Playhouse 90’s A TOWN TURNED TO DUST aka Echoes of the current political landscape!

“We didn’t know he was guilty.

We strung him up, to satisfy the mood.”

 

“There’s the hunger for the niche.

I wanted to be somebody.

So I decided who the victim should be.

I pointed to an old man.

I led the mob.

I wanted to be somebody.”

— Playhouse 90 A TOWN HAS TURNED TO DUST

 

Those quotes from 1958, written by one of our great writers to highlight a mindset of ignorance and prejudice and lynchings, are oddly and shamefully relevant. Being that here 60 years later the current occupant of the white house stole into the office, on such rhetoric of hate and stupidity and intolerance.

Invaded the most powerful office in the world, swept in on the unreasoning bellows of the mob.

I love Amazon Prime for making available these forgotten and overlooked pieces of cultural and cinematic history.

 

Today I watched from the early days of television, PLAYHOUSE 90s A TOWN THAT TURNED TO DUST.

Directed masterfully by John Frankenheimer, written by Rod Serling, starring a stellar cast including Rod Steiger, William Shatner, Fay Spain,  Eugene Iglesias, Mario Alcade and James Gregory.

From 1958, when Jim Crow and Lynchings still infested large swaths of America, this live production is unfortunately again relevant in 2019, will always be relevant as long as there are masses who want to blame their lives on others rather than taking responsibility for their lives. And ready, these masses, to be led by the loudest voice of hate, rather than the more thoughtful voices of reason.

Watch it now courtesy of Amazon Prime (search for it under the title AN EVENING IN THE ZONE). This is a film that deserves to be owned on DVD/Blu-Ray. Deserves to always be readily available, and not at the mercy of ephemeral streaming  contracts and whims.

I would like to think if Americans were raised on films like 1936’s FURY by Fritz Lang and 1943’s THE OX BOW INCIDENT by William Wellman and this one by John Ftrankenheimer, if these films were required viewing, we would stop repeating the same mistakes and committing the same attrocities and empowering the same hate mongers. To the point where the occupancy of the White House would be different.

There is nothing sadder than history and mistakes not learned from.

Get it While You Can : Bill Cosby’s groundbreaking I-SPY TV series and previous post feedback!

Well my last post really got a lot of attention and mostly positive response.

From a lot of people who get it. And a few negative comments from some people who don’t.

One such comment:

“We need to stop letting abuse occur in our community. Black men are never held accountable when the victims are black women. It’s sick you’re suggesting that we support someone who openly abused women. No more.”

See that kind of response is what I’m talking about.

Bill Cosby isn’t a stand in for your bad experience with your boyfriend, husband, father, uncle. brother, son. He’s not a stand in for your baggage with how you think you’ve been wronged by men. For every woman who wants to castrate every man for her bad relationships, there are quite a few in great relationships. Your baggage is not the world’s baggage, and more importantly your baggage should not be projected onto a case about one individual, Bill Cosby.

It is that kind of thinking (the inability to see an individual but rather a target to put your hate, your rage, your frustrations; frustrations with stuff that has nothing to do with that person or the case at hand) that is the very definition of mob justice and lynchings. It is that kind of thinking that I call sick.

Did Bill Cosby 14 years ago, roofie Costrand, a college student athlete with financial issues, when she supposedly came to his house to ask him for career advice? Did he roofie five other women three decades ago, when he could have had any woman he wanted?  With no physical evidence, and nothing but he said, she said, the way our courts work, the burden of proof is on the prosecution. And how do you prove someone guilty in the absence of evidence? Well, you forget proof, and you sell them as guilty before trial. You, before they even are proven guilty, brand them as guilty in every paper, every tv announcement; you have institutions strip them of honors, before trial.

And even in such an unfair, witch-hunt infused atmosphere, where even the Judge seemingly had decided Cosby was guilty before the case, it took a 2nd jury to get them to swallow the McCarthy flavored kool-aid and pronounce… ‘guilty’.

 

Did Cosby do these things? I don’t know. I do know no one proved it in a court of law. He was tried and convicted before ever getting to a court house. This was a lynching plain and simple, and I find everything about it, the timing, the witnesses,.. suspect.

I do know that if true, these alleged aberrations speak of sickness; rather than an 80 year old mix of Jack the Ripper and Hitler… that the media is painting him as. If true these aberrations warrant treatment and not enslavement.

But as that one comment shows, there are always people willing to see you brought low and punished not for your sins, but as somewhere to put theirs. Many a tree in this country has swung with burned and butchered men and boys, not because they were guilty, but because a group of people decided they needed someone to be guilty.

But when that someone has done as much to change the landscape of a racist America, from sports, to television, to comedy, to movies, to representation, the very fact that many of you can see yourself in TV and movies in non stereotypical roles, is down to this erudite, renaissance man.

You want to judge? You have to judge not just the falling down, you have to judge the standing up. An in an age when very very few had the courage to do anything, Bill Cosby and a few others kicked open the doors, and had the courage to do everything.

You can not strip Bill Cosby of his achievements, without in some fundamental way… stripping away the larger social and economic progress those achievements extended to a whole group of people.

I’m not talking about simply innocence or guilt.

I’m talking about the need to make demons out of people, usually people of color.

In the grand scheme of things, Bill Cosby’s story should not be this big a deal.

Every where around the world, right now, true horrors are happening.

Real horrors, deserving of your outrage and attention.

Real demons, many in high public office and private positions.

And you expend your outrage being swayed to demonize a man whose greatest crime was, he shared his success and his opportunities, and he brought other people of color up with him.

This is who you let yourself be sold on demonizing?

Really?

My god, you have to see with better eyes than that.

I’m saying you are being used to kill your heroes, and by so doing kill some measure of the liberties and the horizons they opened for you.

In everything someone loses, and someone profits.,

A lot of powerful liberal men, who made powerful enemies, have been taken off the playing field.

And every witch hunt has a witch-finder general.

People who amass power as others lose it.

You are being used.

Your bloodthirsty rush to judgment being used, to clear the playing field, and to leave you sheep devoid of anyone to keep the wolves from your neck.

I find everything is a matter of perspective and mercy.

And those without either, need to judge themselves before judging anyone else.

They are trying to erase Bill Cosby’s achievements, and I say you don’t get to do that.

Not on my watch.

Pick up these DVDs while they are still available:

 

 

https://amzn.to/2IgcRMC

https://amzn.to/2KvlXDH

https://amzn.to/2weyg46

https://amzn.to/2JOdZ7t

 

 

https://amzn.to/2KyTM6Q

 

The Cosby Tapes -The Last and First Word on Bill Cosby

‘Be wary of letting the heirs to companies and families that grew rich enslaving you define your Gods or your Devils.’ — Eldan

‘The race human, the ethnicity Nubian, the tribe local, The nationality American. That is the progression of your responsibilities from largest to smallest. The interests of a world must always super-cede those of a nation, as must our responsibilities to the people, transcend responsibilities of nation. Nations and companies are codified to serve the people, not the other way around. Somehow we have gotten that backwards.’

‘When you side with a man in the good times, you do not abandon him in the bad. When you side with a man you stick with him, and if you can’t do that you are like some kind of animal.’

‘What mesmerizes is this very 21st century idea that, really only seems to apply to people of color or liberals, specifically, that the evil of a man erases his good. This rush to demonize those you once lauded, is the behavior of a fool and a hypocrite. To remove their honors they have earned, does not diminish them, it diminishes the quality of your honors.

It makes your honors, and Hollywood stars, and doctorates, leaves to be blown away with the merest dissenting wind or mob decree. It makes your institutions whores, and their administrators slaves.’

A soldier earns a medal for a moment in time. Nothing he does in later, less honorable times, changes that moment. To strip him of that medal devalues not that soldier, but the medal, and every permanence it hopes to represent.

The founding fathers were bigots and rapists and slavers and murderers. They were, by the most rational definition… terrorists that won, yet their evil is given a pass because of what we define as their good. Recent presidents are responsible for more murders of innocent men, women, and children than all the mass murderers combined (those targeted bombings and drone strikes and invasions have a tendency of killing 99% collateral damage, innocents, for every actual target), yet their evil is given a pass for the presumed good of ‘operation freedom’ or whatever the latest platitude is for what Hitler best described as ‘breathing room’.

Your quickness to jump on the bandwagon, and stand in judgment of a man’s evil, ignoring your own, and obliterate blithely his good when you have done nothing in your life to equal his good, says far less about that person’s evil, and far more about your own. About your jealousy and pettiness over his achievements and greatness, that you could never equal. But now you hope to dash into the dirt and mud, down with you, those lofty highs , and like demons, find joy in bringing angels low.

You, the mob vigorously endorsing these witch-hunts, are what was in the wind in Salem when witches burned, and in Georgia fields, and from Alabama trees, you are the spear in the side, you are evil and you are a coward. And this fall you revel in in others, is your own. It is the fall of men who stood against despots, and spoke truth to power, and to get you the very people they fought for, to attack them like unruly dogs, somewhere the sons of slavers watch this witch-hunt… and laugh.

The mob says Cosby should be punished for some amorphous crime from mostly decades ago, he has been tried thoroughly in the media before ever seeing a day in court, and the judge has a conflict of interests, for crimes, that unfortunately in the scheme of American horrors, hardly moves the needle of public interest, except for the fact that Cosby is an icon on a pedestal, a Black icon, and his fall of major interests to a country that made OJs Simpson’s, in the scheme of things meaningless case, the crime of the century. In a nation where the common theme is murdered wives and husbands, the persecution and vilification of OJ is beyond the infamy we coat mass murderers or natural disasters or ethnic cleansings with. In Cosby we have another case of persecution and vilification beyond all scope of the actual crime.

These are modern day lynchings, done for old fashioned reasons. To help a scared and greedy minority of masters keep power in a world where people of color are not the minority. To push back progress.

And if you can use house slaves to help bring down escaping field slaves, use one so called minority to bring down another, well that is the Lynch doctrine in action.

I have come not to praise Cosby, but to bury him.

The mob tells us Cosby is villain, is predator, is monster, and this is an honorable mob. So surely this must be the case.

Because surely never before have there been witch-hunts in this country, and never before have many false voices come together, and many joined interests, to fan the fames of hysteria, and lynch mob justice.

Surely this is not just an updated 21st century lynching. Using less crude methods of rope and knife, for more far reaching methods of social media, and 24 hour news cycle.

 

We must stand with Bill Cosby,and against witch -hunts and the use of the media and social media to lynch, and mob-rule. If guilty, he is a man who has erred, and arguably deserves counseling rather than castigation. And his guilt or sin does not obliterate his accomplishments. Anymore than yours does.

 

We must stand together against this new tool of public lynchings, played by oligarchs  and those who profit from the fall of freedom fighters, and the mediocrity and small mindedness of the masses.

 

Here begins the lesson.

Currently Listening to : Nate Parker’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION (2016) The Inspired by Album

This is a really odd post, it starts as a nice, fluffy love letter to an album I’m completely loving, and at the end goes completely off the rails and becomes a tirade.

I would say, read the warm, fluffy part, and leave the tirade alone. Especially if you know nothing about the Nate Parker controversy, or better yet care nothing for it.

I’ll give you ample warning when to stop reading.

Not sure where it came from, but it came.

My ire, and disgust with the media.

But it came.

And I thought it was honest, not necessarily right, but it was honest and deserved its say. So I left it.

You have been warned.

I think what Nate Parker is doing with BIRTH OF A NATION, a hundred years after DW Griffith’s love song to racism by the same title, is nothing short of inspired. The audacity of it, the brilliance, the balls of it, Something Percival Everett does wonderfully in literature, overturning assumptions, and re-appropriating those parts of our shared consciousness, our story, that we have relegated too long… to the worst angels of our nature.

I can’t wait to see the movie when it breaks on wide release. It sounds completely on my page. However I haven’t seen the movie so the jury’s out, but I have listened to the soundtrack, and… I LOVE IT!!!!

LOVE IT!!!

To listen to this one album was reason enough to sign up for Spotify.

And speaking of Spotify, how did I get involved with it?

Well I’m not at all a social media type. But I like things that enrich us and after a month of using Spotify I have to say… I’m feeling enriched.

This is going to sound hyperbolic. And maybe it is. I’m too close, I can’t say. I can only say I’m listening to THE BIRTH OF A NATION as I write this and I’m feeling… thankful.

I think as we get older, and side-tracked by adult concerns, one thing that falls by the wayside, is our time to enjoy and follow and discover music. And I think that moving away from that discovery of new sounds, new voices, new visions, new wonders to buoy our souls, is when we begin to die,

I know, extreme.

But bear with me.

What if the world began with a song, and will end with one.

What if all we are is notes, in some unfathomable composition.

That would mean that what we feed on more than food is music. And it would mean what we starve for lack of, more than food, is music.

The lack of it, the relinquishing of it, perhaps just a little death.

A little death we let wedge its tip into our hearts.

And widen, till everything we are… escapes.

So I’m finding SPOTIFY, with its easy ability to allow me to find and listen to this music I would otherwise not find or find time for…I’m finding it, in my emotional state of listening to THE BIRTH OF A NATION, I’m finding it… of great value.

That said MP3 is great for sampling music, and SPOTIFY is great for introducing me to music, but great music deserves to be listened to on the highest quality CD you can find. I’ve spent a month on SPOTIFY and I have bought easily a couple hundred dollars in CDs.

I’d like to buy BIRTH OF A NATION but unfortunately it is not yet available on CD. But when it is, it’s going on constant rotation in my portable cd player.

It is that good.

 

 

“When they say make America great again, they mean make us all slaves again.”— WAR Nas

“No matter if you’re red, white, black, if you want freedom, then we’re all like Nat!”— WAR Nas

 

OKAY STOP READING HERE!!!! Beyond this place, like the old maps once said… “There be Dragons!” I’m bat guano ranting in the next section, and it goes strange quickly, so if strange is not your friend, stop reading NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Oh and if you have a problem with Nate Parker, and are part of this new spate of using the media to lynch Black Men before trial, be it Bill Cosby or Nate Parker, or really going back 20 years to OJ Simpson, eff you and the horse you rode in on.

“Oh, but they are guilty, they did this, they did that.”

Then let a court prove it. Not the news, not talk shows, not soap boxes.

I don’t stand with lynch mobs, whether you wear a white hood and a shotgun, or a TV camera and a microphone.

Because for a lynch mob it’s never about innocence or guilt, it’s about creating an atmosphere of fear and horror and distrust, so they can sell a message, usually to keep a certain demographic in line.

Me, I’m not the message buying type. In a Nation where less than a hundred years ago, thousands of Black men (many of them war heroes) were lynched by ‘god fearing’ ‘people’ I’ll side with Black ‘villains’ before I side with a biased lynch mob media, everyday of the week, and twice on Sunday.

If they are guilty try them in the courts. Do not effing try them on your TV program, or radio show, or ‘news’ show, or at the water cooler, or on your lynching scaffold.

Until you’ve done the good of a Bill Cosby, or a Nate Parker, or even an OJ Simpson; don’t presume to judge their evil. That’s for a court room… your soul is not sinless enough for the task.

I say again…

Your soul… Christian, or Muslim, or Jew, or Hindu… is not sinless enough for the task.

I think any Presidential candidate you can name has done more evil than all three of those men combined. The pursuit of power is a bloody road, and the achieving of it even more so.

You kill one person (allegedly) they call you what, OJ? 🙂 You kill thousands of people, they call you Reagan or Bush.

Save your hate for mass murderers, but for other flawed men, and for yourself, pray to be better.

That is the justice of honest men, who are wise enough to know, there… but for the grace of God… go I.

 

Woah… that came out of nowhere.

But hey, that’s what you can expect in a nation that is honestly considering Trump for the highest office in the land. Derision. :).

God keep you all from rage, and keep you all from harm, and most of all god keep you from the folly of thinking you are bloody better than the poor slobs the media chooses to lynch today.

Amen.

If you like this crazy post, or just like the blog, support by checking out and purchasing the following cool and recommended items!

Sylvania SDVD7029 7″ Portable DVD Player-Swivel Screen (Certified Refurbished)
Kids these days, in this age of MP3s and Itunes and Spotify have no idea what CDs are, or how good they can sound. For $40 you can give them the gift of not only a portable CD player, but a portable DVD player.

But it’s as the former, a portable CD player, that currently interests us. In addition to the portable player you want to get them a couple CDs to play on it, and I recommend the following two:

It Follows (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) I really enjoyed IT FOLLOWS and the soundtrack on CD is equally brilliant, and stands on its own as just engaging and creepy and addictive listening experience.At once an influenced work, yet highly original in its own right, and sure to be influential. Disasterpeace hits a homerun with this score. Nice use of stereo imaging. Highly Recommended.

Sinister (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) – I’m not a wimp, and am a huge fan of a variety of scores, especially the dark, strange ones, but I have to say this Christopher Young score is on a level all its own. I find it truly disturbing, and yes… scary. A huge achievement, and essential listening!

Azend Group Corp BDP-M1061 Maxmade Portable 10-Inch Blu-Ray DISC/DVD Player (Black)

Sony S1500RF Multi System Region Free Blu-Ray Disc DVD Player

Review: INCOGNEGRO A Graphic Mystery by Mat Johnson & Warren Pleece

Those of you who’ve followed this blog over the years know I’m seldom at a loss for words.

I came close with this review of INCOGNEGRO.

INCOGNEGRO… wow. Anything I say about it will either be too little or too much. You should go into the book knowing very little (my thought on most things you seek to dazzle you) and you’ll get a lot out of it. All you need to know is it’s basically a murder mystery set in Jim Crow America. A 138pg 2008 Graphic novel, I don’t quite know how it avoided my radar, but this tale of an America of nearly a 100 years ago is RIVETING! I read it in one sitting, and went from unsure of it, to offended, to horrified, to chuckling and back again all in a space of pages.

Just am amazing mixture of pacing, scripting, dialog by Matt Johnson and expressive, pitch perfect visuals by Warren Pleece, that initially strikes me as too cartoony but ultimately works, creates a work that cannot easily be dismissed, forgotten, or put aside. I picked up the book for free at the library, but I am buying the hardcover, because it is one of those books (and this is the reason digital will never truly replace books for bibliophiles) that you want to have on your shelf, and own, and thumb through, and occasionally reread. It’s book as comfort as much as content, as talisman as much as text.

Matt Johnson writes as if the ghosts of Hal Bennett runs through him, combining that writer’s unequaled ability to pummel you with horror, then wring from you in the next breath, a sound not unlike laughter. And that ending is FANTASTIC!

Essential reading. A-.

My review is for the Hardcover. Use the link below to order your copy today. My Comic Shop is a site I personally use and recommend, and any purchases you do through my links brings me a few pennies which helps keep the blog running. So get yourself a great book and help the site, in one stroke. What could be easier. :).

Check status or purchase INCOGNEGRO here

“I grew up a Black boy who looked White. This was in a predominantly African-American neighborhood, during the height of the Black Power era, so I stood out a bit. My mom even got me a dashiki so I could fit in with the other kids, but the contrast between the colorful African garb and my nearly blond, straight brown hair just made things worse. Along with my cousin (half Black/half Jewish) I started fantasizing about living in another time, another situation, where my ethnic appearance would be an asset instead of a burden. We would “go Incognegro” we told ourselves as we ran around, pretending to be race spies in the war against White supremacy.”
— Matt Johnson, his forward to his book INCOGNEGRO

“That’s one thing that most of us know that most white folks don’t. That race doesn’t really exist. Culture? Ethnicity? Sure. Class too. But Race is just a bunch of rules meant to keep us on the bottom. Race is a strategy. The rest is just people acting. Playing roles.”
— INCOGNEGRO, Part I