SINCE SKEPTICISM HAS BEEN RAISED that the comment yesterday's post on the actual evil that has come from the movies and show biz and the media, in general was based on was made. I have temporarily posted it on the post it was made on, here. The ban on Simp's comments was one I put into place for my own edification and because he mocked my father, it is one I can relax if I think it is necessary to make a point worth making. So, since yesterday's post established the inspiration of the movie Birth of a Nation, I'll expand on the topic of that post commented on and the connection between the media depiction of police influencing the criminals who do their crime while being cops and members of the terrorist gang, the KKK.
William J. Simmons, a former minister and promoter of fraternal societies, founded the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia in 1915. His organization grew slowly, but by the 1920s, Simmons began coordinating with a public relations firm, in part to chip away at the (accurate) perception that the Klan was an outlaw group involved in extralegal violence. Membership in the Klan exploded over the next few years. As part of this PR campaign, Simmons gave an interview to the Atlanta Journal newspaper in January 1921. While explicitly advocating white supremacy, Simmons played up his group’s commitment to law and order, promoted their enforcement of Prohibition, and even boasted of his own police credentials. He claimed members at every level of law enforcement belonged to his organization, and that the local sheriff was often one of the first to join when the Klan came to a town. Ominously, Simmons declared that “[t]he sheriff of Fulton County knows where he can get 200 members of the Klan at a moment’s call to suppress anything in the way of lawlessness.”
Across the country, the Ku Klux Klan sometimes claimed it was protecting the public when the police could not. However, its leaders also often sought to legitimize the organization by working in cooperation with police—a strategy that has echoes in the Watchmen series. Writing on the early 1900s revival of the Klan, historian Linda Gordon recounts numerous collaborations between police and the Klan in the 1920s. In Portland, Oregon, the Klan formally allied itself with the police department, and city’s mayor augmented the 150-man police force with a vigilante auxiliary selected by the Klan, giving them police powers and guns but keeping their names secret. In Anaheim, California, the Klan-dominated city council allowed police officers who held membership to patrol in full Ku Klux Klan regalia. And in Indiana, the Klan exploited a decades-old legal loophole to gain a legitimacy that only a badge could bring.
And that relationship certainly didn't end in the 1920s, the problem of KKK infiltration of police departments and forces has been an ongoing problem well into the period when sound came to the movies and when it was Clint Eastwood, Hollywood "liberal" Don Siegel and a handful of writers, including the uncredited self-proclaimed "Zen-fascist" John Milius were giving criminal cops new role models whose lines filled the mouth of our first Hollywood president, Ronald Reagan. Hollywood has promoted racism and fascism and violence, presenting them as sexy, especially when they can put some improbably buff looking guy in a tight fitting outfit and give him a badge and a gun. And as they do exactly what I pointed out they deny they have the power to do, to influence behavior. My point didn't rest solely on any one movie or TV show, though Dirty Harry certainly had an influence on many more movies and TV shows and in other crap kulcha.
Pauline Kael, a much better film critic than the sainted Roger Ebert did a far more insightful review of the first Dirty Harry movie, including the motives of those who made the thing and the incredible level of manipulation of the audience they achieved. I've read others who note that the racism of the Dirty Harry movies, as well as its misogyny were more evident in later films. I know I watched the original and one other - I've always had a very low tolerance for Clint - and it all sort of melds together in memory. So I wasn't the only one who noticed the manipulation of the audience. She more or less points to the behavior that the producers, writers and actors wanted the most to influence, their decision to buy tickets and see more of it, thus the Hollywood addiction to sequels. I'm a lot more interested in the behavior of the police who see it more than once and its sequels and the myriad of other movie and TV copy cat shows.
People love their stories, they love to be titillated by sexy men and women on the screen, they love excitement and violence put into a form where they can pretend that it's all an expression of virtue. That's been show-biz forever, the movies even more so, probably most of all with one of those technical achievments credited to D. W. Griffeth in Birth of a Nation, the close up. They just hate it when someone like me points out that there are real consequences suffered by real people in the process of that manipulation, especially those whose targeting and stereotyping can be counted on to be popular with the larger customer base for show biz. That's been show-biz forever too. We live in a world where people don't go to the movies once a week or the theater once a month, we live in a world where show biz, Hollywood, scumbag cabloid hate mongers fill the time and so minds of a large majority of people. Pretending that the most manipulative media ever invented is blameless of the effects it has on its audience, on their behavior, is one of the most dangerous and stupid superstitions of alleged liberalism in the 20th century. Those who "liberals" especially secular "liberals" claim to champion are among the most frequent victims of the media whose freedom to promote fascist, racist violence they also value. It's clear that secular "liberalism" values the media's right to promote fascist, racist violence more than it does the lives of Black People and others who are going to take the most of that violence. Certainly women, even white women are the ones who experience that, too. The levels of violence against women is and always has been at an epidemic level.
Update: I had a minute so I looked it up, the other Dirty Harry movie I watched was The Enforcer, the only reason I could is because Tyne Daly was in it. If she hadn't been in it I don't think I could have picked it out. Actors have to be in a lot of crap, one of the reasons I'm glad I never tried to be one.
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