Fall began Monday at 2:19 p.m. I was looking for old columns that greet the autumn when I stumbled upon this. The opening segment pushes back against the identity-based politics that over the past decade and a half have come to dominate our world, both in the left sanctifying it and the right demonizing it. Let's just say the "happy future" I refer to must be dragging its feet. I kept in the correction just because it captures a moment in history — the police censorship of movies using its "widow's board" that will be unfamiliar to many. It was back when the column filled a page, and I've retained the original subheadings.
Opening shotEver wonder how people in the future will view us? I do, especially this week, pawing through the coverage of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama's first nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.
There was a certain theme, a leitmotif, if you will, a focus, an element of the story given an awful lot of emphasis.
Did you notice it too?
She's Hispanic.
And yes, I understand that having a Hispanic Supreme Court justice would be historically significant, a milestone in our steady march from a racist, slave-owning past to the happy, everybody-in-the-pool future that we expect to arrive any moment now.
But did Sotomayor's ethnic background really deserve the big blast of ballyhoo it received, going so far as to exhume poor old Benjamin Cardozo to determine whether he too was Hispanic (his family came from Portugal in the 1700s)?
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"Mona Lupe," by César Augusto Martínez |
Imagine a similar response in private life. You are considering going to a new doctor — Dr. Sotomayor — and tell your friend about her.
"My God, she's HISPANIC," you gush. "Her parents were PUERTO RICAN! Which means, if I go to her, she'll be the FIRST HISPANIC DOCTOR I'VE EVER HAD...."
At that point, your friend would be edging away from you because it's racism — not the extreme, Bull Connor racism, but racism nonetheless — the softer, gentler harping on irrelevant differences. Society dislocates an arm patting itself on the back for letting one of a heretofore-loathed minority sit at the dinner table, while the honored group celebrates as if they were a fungible mass and the accomplishment of one is the accomplishment of all. Are we not better than this?
Not yet. Someday, a future scholar writing about our woeful early 21st century race relations will be at his datascreen, smiling and shaking his head at what oblivious goofs we all were, and I want to wave over your heads at him and say, "Hey Phred2047 — don't feel so smug. It wasn't unanimous."
Correction
Last week, I wrote that Mayor Richard J. Daley didn't allow movies to be shot in Chicago because of "The Man with the Golden Arm," the 1955 Frank Sinatra film.
It was a good guess, but printing that as fact was like grabbing a container at the back of the refrigerator and gobbling what's inside without first checking to see if it's still good.
The error — no, let's make it a "probabilistic fact later proved untrue" in honor of Topix* — prompted a phone call from Michael Kutza, founder and longtime director of the Chicago International Film Festival. He remembers what happened.
"It was 'Medium Cool,' " he said, referring to the controversial 1969 film set against the riots at the Democratic National Convention. "It put a stop to everything. Every script had to be read by somebody at City Hall, and they didn't allow anything to happen."
The Sun-Times regrets, etc.
That out of the way, we fell into talking about the censorship board, which Kutza had to appear before when the festival began.
"A feature film was in two very heavy metal cans whose combined weight was 100 pounds," he said. "In 1965, I had to drag my movies down to the old building where we used to pay our parking tickets.
"You went in there -- it was a leftover courtroom -- and they had actual judges, these nine ladies --they had to be widows of policemen, that's what gave them the right to be on the censorship board. I was too young to think it was funny.
"I had to drag these things in there and leave them overnight," he continued. "I took maybe 10 feature films there -- they had a 35mm projector, and any film shown in Chicago had to pass by these people."
"Pass by" should not be taken to mean they actually watched the films, not all of them.
"Our films were immediately made X-rated because they were from foreign countries," Kutza said. "When I dragged in a Swedish film, it was rated porn immediately, without looking."
This was a problem for a film festival, so Kutza struck on the solution of making the event "adults only." Eventually, he did what all who wanted to get something done in that long-ago era did -- he appealed to the mayor.
"I worked with Frank Sullivan, the press secretary to Mayor Daley," remembered Kutza. "He took me to him, and Daley said, 'Give the kid what he needs, but don't tell anybody because the stuff you show could lose me votes.' "
The 45th annual festival takes place this autumn.
"The nicest thing about doing this so many years is you have a chance to outlive your critics," Kutza said.
I will look forward to that.
Today's chuckle...
"I was reading the paper, and it said that 80 percent of the people in New York are minorities. Don't you think we should stop calling them minorities when they hit 80 percent? You could put one white guy in a room with 50,000 black people and 20,000 Puerto Ricans, and he'd still be going, 'Look at all these minorities! I'm the only majority here.'" Louis C.K.
— Originally published in the Sun-Times May 29, 2009
* Topix, the country's "largest local forum site," was being sued by a Texas couple for posting unsubstantiated rumors that they were child molesters and drug-dealers. A jury eventually awarded them $13.8 million in damages.
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