Nathan Williams

Thought process: "Why isn't there a biopic about John Brown? His life was weird and full of adventures and it would be a banger. Wait, maybe there is, let me check wikipedia... oh my goodness these are very different movies."

If anyone's seen any of these and they're worth watching (because good), or hatewatching, or avoiding like the plague, then let me know!

1. Santa Fe Trail (1940), with Raymond Massey as John Brown, also Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Ronald Reagan as General Custer. That's certainly some casting?

   Wikipedia says:

   [The film] depicted Brown completely unsympathetically as a villainous madman and Massey plays him with a constant, wild-eyed stare. The film gave the impression that he did not oppose slavery

   and quotes from the film:

   Mammy: "Well, Old John Brown said he's gonna give us freedom, but shuckins, if this here Kansas is 'freedom', then I got no use for it. No, sir." Then, a black man adds, "Me, neither. I just wants to get back home to Texas and sit till Kingdom Come."

   So this certainly sounds like a gem.

2. The Good Lord Bird (2020 miniseries), starring Ethan Hawke as John Brown and an large cast including Daveed Diggs, Orlando Jones, and...Killer Mike? Sure, why not.

   Did I know about this one? I bet I did—it won a lot of awards—but everyone's brain was oatmeal in 2020 and I am not sure I formed long term memories. Also maybe I heard of it and assumed it was about the Lord God Bird (the ivory billed woodpecker) because who wouldn't assume that?

   Anyway the assessment of this is mostly a lot of awards and a positive rotten tomatoes rating so probably a safer bet watching Daveed Diggs as Frederick Douglass instead of Ronald Reagan as George Custer, yeow.

Mostly these days I'm reading fun romances because, you know, everything. But here's two exceptions:

I am not a good reader for non-fiction American history doorstoppers, but I picked up from the library Charles Sumner : conscience of a nation by Zaakir Tameez entirely on the strength of Jamelle Bouie's interview with the author, which intrigued me. And the book was really great, hard recommend. Also very apropos for the moment, in both inspiring and disturbing ways.

About 10 pages in I was thinking, was Sumner autistic? and then shortly afterward Tameez mentions the same speculation. And it's very much written as Sumner's neuroatypicality basically being one of the reasons we had Reconstruction at all -- while all the other Republicans (laudatory) in Washington were thinking about what was achievable, about the next election, not being rude to their more conservative friends, doing whatever centrist compromise David Shor and James Carville told them to do, Sumner was just blowing it all up to do what was right. The man was nearly beaten to death, and he knew the beatdown was coming. He just kept yelling about human rights and civil rights on the senate floor (using those very words), alienating all his closest friends, pissing off President Lincoln, and giving no quarter. And sometimes he was an asshole, clearly; and sometimes he was very much in the wrong. But still. We could use a morally uncompromising neuroatypical asshole senator right now.

Anyway, great book.

I also ILL'd The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould, which I never read in high school. And wow, so glad I read it. I picked it up because it was referenced in an article about GenAI, but what I kept thinking as I read is how much all this oldey-timey historical eugenics has come roaring back. The confluence shouldn't have surprised me, because the GenAI weirdos and the eugenicists all travel in the same circles at the very least, and are often the exact same people.

Anyway, very well written, except it took me a while because so much racism. Also the fun thing about living near Harvard is that in any book about American historical upper-crust shittiness, you're going to keep reading about utterly loathsome people while thinking "and that one's a street! and that one's an elementary school!" (Also, "Carl Sagan named a book after this asshole? Really?")

To be fair the elementary school got renamed 20 years ago. I'm apparently now my dad. You know, "turn off where route 99 used to be" and "I'll meet you at Scollay Under".

(CW: Gould is both writing in 1981, and his method of argument is to say, basically, okay even if I take these racist assholes at face value, let me show that their science is shit and their data are nonsense. Which means he restates a lot of the racist and eugenicist arguments—and prints a few of their illustrations—so their racism is present in the book. It's not a style of presenting racism that a history of science book would use today, I believe. Gould is clearly repeating the racist arguments in order to refute them, it's just that he's slow and methodical in the refutations.)