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📽️ “Cloak and Dagger,” dir. Fritz Lang (Warner Bros., 1946), is good as a thriller and as a war film. Unfortunately, it never develops its initial premise, the race to develop the atomic bomb.
Given that the U.S. was the only nuclear power in 1946, emphasizing the transferability of knowledge about weaponized applied nuclear physics would have been politically problematic anyway.
Fighting fascism, however, was a-okay. So were women serving as counterintelligence agents and partisans in this early Atomic Era film. Gary Cooper stars as an American physicist turned agent, who falls for a gun-toting Italian played by Lilli Palmer.
📽️ If you want to watch a thriller set in 1939 before Germany’s invasion of Poland, “Man Hunt,” dir. Fritz Lang (20th Century Fox, 1941), holds up. Only the ending was unsatisfactory, if appropriate to a time when embattled Britain needed Americans to understand what was going on.
😷 Got an email from the hospital in Berlin, NH, saying that masks are currently mandated there again. Encouraging to see the health of their patients take precedence over ideology. ❄️ Got some snow today I hadn’t been expecting, maybe 4 in or 10 cm.
🇺🇦 Excellent development: “Ukraine Is Jamming Russian Glide Bombs All Along The Front Line, Erasing One Of Russia’s Main Battlefield Advantages” by David Axe, Forbes, February 26, 2025. www.forbes.com…. “It now takes up to 16 glide bombs to hit one target.”
📽️ Watched “‘Pimpernel’ Smith,” dir. Leslie Howard (British National Films, 1941), which imagines The Scarlet Pimpernel set in Germany in 1939.
Today’s so-called conservatives would do well to read Edmund Burke on the French Revolution. He was conservative. Republicans are merely a weird mix of early-modern iconoclasts and modern-day ideologues intent on remaking the world, no matter the human toll.
We’re going to end up spending many more billions to rebuild much needed governmental functionality than any savings ostensibly netted by Cyberwreck and his incels. And don’t get me started on the broader societal damage, not to mention our diminished and less secure place in the world.
A lot of veterans have (or had) civil service jobs. Do Orange & Cyberwreck think they can mistreat veterans and currently serving military personnel without any repercussions? Good luck trying to issue the latter illegal orders to kill fellow Americans.
'Judgement' by John MacWhirter for the WPA, ca. 1935–43
In the powerful image above,1 a biblical passage on the pulpit reads:
They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity. The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money: yet will they lean upon the Lord, and say, Is not the Lord in the midst of us? No evil can come upon us. Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field2 … Woe unto them who decree unrighteous decrees … who turn aside the needy from justice, and rob the poor of my people of their rights.3
Below are church pews full of worshipers. Straight ahead are two church windows and above them a cross in front of a bigger window that is cracking. The walls of the church and a beam are coming down, helped along by falling bombs. Surrounding the cross that the bombs are falling toward are four quadrants that show challenges and injustices of the late 1930s and early 1940s. (If they match up with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, I am unsure how.)
Clockwise from top-left: There is a factory producing something; out front stands a boy whose emaciated ribs and distended stomach are painfully visible. Next, there are buildings almost completely submerged by flood waters; flooded telephone poles are leaning precariously.4 After that is a Black man hanging by his neck from a tree; the seated onlookers are wearing civilian clothes, not Klan robes. Finally, there are sharecroppers bent over, working a field, presumably for less than their bare subsistence requires.
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“Judgement” by John MacWhirter, signed print from an engraving, ca. 1935–43, for the Works Progress Administration. Via the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL Digital Collections, image 5179597. Click image to enlarge. ↩︎
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Biblical quotation from Micah 3. ↩︎
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Biblical quotation from Isaiah 10. ↩︎
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The Library of Congress has photos produced by the Farm Security Administration of flood refugees in 1937. Many of them are African American. ↩︎
Good piece on the role of Black children and youth in the civil rights movement: “Hidden Herstory: The Leesburg Stockade Girls” by Tulani Salahu-Din, National Museum of African American History and Culture, nmaahc.si.edu….
📽️ I am really enjoying Irene Dunne in her old comedies, most recently “Lady in a Jam,” dir. Gregory La Cava (Universal, 1942). It involves a lost fortune and a psychiatrist too sure of his professional knowledge, which he posits has a kind of mathematical accuracy. Love, however, has other ideas.
Good piece: “The history and resurgence of The Transexual Menace” by Riki Wilchins and Denise Norris, Gay City News, February 25, 2025, gaycitynews.com….🏳️⚧️🗽
Jen Psaki offers a glimmer of hope in the face of Orange & Cyberfruck’s shock and awe program. “Pushback is coming from everywhere” (not just the opposition): youtu.be….
“Theodora Goes Wild,” dir. Richard Boleslawski (Columbia Pictures, 1936) is great fun. It roasts performative morality, gossip, and small-mindedness. The main attraction, though, is Irene Dunne, who soon comes to handle it all with aplomb.
An Example of White Terror Depicted in WPA Art
“South” by Philip Reisman. “Executed for the Public Art Works Project, 1934."*
The South here is portrayed as a place of white terror: lynching, cross burning, Ku Klux Klan. Note, too, the figures on the left: men in chains working at gun point, modern-day slave labor powering industry. The prisoner whose face is visible is Black, the armed guard white. (Click to enlarge for detail.)
I’ve always avoided posting such images, but the history whitewashing of the current administration is making me think differently. This art, at least, is respectful. It depicts the humanity of the victims, unlike the grizzly souvenir postcards circulated by the terrorists.
* Source: NYPL Digital Collections, image 5179787.
A message to Putin from my car’s rear end. The same goes for his White House asset. #RussiaIsATerroristState #SupportUkraine #SupportHumanRights
“Spirituals” by Lillien Richter for the Works Progress Administration, ca. 1935–43. Print from engraving, signed by artist, via NYPL Digital Collections, image 5179325.
📺 I really enjoy the U.S. iteration of “Have I Got News For You.” Roy Wood Jr., the host, is brilliant. I was missing Amber Ruffin, a team captain on the show, after her short-lived show on Peacock. And this is my introduction to Michael Ian Black, the other team captain. Great fun.
If the FDP doesn’t make it back into the Bundestag, and if Scholz is gone, maybe this early election will have been worth it. Much will depend on how much pragmatism the CDU/CSU and the SPD can muster. The only party in the incumbent coalition not to get completely hammered are the capable Greens.
Do I dare check the election news from Germany? Lots of opportunities to chip away at support for Ukraine on the left and the right.😬🇺🇦 #RussiaIsATerroristState
The way “Suffragette” depicts the use of social pressure to make and then ostracize a working class suffragette, drive her out of her home, lead the father to give up their child… Yikes! This film should inspire productive classroom discussions.