump saying there were good and bad people on both sides in Charlottesville.
Lee is saying it's all the same--cinema and news clips; Atlanta's carnage in Gone with the Wind and Charlottesville's plowed-down young woman in 2017; the caricature of Trump that Baldwin portrays on Saturday Night Live and Trump for real declining to say, of Charlottesville, the first and essential thing that any decent American should have said--that racial hate is an intolerable affront to what America stands for, far worse than any counterprotesters, and must be drowned out whenever and wherever it is chanted.
Little Rock in 1957 makes a brief and deserved early appearance in the film. And Little Rock is where, hours later, on Sunday afternoon, an unassailable 50-year hero of the ever-arduous American civil rights struggle came to grace Philander Smith College.
U.S. Rep. John Lewis, beaten to a skull fracture in Selma and now beleaguered in Congress as he strives for social justice amid Trumpian regression, spoke at the small historically black college.
I was told that Lewis would engage in an "intimate session" with students. But the event instead was a large gathering of Little Rock liberals and Democrats in a too-small room. The event mostly was a rally for the congressional candidacy of Clarke Tucker.
I initially took offense that a student event had been overpowered by politics. My first instinct is to value a rare opportunity for college students more than I value a political event.
But then I realized that Lewis knew that the best way to begin to re-bridge the gap between America's conceptual greatness and practical failing is for the current president and his enablers to be gone from office.
Lewis' message was that it's high time to "make trouble, good trouble" because "it's our responsibility to fight," by which he meant go out and win some elections.
Tucker told the crowd the story of the South Carolina man who had joined in beating Lewis in the '60s and who, decades later, took his son with him as he sought out Lewis to tell him he was sorry. Lewis listened to the man, forgave him and embraced him, and the men wept.
That's progress. It's evolution. It's healing.
It's reaching from the depth of evil toward greatness.
Spike Lee is saying it's too isolated an event and one from which we've retreated. He is saying today's American movie is a rerun of the same old American movie. He is saying only the names have changed.
John Lewis came to Little Rock to say we can change those names for the better locally and one at a time, beginning with a congressional race in November.
So, then, to summarize: It's a great country that can give you a Spike Lee movie Saturday night about the country's lack of greatness and a John Lewis speech Sunday afternoon on ever-waging the hard struggle for our ideal.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 08/21/2018