From Axios AM today:
"Civil war" sneak peek,with trailer to watch:
https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios ... are#story7
New US civil war film
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david johnson
- Posts: 1797
- Joined: Wed Dec 21, 2005 5:04 am
- Location: ark/mo
Re: New US civil war film
I saw a couple of 'previews' of this on YouTube several weeks ago. I had already forgotten it.
Re: New US civil war film
A review in New Yorker today:
The Current Cinema
“Civil War” Presents a Striking but Muddled State of Disunion
Kirsten Dunst plays a war photographer in the trenches of Alex Garland’s speculative dystopian thriller.
By Justin Chang
April 12, 2024
Is it the end of the world if Kirsten Dunst isn’t around to witness it? I’m beginning to wonder. At the mystical aliens-among-us climax of Jeff Nichols’s “Midnight Special” (2016), it is Dunst, aglow with Spielbergian wonderment, who compels our surrender to the thrill of the unknown. In Lars von Trier’s end-of-days psychodrama, “Melancholia” (2011), Dunst, giving her greatest performance, all but wills her clinical depression into a cataclysmic reality. And I’m tempted to throw in Sofia Coppola’s “The Beguiled” (2017), an intimate Civil War gothic in which Dunst, as a dour Virginia schoolteacher, distills the existential gloom of the moment into every shattered stare. It may not be Armageddon, but, from her terrified vantage, who’s to say that tomorrow is another day?
A very different civil war swirls around Dunst in “Civil War,” a dystopian shocker set in a not too distant American future. The English writer and director Alex Garland has an undeniable flair for end-times aesthetics, and he and his cinematographer, Rob Hardy, rattle off image after unsettling image of a nation besieged. Their camera lingers on bombed-out buildings, blood-soaked sidewalks, and, in one surreal tableau, a highway that has become a vehicular graveyard, with rows of abandoned cars stretching for miles. Plumes of smoke always seem to be rising from somewhere in the distance, and apart from a few congregation zones—a makeshift campsite where kids play with abandon, a crowded block where desperate Brooklynites line up for water rations—the landscapes are eerily emptied out. At night, a deceptive stillness sets in, and the sky lights up, beautifully, with showers of orange sparks. We could be watching fireflies at dusk, if the hard pop of gunfire didn’t warn us otherwise.
Strictly as a piece of staging, “Civil War” is as vividly detailed a panorama of destruction as I’ve seen since “Children of Men” (2006), or perhaps the Garland-scripted zombie freakout of “28 Days Later” (2002). Even Dunst has never stared down a more imposing vision—and stare it down she does, invariably through the lens of a camera. Her character, Lee, is a skilled photojournalist, and if your mind doesn’t automatically leap to Lee Miller, celebrated for her stunning images of the Second World War, rest assured that Garland’s script is eager to connect the dots. This Lee may not have her namesake’s celebrity glamour or her willingness to turn the camera on herself. But Dunst gives the character a comparable steeliness, a cut-the-crap professionalism that gets you immediately on her side. She has fearlessly covered sieges, firefights, and humanitarian crises the world over; now, with a tightly set jaw and an unwavering seriousness of purpose, she’s confronting the horror in her own back yard.
The plot comes at us in a rush of details so clipped and vague that you can’t help but suspect that they’re largely irrelevant. In a fanciful twist, Texas and California have cast their red-blue animus aside and forged the Western Forces, a secessionist axis seeking to topple the President (the ruthless, mirthless Nick Offerman), a despot who has appointed himself to a third term. Florida, not to be outdone, has launched a separatist campaign, too. In response, the President has called in his troops and launched air strikes against American citizens. With these militarized factions attacking one another relentlessly, the entire country has descended into poverty and lawlessness, and Lee has seen and photographed it all. Now she sets her sights on the White House, where it seems that the conflict will finally end, with the President cornered and overthrown.
But, first, there’s a treacherous road to travel from New York to Washington, D.C. Along for the ride are two reporters: Joel (Wagner Moura), who tempers his cynicism with a wolfish grin, and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a distinguished political writer whose instincts are as sturdily old-school as his suspenders. Then, there’s Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), the youngest and most surprising addition to the group. She’s an aspiring photographer who idolizes Lee (both of them) and, like many a plucky outsider, becomes a de-facto stand-in for the audience. Jessie is talented, serious-minded, with a purist’s preference for black-and-white film. She is also reckless and naïve, and Lee is infuriated by her presence on this dangerous mission. Lee has already saved her life once, in an early scene, yanking her out of harm’s way shortly before a bomb explodes, leaving behind streams of blood and mangled body parts. There is more carnage to come, and Lee knows that Jessie—indeed, all of them—might not survive.
This isn’t the first time Garland has sent a small group of courageous folk on a perilous journey. That’s more or less the premise in his screenplays for “28 Days Later,” the space thriller “Sunshine” (2007), and the terrifying “Annihilation” (2018), his second feature as a writer-director. (He also wore both hats on “Ex Machina” and “Men.”) We accept these premises because we accept the conventions of genre, and because the stories themselves, for all their visceral grip, stake little claim to real-world verisimilitude. But “Civil War” has loftier ambitions; its parable of American infighting means to sound a note of queasy alarm, as if we were just one secessionist screed or Presidential abuse of power away from tumbling into a comparable nightmare.
Why, then, despite the sweep and scale of Garland’s world-building and world-destroying—and with an election-year release titled “Civil War”—do we remain at arm’s length, engaged yet unconvinced? As the four principal characters make their way south, they bear witness to an America gone unsurprisingly mad. But, even when a knot forms in the pit of your stomach, you’re more persuaded by the tautness of Garland’s craft, the skill with which he modulates suspense and dread, than by his understanding of how such an immense catastrophe might really play out. Whenever the mood lightens, you know, instinctively, that a tragic swerve is right around the corner. When Lee and her companions are ambushed at an abandoned Christmas theme-park display, your terror is held in check by the winking nastiness of the setup—and that’s before a lawn Santa catches a bullet in the face. The movie’s most chilling sequence—in a nicely demented touch, Jesse Plemons, Dunst’s offscreen husband, pops up as a murderous psychopath—is also its most dubiously contrived. Was it really necessary to introduce and then immediately sacrifice two nonwhite characters to score a point about the racism that lurks in America’s heartland? It’s not the only question Garland leaves unanswered.
The point, if “Civil War” has one, is that war is not only hell but also addictive, and that, for an alarming swath of the population, the joy of meting out rough justice with a rifle outstrips any deeper moral or ideological convictions. But war coverage has its own allure, and before long Jessie is hooked; the more field experience she gets, the more indelible the rush. In skirmish after skirmish, she masters the tools of her trade and inures herself to the trauma that comes with using them. As bullets whiz by and tanks roll past, she learns what it means to embed oneself, to capture dramatic images without interfering, to risk everything for the sake of the shot. (The scenes of photographers at work are often set to jarringly irreverent needle drops; a blast of De La Soul seems to capture—and interrogate—the desensitization their job demands.)
As a tribute to the work that journalists do, “Civil War” feels entirely sincere—but even here the fuzziness of Garland’s execution undermines his nobler intentions. What outlets and platforms are Lee and her colleagues using to disseminate that work? The media industry, a disaster zone even in peacetime, appears to have collapsed. Internet connections are spotty to nonexistent, and the conflict rages, for better or worse, without the breathless incursions and distortions of social media. One character makes wry reference to “whatever is left of the New York Times”; another notes that in the U.S. Capitol journalists are treated as enemy combatants and shot on sight. Such demonization of the press, with its grim echo (or harbinger?) of Trumpist rule, is about as close as the movie gets to advancing a remotely political point of view. The more arresting its doomsday images—a daring raid on the White House, a fiery assault on the Lincoln Memorial—the more Garland’s war loses itself in a nonpartisan fog, a thought experiment that short-circuits thought.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t amusing, as the credits roll on the appalling final tableau, to speculate about the aftermath. Will the Western Forces be required to make state-specific concessions in order to maintain their rickety alliance? Will California start banning books if Texas relaxes its abortion laws? I have a sneaking suspicion that Florida presses on with its own fight for independence, and in so doing ushers in the war’s next phase. If at first you don’t secede, try, try again.
The Current Cinema
“Civil War” Presents a Striking but Muddled State of Disunion
Kirsten Dunst plays a war photographer in the trenches of Alex Garland’s speculative dystopian thriller.
By Justin Chang
April 12, 2024
Is it the end of the world if Kirsten Dunst isn’t around to witness it? I’m beginning to wonder. At the mystical aliens-among-us climax of Jeff Nichols’s “Midnight Special” (2016), it is Dunst, aglow with Spielbergian wonderment, who compels our surrender to the thrill of the unknown. In Lars von Trier’s end-of-days psychodrama, “Melancholia” (2011), Dunst, giving her greatest performance, all but wills her clinical depression into a cataclysmic reality. And I’m tempted to throw in Sofia Coppola’s “The Beguiled” (2017), an intimate Civil War gothic in which Dunst, as a dour Virginia schoolteacher, distills the existential gloom of the moment into every shattered stare. It may not be Armageddon, but, from her terrified vantage, who’s to say that tomorrow is another day?
A very different civil war swirls around Dunst in “Civil War,” a dystopian shocker set in a not too distant American future. The English writer and director Alex Garland has an undeniable flair for end-times aesthetics, and he and his cinematographer, Rob Hardy, rattle off image after unsettling image of a nation besieged. Their camera lingers on bombed-out buildings, blood-soaked sidewalks, and, in one surreal tableau, a highway that has become a vehicular graveyard, with rows of abandoned cars stretching for miles. Plumes of smoke always seem to be rising from somewhere in the distance, and apart from a few congregation zones—a makeshift campsite where kids play with abandon, a crowded block where desperate Brooklynites line up for water rations—the landscapes are eerily emptied out. At night, a deceptive stillness sets in, and the sky lights up, beautifully, with showers of orange sparks. We could be watching fireflies at dusk, if the hard pop of gunfire didn’t warn us otherwise.
Strictly as a piece of staging, “Civil War” is as vividly detailed a panorama of destruction as I’ve seen since “Children of Men” (2006), or perhaps the Garland-scripted zombie freakout of “28 Days Later” (2002). Even Dunst has never stared down a more imposing vision—and stare it down she does, invariably through the lens of a camera. Her character, Lee, is a skilled photojournalist, and if your mind doesn’t automatically leap to Lee Miller, celebrated for her stunning images of the Second World War, rest assured that Garland’s script is eager to connect the dots. This Lee may not have her namesake’s celebrity glamour or her willingness to turn the camera on herself. But Dunst gives the character a comparable steeliness, a cut-the-crap professionalism that gets you immediately on her side. She has fearlessly covered sieges, firefights, and humanitarian crises the world over; now, with a tightly set jaw and an unwavering seriousness of purpose, she’s confronting the horror in her own back yard.
The plot comes at us in a rush of details so clipped and vague that you can’t help but suspect that they’re largely irrelevant. In a fanciful twist, Texas and California have cast their red-blue animus aside and forged the Western Forces, a secessionist axis seeking to topple the President (the ruthless, mirthless Nick Offerman), a despot who has appointed himself to a third term. Florida, not to be outdone, has launched a separatist campaign, too. In response, the President has called in his troops and launched air strikes against American citizens. With these militarized factions attacking one another relentlessly, the entire country has descended into poverty and lawlessness, and Lee has seen and photographed it all. Now she sets her sights on the White House, where it seems that the conflict will finally end, with the President cornered and overthrown.
But, first, there’s a treacherous road to travel from New York to Washington, D.C. Along for the ride are two reporters: Joel (Wagner Moura), who tempers his cynicism with a wolfish grin, and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a distinguished political writer whose instincts are as sturdily old-school as his suspenders. Then, there’s Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), the youngest and most surprising addition to the group. She’s an aspiring photographer who idolizes Lee (both of them) and, like many a plucky outsider, becomes a de-facto stand-in for the audience. Jessie is talented, serious-minded, with a purist’s preference for black-and-white film. She is also reckless and naïve, and Lee is infuriated by her presence on this dangerous mission. Lee has already saved her life once, in an early scene, yanking her out of harm’s way shortly before a bomb explodes, leaving behind streams of blood and mangled body parts. There is more carnage to come, and Lee knows that Jessie—indeed, all of them—might not survive.
This isn’t the first time Garland has sent a small group of courageous folk on a perilous journey. That’s more or less the premise in his screenplays for “28 Days Later,” the space thriller “Sunshine” (2007), and the terrifying “Annihilation” (2018), his second feature as a writer-director. (He also wore both hats on “Ex Machina” and “Men.”) We accept these premises because we accept the conventions of genre, and because the stories themselves, for all their visceral grip, stake little claim to real-world verisimilitude. But “Civil War” has loftier ambitions; its parable of American infighting means to sound a note of queasy alarm, as if we were just one secessionist screed or Presidential abuse of power away from tumbling into a comparable nightmare.
Why, then, despite the sweep and scale of Garland’s world-building and world-destroying—and with an election-year release titled “Civil War”—do we remain at arm’s length, engaged yet unconvinced? As the four principal characters make their way south, they bear witness to an America gone unsurprisingly mad. But, even when a knot forms in the pit of your stomach, you’re more persuaded by the tautness of Garland’s craft, the skill with which he modulates suspense and dread, than by his understanding of how such an immense catastrophe might really play out. Whenever the mood lightens, you know, instinctively, that a tragic swerve is right around the corner. When Lee and her companions are ambushed at an abandoned Christmas theme-park display, your terror is held in check by the winking nastiness of the setup—and that’s before a lawn Santa catches a bullet in the face. The movie’s most chilling sequence—in a nicely demented touch, Jesse Plemons, Dunst’s offscreen husband, pops up as a murderous psychopath—is also its most dubiously contrived. Was it really necessary to introduce and then immediately sacrifice two nonwhite characters to score a point about the racism that lurks in America’s heartland? It’s not the only question Garland leaves unanswered.
The point, if “Civil War” has one, is that war is not only hell but also addictive, and that, for an alarming swath of the population, the joy of meting out rough justice with a rifle outstrips any deeper moral or ideological convictions. But war coverage has its own allure, and before long Jessie is hooked; the more field experience she gets, the more indelible the rush. In skirmish after skirmish, she masters the tools of her trade and inures herself to the trauma that comes with using them. As bullets whiz by and tanks roll past, she learns what it means to embed oneself, to capture dramatic images without interfering, to risk everything for the sake of the shot. (The scenes of photographers at work are often set to jarringly irreverent needle drops; a blast of De La Soul seems to capture—and interrogate—the desensitization their job demands.)
As a tribute to the work that journalists do, “Civil War” feels entirely sincere—but even here the fuzziness of Garland’s execution undermines his nobler intentions. What outlets and platforms are Lee and her colleagues using to disseminate that work? The media industry, a disaster zone even in peacetime, appears to have collapsed. Internet connections are spotty to nonexistent, and the conflict rages, for better or worse, without the breathless incursions and distortions of social media. One character makes wry reference to “whatever is left of the New York Times”; another notes that in the U.S. Capitol journalists are treated as enemy combatants and shot on sight. Such demonization of the press, with its grim echo (or harbinger?) of Trumpist rule, is about as close as the movie gets to advancing a remotely political point of view. The more arresting its doomsday images—a daring raid on the White House, a fiery assault on the Lincoln Memorial—the more Garland’s war loses itself in a nonpartisan fog, a thought experiment that short-circuits thought.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t amusing, as the credits roll on the appalling final tableau, to speculate about the aftermath. Will the Western Forces be required to make state-specific concessions in order to maintain their rickety alliance? Will California start banning books if Texas relaxes its abortion laws? I have a sneaking suspicion that Florida presses on with its own fight for independence, and in so doing ushers in the war’s next phase. If at first you don’t secede, try, try again.
Re: New US civil war film
What Are the Stakes of ‘Civil War,’ Really?
April 13, 2024, 11:00 a.m. ET
By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist
Ahead of the release of “Civil War,” the new alt-history action-drama from the director Alex Garland, A24, the studio that produced the film, released a map of the United States showing the lines of the conflict. There was the “New People’s Army” of the Pacific Northwest, the Mountain West and some of the Great Plains. There were the “Western Forces” of Texas and California. And there was the “Florida Alliance,” encompassing most of the Southeast. What remained was labeled “the Loyalist States.”
This little bit of information spurred a torrent of speculation on social media about the political contours of the film. What, exactly, were the stakes of the conflict? How, precisely, did the country come to war in the world of the movie? In what universe do the people of California find common cause with the people of Texas? The scenario wasn’t just far-fetched; it seemed nonsensical. And it did not help that in interviews, Garland took a “pox on both their houses” approach when asked about the relationship between his film and contemporary political life. “It’s polarization,” he said. “You could see that everywhere. And you could see it getting magnified.”
I saw “Civil War” a few weeks ago at a screening in Charlottesville. I had no particular expectations, but I was interested to see if the film would try to flesh out its world. It is not a spoiler to say that, well, it didn’t.
Garland and his collaborators make no attempt to explain the war. They make no attempt to explain the politics of the war. They make no attempt to explain anything about the world of the film. There are hints — allusions to the precipitating crisis and the contours of the conflict. In one scene, a television broadcast refers to the president’s third term. In another, a soldier or paramilitary whose allegiances are unclear, executes a hostage who isn’t the right “kind of American.” In another sequence, we see a male soldier — an insurgent fighting the government — sporting colored hair and painted fingernails.
Overall, however, the movie isn’t about the war itself. It is about war itself. It is not an idle choice that the protagonists of the film — and the people we spend the most time with overall — are journalists. They are on a road trip to see the front lines of the war in Charlottesville (I will say that it was a very strange experience watching the movie in a movie theater roughly 30 minutes from where the scene is supposed to be set), and we experience the conflict from their perspective as men and women who cover violent conflict. Their job is to view things as objectively as possible. This carries over to the way the story is filmed and edited. We see what they see, shorn of any glamour or excitement. The war is bloody, frightening and extremely loud.
Nothing depicted in the film — torture, summary executions and mass murder — is novel. It is part of our actual past. It has happened in many places around the world. It is happening right now in many places around the world. What makes the film striking, and I think effective, is that it shows us a vision of this violence in something like the contemporary United States.
The point, however, is not to bemoan division in the usual facile way that marks a good deal of modern political commentary. The point is to remind Americans of the reality of armed conflict of the sort that our government has precipitated in other countries. The point, as well, is to shake Americans of the delusion that we could go to war with each other in a way that would not end in catastrophic disaster.
There is a palpable thirst for conflict and political violence among some Americans right now. There was the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, of course. There are also open calls on the extreme right for civil war. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican representative from Georgia, wants a “national divorce.” A writer for the influential Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank, once mused that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” Disturbingly large numbers of Americans believe that violence might be necessary to achieve their political goals.
More than anything else, “Civil War” is plugged into this almost libidinal desire. It shows people, on both sides of the conflict, relishing the opportunity to kill — taking pleasure in the chance to wipe their enemies from the earth. In depicting this, “Civil War” is asking its American viewers to take a long, hard look at what it means to want to bring harm to their fellow citizens.
By setting the details of the conflict aside to focus on the experience of violence, “Civil War” is a film that asks a single, simple question of its audience: Is this what you really want?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/13/opin ... rland.html
April 13, 2024, 11:00 a.m. ET
By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist
Ahead of the release of “Civil War,” the new alt-history action-drama from the director Alex Garland, A24, the studio that produced the film, released a map of the United States showing the lines of the conflict. There was the “New People’s Army” of the Pacific Northwest, the Mountain West and some of the Great Plains. There were the “Western Forces” of Texas and California. And there was the “Florida Alliance,” encompassing most of the Southeast. What remained was labeled “the Loyalist States.”
This little bit of information spurred a torrent of speculation on social media about the political contours of the film. What, exactly, were the stakes of the conflict? How, precisely, did the country come to war in the world of the movie? In what universe do the people of California find common cause with the people of Texas? The scenario wasn’t just far-fetched; it seemed nonsensical. And it did not help that in interviews, Garland took a “pox on both their houses” approach when asked about the relationship between his film and contemporary political life. “It’s polarization,” he said. “You could see that everywhere. And you could see it getting magnified.”
I saw “Civil War” a few weeks ago at a screening in Charlottesville. I had no particular expectations, but I was interested to see if the film would try to flesh out its world. It is not a spoiler to say that, well, it didn’t.
Garland and his collaborators make no attempt to explain the war. They make no attempt to explain the politics of the war. They make no attempt to explain anything about the world of the film. There are hints — allusions to the precipitating crisis and the contours of the conflict. In one scene, a television broadcast refers to the president’s third term. In another, a soldier or paramilitary whose allegiances are unclear, executes a hostage who isn’t the right “kind of American.” In another sequence, we see a male soldier — an insurgent fighting the government — sporting colored hair and painted fingernails.
Overall, however, the movie isn’t about the war itself. It is about war itself. It is not an idle choice that the protagonists of the film — and the people we spend the most time with overall — are journalists. They are on a road trip to see the front lines of the war in Charlottesville (I will say that it was a very strange experience watching the movie in a movie theater roughly 30 minutes from where the scene is supposed to be set), and we experience the conflict from their perspective as men and women who cover violent conflict. Their job is to view things as objectively as possible. This carries over to the way the story is filmed and edited. We see what they see, shorn of any glamour or excitement. The war is bloody, frightening and extremely loud.
Nothing depicted in the film — torture, summary executions and mass murder — is novel. It is part of our actual past. It has happened in many places around the world. It is happening right now in many places around the world. What makes the film striking, and I think effective, is that it shows us a vision of this violence in something like the contemporary United States.
The point, however, is not to bemoan division in the usual facile way that marks a good deal of modern political commentary. The point is to remind Americans of the reality of armed conflict of the sort that our government has precipitated in other countries. The point, as well, is to shake Americans of the delusion that we could go to war with each other in a way that would not end in catastrophic disaster.
There is a palpable thirst for conflict and political violence among some Americans right now. There was the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, of course. There are also open calls on the extreme right for civil war. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican representative from Georgia, wants a “national divorce.” A writer for the influential Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank, once mused that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” Disturbingly large numbers of Americans believe that violence might be necessary to achieve their political goals.
More than anything else, “Civil War” is plugged into this almost libidinal desire. It shows people, on both sides of the conflict, relishing the opportunity to kill — taking pleasure in the chance to wipe their enemies from the earth. In depicting this, “Civil War” is asking its American viewers to take a long, hard look at what it means to want to bring harm to their fellow citizens.
By setting the details of the conflict aside to focus on the experience of violence, “Civil War” is a film that asks a single, simple question of its audience: Is this what you really want?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/13/opin ... rland.html
Re: New US civil war film
The impact of technology, let alone the coming AI, on the culture:
From AxiosMacro April 22:
“Flashback: Acemoglu pointed to the late 1970s, when automation hit America's factories in a way that reshaped the industrial landscape.
"People from Silicon Valley, journalists and some economists might be excused for saying, 'Ultimately, things have worked out,'"Acemoglu said. "But 'ultimately' may be a very long time," Acemoglu added.
Acemoglu cited the widening earnings gaps between workers that happened in the years after the 1970s technology wave.
"Low education groups experienced real wage declines, while productivity is increasing, while capital owners are doing well, and well-educated workers are experiencing rapid wage growth," Acemoglu said.
He added that some demographic groups saw their income shrink — in real terms — over the next 40 years.
That was a result of other factors, including the rise in globalization, but "automation, in particular how we have used digital tools," was an important part of it, Acemoglu said.”
These folks now vote for Trump.People who see success of others as an attack on their own lives.
From AxiosMacro April 22:
“Flashback: Acemoglu pointed to the late 1970s, when automation hit America's factories in a way that reshaped the industrial landscape.
"People from Silicon Valley, journalists and some economists might be excused for saying, 'Ultimately, things have worked out,'"Acemoglu said. "But 'ultimately' may be a very long time," Acemoglu added.
Acemoglu cited the widening earnings gaps between workers that happened in the years after the 1970s technology wave.
"Low education groups experienced real wage declines, while productivity is increasing, while capital owners are doing well, and well-educated workers are experiencing rapid wage growth," Acemoglu said.
He added that some demographic groups saw their income shrink — in real terms — over the next 40 years.
That was a result of other factors, including the rise in globalization, but "automation, in particular how we have used digital tools," was an important part of it, Acemoglu said.”
These folks now vote for Trump.People who see success of others as an attack on their own lives.
-
david johnson
- Posts: 1797
- Joined: Wed Dec 21, 2005 5:04 am
- Location: ark/mo
Re: New US civil war film
I had a chance to see it, but opted for Godzilla x Kong. I had fun.
Re: New US civil war film
I will want to obtain a new book coming out this week, “ Minority Rule” by one Ari Berman.Heard him interviewed on NPR about the book.
Factoids he mentioned:
By 2040, 70% of the US population will live in just 15 of the States,which States will have 30 of the 100 US Senators.
Presently, California has 68 times the population of Wyoming.
The first 12 Presidents were slave owners.
The slaves counted as “ 3/5 person” provision of the Constitution was designed to allow the Southern States to increase their population for determining how many US House Representatives they would get even though slaves had no right to vote.
Factoids he mentioned:
By 2040, 70% of the US population will live in just 15 of the States,which States will have 30 of the 100 US Senators.
Presently, California has 68 times the population of Wyoming.
The first 12 Presidents were slave owners.
The slaves counted as “ 3/5 person” provision of the Constitution was designed to allow the Southern States to increase their population for determining how many US House Representatives they would get even though slaves had no right to vote.
-
jserraglio
- Posts: 11954
- Joined: Sun May 29, 2005 7:06 am
- Location: Cleveland, Ohio
Re: New US civil war film
And then there was the cadaver trade in enslaved people …
Beyond the Slave Trade, the Cadaver Trade
By Daina Ramey Berry
Feb. 3, 2018
NYT
OPINION
The topic of slavery features prominently in each February’s reflections on African-American history. But when it comes to this darkest time in our country’s past, experts are still discovering horrors that have not yet made their way into history books.
One shocking fact that’s recently come to light: Major medical schools used slave corpses, acquired through an underground market in dead bodies, for education and research.
Yes, there was a robust body-snatching industry in which cadavers — mostly the bodies of black people, many of whom had been enslaved when they were alive — were used at Harvard, the Universities of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and other institutions.
It is time to acknowledge this dark truth behind our understanding of human anatomy and modern medicine.
Over several years, I’ve studied what I call the domestic cadaver trade and its connection to 19th-century medical education. The body trade was as elaborate as the trans-Atlantic and domestic slave trade that transported Africans to the New World and resold African-Americans on our soil. But when enslaved people died, some were sold again and trafficked along the same roads and waterways they traveled while alive.
The domestic cadaver trade was active, functional and profitable for much of the 19th century. Fueled by demand from medical schools’ need for specimens for anatomy classes, it was a booming business. Typically, the supply of bodies consisted of executed criminals and unclaimed corpses from almshouses and prisons.
But when these sources fell short, physicians and students alike looked elsewhere. Some anatomy professors personally sent agents to work with professional body snatchers who stole bodies from pauper cemeteries.
Body snatchers like Grandison Harris of Georgia and Chris Baker of Virginia collected specimens for dissection for the benefit of medical colleges. While they received room, board and modest wages for the bodies they collected, they were also enslaved African-American men themselves, listed as “janitors” or “porters” in the medical schools’ records.
According to faculty minutes of the Medical College of Georgia from an 1852 meeting, the dean of the college purchased Harris at a Charleston, S.C., auction for $700, equivalent to about $22,000 today.
Baker was born at the Medical College of Virginia (Virginia Commonwealth University today) to enslaved parents who worked at the college. Thus the school did not need to purchase him — being born to an enslaved woman meant he, too, was enslaved. Both men were central in acquiring cadavers used for dissection.
Having the two body snatchers in the building where anatomy professors taught and performed dissections gave the schools an advantage in recruiting. The medical colleges boasted about their ample supplies of subjects for dissection, a necessary component for training in human anatomy.
Enslaved people like Harris and Baker who were forced to rob graves were complicated and important historical figures, and their stories remind us we have much to learn from the legacy of slavery in the United States.
It’s well known that the effects of this chapter of American history, during which human beings were bought and sold, still reverberate today. As President Barack Obama emphasized last year in an interview with Trevor Noah of “The Daily Show,” America “has by no means overcome the legacy of slavery.”
I would add that we are still discovering it.
It’s nearly impossible to find history textbooks that discuss the cadaver trade or the role enslaved people like Harris and Baker played in it. Aside from Craig S. Wilder and Michael Sappol, until recently, few scholars have considered what I refer to as the “ghost value” of the bodies of deceased enslaved people traded throughout the United States for medical education.
Medical schools regularly purchased bodies from men like Harris and Baker. In Richmond, Va., where Baker brought the bodies he acquired, adult cadavers cost $12, mothers and their infants cost $15, and children from ages 4 to 10 were worth $8.
That schools had payment schedules for this expense speaks volumes about the routine nature of the trade.
American medical schools must finally acknowledge and atone for this.
In the same way that Georgetown University and schools such as Brown, Yale, Harvard, the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary have come clean about the role of enslaved people in their founding, other schools should open their records and confirm their involvement in the domestic cadaver trade.
We will be a more informed nation because of it.
Daina Ramey Berry is an associate professor of history and African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of “The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from the Womb to the Grave, in the Building of a Nation.”
Beyond the Slave Trade, the Cadaver Trade
By Daina Ramey Berry
Feb. 3, 2018
NYT
OPINION
The topic of slavery features prominently in each February’s reflections on African-American history. But when it comes to this darkest time in our country’s past, experts are still discovering horrors that have not yet made their way into history books.
One shocking fact that’s recently come to light: Major medical schools used slave corpses, acquired through an underground market in dead bodies, for education and research.
Yes, there was a robust body-snatching industry in which cadavers — mostly the bodies of black people, many of whom had been enslaved when they were alive — were used at Harvard, the Universities of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and other institutions.
It is time to acknowledge this dark truth behind our understanding of human anatomy and modern medicine.
Over several years, I’ve studied what I call the domestic cadaver trade and its connection to 19th-century medical education. The body trade was as elaborate as the trans-Atlantic and domestic slave trade that transported Africans to the New World and resold African-Americans on our soil. But when enslaved people died, some were sold again and trafficked along the same roads and waterways they traveled while alive.
The domestic cadaver trade was active, functional and profitable for much of the 19th century. Fueled by demand from medical schools’ need for specimens for anatomy classes, it was a booming business. Typically, the supply of bodies consisted of executed criminals and unclaimed corpses from almshouses and prisons.
But when these sources fell short, physicians and students alike looked elsewhere. Some anatomy professors personally sent agents to work with professional body snatchers who stole bodies from pauper cemeteries.
Body snatchers like Grandison Harris of Georgia and Chris Baker of Virginia collected specimens for dissection for the benefit of medical colleges. While they received room, board and modest wages for the bodies they collected, they were also enslaved African-American men themselves, listed as “janitors” or “porters” in the medical schools’ records.
According to faculty minutes of the Medical College of Georgia from an 1852 meeting, the dean of the college purchased Harris at a Charleston, S.C., auction for $700, equivalent to about $22,000 today.
Baker was born at the Medical College of Virginia (Virginia Commonwealth University today) to enslaved parents who worked at the college. Thus the school did not need to purchase him — being born to an enslaved woman meant he, too, was enslaved. Both men were central in acquiring cadavers used for dissection.
Having the two body snatchers in the building where anatomy professors taught and performed dissections gave the schools an advantage in recruiting. The medical colleges boasted about their ample supplies of subjects for dissection, a necessary component for training in human anatomy.
Enslaved people like Harris and Baker who were forced to rob graves were complicated and important historical figures, and their stories remind us we have much to learn from the legacy of slavery in the United States.
It’s well known that the effects of this chapter of American history, during which human beings were bought and sold, still reverberate today. As President Barack Obama emphasized last year in an interview with Trevor Noah of “The Daily Show,” America “has by no means overcome the legacy of slavery.”
I would add that we are still discovering it.
It’s nearly impossible to find history textbooks that discuss the cadaver trade or the role enslaved people like Harris and Baker played in it. Aside from Craig S. Wilder and Michael Sappol, until recently, few scholars have considered what I refer to as the “ghost value” of the bodies of deceased enslaved people traded throughout the United States for medical education.
Medical schools regularly purchased bodies from men like Harris and Baker. In Richmond, Va., where Baker brought the bodies he acquired, adult cadavers cost $12, mothers and their infants cost $15, and children from ages 4 to 10 were worth $8.
That schools had payment schedules for this expense speaks volumes about the routine nature of the trade.
American medical schools must finally acknowledge and atone for this.
In the same way that Georgetown University and schools such as Brown, Yale, Harvard, the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary have come clean about the role of enslaved people in their founding, other schools should open their records and confirm their involvement in the domestic cadaver trade.
We will be a more informed nation because of it.
Daina Ramey Berry is an associate professor of history and African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of “The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from the Womb to the Grave, in the Building of a Nation.”
Re: New US civil war film
Rach3 wrote: ↑Tue Apr 23, 2024 12:17 pmI will want to obtain a new book coming out this week, “ Minority Rule” by one Ari Berman.Heard him interviewed on NPR about the book.
Factoids he mentioned:
By 2040, 70% of the US population will live in just 15 of the States,which States will have 30 of the 100 US Senators.
Presently, California has 68 times the population of Wyoming.
The first 12 Presidents were slave owners.
The slaves counted as “ 3/5 person” provision of the Constitution was designed to allow the Southern States to increase their population for determining how many US House Representatives they would get even though slaves had no right to vote.
The full NPR interview with Berman:
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1246297603
As I suggested earlier,Barney.
Re: New US civil war film
The interview is actually a bit terrifying if Berman is accurate, which seems he is.Rach3 wrote: ↑Tue Apr 23, 2024 8:33 pm
The full NPR interview with Berman:
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1246297603
As I suggested earlier,Barney.
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