Right Wing ‘Journalist’ Angry that ’12 Years a Slave’ Doesn’t Depict Happy Slaves
You’d think that the subject of slavery would be off limits for the partisan rhetoric of conservatives. Well, you have no idea.
Yes,
there are a few conservative voices who are actually ‘disappointed’
with their perceived ‘negative portrayal’ of slavery in the movie “12
Years a Slave.”
Writing in the American Spectator, James Bowman wants to know where all happy slaves were in the movie. How about their story?
If
ever in slavery’s 250-year history in North America there were a kind
master or a contented slave, as in the nature of things there must have
been, here and there, we may be sure that Mr (sic) McQueen does not want
us to hear about it. This, in turn, surely means that his view of the
history of the American South is as partial and one-sided as that of the
hated Gone With the Wind.
Why
anyone would want to launch a PR campaign for the most despicable
period in our nation’s history is unknowable. But when reading Bowman’s
piece, you can’t help but wonder if it wouldn’t be so out of place on
Stormfront.org or some other white supremacist website.
Yes,
there was much cruelty and hardship in the slave-owning South, as there
has been in most of the rest of the world most of the time, and Mr.
McQueen’s camera is all over that. But it strains ordinary credulity to
suppose that there was nothing else.
Maybe Bowman could write his next column about all the missing happy Jews in Holocaust movies.
To
give a little credit to the American Spectator’s readers, the comment
thread that opened up beneath the article was mostly filled with people
wondering what the hell Bowman was thinking. “Is this article a joke of
some sort?” one commenter asked.
The
piece, entitled “Propaganda is Not ‘Reality’ or ‘Truth’” is a new low
in right wing punditry. Anyone who would suggest that a movie based on a
historical account of slavery is simply a propaganda ploy, deserves to
be relegated to the fringe and shamed out of mainstream online
publications.
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