History should make you feel uncomfortable

My Sunday movie was My Beautiful Laundrette. I heard about it when it came out in 1985, but had not seen it. The reviews of the time said it was a touching gay love story, something revolutionary for the time. This is the story of Omar and his extended Pakistani family living in London. The men in the family get Omar involved in the various family businesses, some of them illegal, and finally he settles on managing a dingy laundrette (what we would call a laundromat). Omar calls on childhood friend Johnny to help him run and reform the place. Yeah, the white guy worked for the guy of color. Johnny is a former skinhead and his racist friends lurk in the background. Omar and Johnny of course fall in love. But the story is more about Omar and his family and as people of color trying to fit in to English society than the gay relationship. Omar’s uncle Nassar referred to his home country of Pakistan when he said, “I can’t go back. Religion is sodomizing the country. It’s getting in the way of making money.” Interesting description in a movie with a gay relationship. Omar and his father live in an apartment near where two commuter rail lines cross. Many scenes include trains passing by. That got me wondering whether they timed the scenes to the train schedule or they had their own trains they could run by as needed. Or the trains were added later through special effects. I was a bit surprised that Johnny was played by Daniel Day-Lewis. IMDB, in the trivia for this movie, said that this and another Day-Lewis movie premiered in New York on the same day, demonstrating the range he has as an actor. I had heard that until the last couple decades playing gay tended to damage an actor’s career. Why would Day-Lewis chance it? The big example of the damage was the movie Making Love, from 1982, just thee years before. I haven’t seen it. That, I had heard, had damaged the careers of its male stars Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean. But looking at their filmography on IMDB doesn’t show a gap in their work. Patrick Wyman, who writes about history, tweeted:

Lot of folks out there confuse "history" with "stories from the past that make me feel good about who I am in the present." Most of the time, when somebody's whining about "rewriting history," what they mean is "this knowledge about a real thing that happened makes me feel bad." History should make you feel uncomfortable. Lots of bad things have happened. The past doesn't exist to validate your sense of who you are in the present. People did evil things, heroic things, mundane things, bizarre things, and it's not about you. If your sense of self is contingent on a belief in the unimpeachable righteousness of your chosen ancestors, real or mythical, then I'd say that's a pretty fragile sense of self.

Lauren Floyd of Daily Kos wrote about what the police tell the press and public and many time it isn’t the truth. For example, after George Floyd was murdered...

But an initial press release police officials sent to media representatives about the murder didn’t even mention Chauvin’s involvement. “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction” was the title of the release. An investigation of California law enforcement agencies published by The Guardian newspaper on Wednesday found that this kind of marketing spin on police killings is hardly unique.

Floyd listed several other cases of what the police told the press were misleading or actually lying. Christopher Reeves of Kos wrote about his autistic son graduating from high school. Along the way he talked about the way we view those who are disabled – and we’re all disabled sometime in life, whether it is permanent or temporary.

Watching my son complete a task many would think was impossible for him left me in tears of joy. Listening to the current administration talk about ways to improve the lives of those with disabilities, I heard the words that screamed, “pro-life.” Pro-life, as in actually putting value in those with disabilities. Not with fake bills demanding that they be carried to term, but with actual support after they’re born, when they need the love and care of others.

Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote about the bill to form a bipartisan commission to investigate the Capitol attack. The bill has passed the House and is now before the Senate where it will die unless the filibuster is eliminated. Dartagnan wrote, quoting Max Boot of The Washington Post:

Put simply, you cannot put a thoroughly corrupt political party in charge of investigating its own corruption. The nature of the Jan. 6 attacks itself is inextricably tied to the lie of election fraud, a lie that is at this very moment being perpetuated and furthered by the GOP, at both the national and state level. Since Republicans are wedded to this lie, they cannot be expected to willingly participate in any good faith effort to uncover its origins, its blatant falsity, or its relationship to the Jan. 6 insurrection. As Boot points out, “the Republican leaders have become Trump’s collaborators in a coverup.” To expect them to willingly cooperate, while their ties and affinities to violent white supremacists and other assorted domestic terrorists are revealed and dissected for public consumption is, putting it mildly, preposterous. So there can never be any bipartisan accounting of Jan. 6, by definition.