Category Archives: Pop Culture

Reconstructing Cancel Culture

History, politics, Pop Culture, Race

I hope you all are taking care of yourselves while we shelter in place. Hopefully, this post gives you a way to pass the time.

In the last few years, we’ve heard a lot about cancel culture. Celebrities, politicians, and regular people have been “cancelled,” though it’s often unclear what that means. The best definition might actually come from Urban Dictionary. It defines “cancelled” as meaning “if you or anyone does something that’s considered ‘bad’… no one would look at you in a good way anymore, no respect, etc.” The consequences could include losing business, twitter followers, or votes.

For many, cancel culture is something woke young people have invented recently. Merriam-Webster claims “The idea of canceling—and as some have labeled it, cancel culture—has taken hold in recent years due to conversations prompted by #MeToo and other movements that demand greater accountability from public figures.” It then credits black Twitter users for the term.

This semester, I’ve taught a seminar on how race has shaped the legal system. It’s been an eye-opening experience. As we studied the aftermath of the Civil War, I was struck by a phenomenon that looks a lot like cancel culture, except on steroids.

Former rebels didn’t take their defeat on the battlefield lying down. They unleashed violence and terrorism on their supposedly victorious enemies that spurred the creation of a committee on lawlessness and violence at Texas’ 1868 constitutional convention, three years after the Civil War. The committee observed that, “multitudes who participated in the rebellion, disappointed and maddened by their defeat, are now intensely embittered against the freedmen on account of their enfranchisement, and on account of their devotion to the Republican party, and against the loyal whites for their persistent adhesion to the Union…that it is their purpose even by desperate measures to create such a state of alarm and terror among Union men and freedmen as to compel them to abandon the advocacy of impartial suffrage or fly from the State…”

People often worry about cancel culture suppressing free speech. A 2018 study found that 54% of college students felt “intimidated in sharing your ideas, opinions, or beliefs in class because they were different than those of your classmates or peers.” And to be sure, there have been worrying incidents. When a Bryn Mawr student posted on the school’s ride-share Facebook page looking to see if anyone would be interested in going to a Donald Trump rally, several posters called her racist while others threatened her physically. The harassment led her to drop out of college.

But this threat to free speech is not new, as Texas’ experience shows. In 1868, the committee on lawlessness and violence noted that “There is absolute freedom of speech in very few localities in Texas.” Rather, “Union men dare not generally avow their political convictions” because “the dominant rebel element will not tolerate free discussion.” In fact, things were so bad that “hundreds of loyal men, to our knowledge, are at this time forsaking their homes in Texas, fleeing from the assassin, [and] forced away by rebel intolerance.”

Former rebels admitted to things like firing guns into a black church, murdering black officials in cold blood, and whipping black women “to compel the negroes to give up Loyal Leagues, and to get satisfaction out of them for supporting Yankees.”

Cancel culture was real in in Texas after the Civil War in a way that puts today’s debate over it in perspective. Texans with unpopular opinions (you might even say politically incorrect ones) were not at risk of being called out or being shamed. They were at risk of having their very lives cancelled. What were those politically incorrect opinions? Believing in black equality and supporting the Union. Many celebrities who get “cancelled” these days wind up just fine.

Still, Texas gives us two cautionary lessons about cancel culture, but not in the way many critics suppose. First, we should really worry about cancelling when majorities do it to vulnerable minorities. The consequence of being cancelled for those at the margins of society are likely to be real in a way they aren’t for wealthy celebrities.

Second, before cancelling people, we should ask ourselves an uncomfortable question: is the person whose opinion we find repugnant actually right? Could they be getting at a truth we’ve overlooked? The former rebels who cancelled loyal Unionists surely thought their cause was righteous. They were wrong. Today, many of us look back and ask, how could anyone have thought about cancelling people for advocating loyalty to the government and black equality? Before we cancel people today, we would do well to ask ourselves if future generations will react similarly. Are we really trying to eliminate injustice, or will future generations see that we instead enabled it?

If nothing else, Texas’ experience should make us think twice before we exaggerate cancel culture, or engage in it.

Some Nazis Had Redeeming Qualities

History, politics, Pop Culture, ,

Can a good person be a Nazi? The Nazis murdered millions of people, broke treaties, plunged the world into a terrible war, all for horrible ideas. So it seems absurd even to consider such a question. Wading into the uncomfortable space where we ask it is Man in the High Castle.

Based on Phillip K. Dick’s novel, Man in the High Castle describes a world where the Germans and Japanese won World War Two. They have both carved up the United States into zones of influence: the Japanese control the West and the Germans the East. After defeating the allies, they are now in a cold war reminiscent of the one that actually happened between the United States and the Soviet Union. The show follows Juliana Crane and her boyfriend Frank (along with others) as they are caught up in the resistance to Germany and Japan. One the men they are resisting is John Smith.

When American Heroes Become Nazis

Our first introduction to Smith is as a high-level Nazi bureaucrat ferreting out American resistance. Smith orders a man to be tortured, and then beaten to death. He’s set up nicely to be a villain for us to hate for the entire series. This is fair for a man who does many villainous things. He double-crosses a band of black smugglers by promising them money in exchange for one of the films [on the show, Hitler tasks him with finding films depicting an alternate universe where the Nazis lost world war two], but then sends a bomb. He demonstrates no remorse about participating in war crimes and genocide as a younger man.

But there’s more. He’s a loving father and husband. You can see it in the way he interacts with his son and daughters when they’re eating breakfast or in the intimate moments he shares with his wife. And it is precisely those attachments that make his journey as a Nazi so compelling. The Nazis on the show–and in real life–engaged in euthanasia for anyone they deemed subhuman. This includes those with debilitating ailments. At first he and his wife seemed to agree with this; his wife observed after seeing Smith’s brother in a wheelchair that such people weren’t permitted to suffer under Nazi rule, i.e., were euthanized. Her tune changed when she learned their son Thomas had a rare, incurable disorder. The doctor gave Smith an ultimatum: kill his son himself, or have the condition reported to the government (in which case Thomas would have been killed anyway). To save his son’s life, Smith murdered the doctor and covered it up. At the same time he was rising up the Reich’s hierarchy, he was a victim  of its ideology. And although he was an ambitious man, he was willing to put his ambitions at risk for those he loved. With an excellent portrayal by Rufus Sewell, viewers are eventually left cheering for what remains of Smith’s humanity to prevail over his darkness.

As the series went on, we learned that Smith had fought bravely in the U.S. Army before the Nazis took over. This is a tantalizing hint of what might have been for his character: a patriotic American devoted to serving his country and its ideals. More than anything, I’m left with questions for him. Did he ever think about joining the resistance? What were his views towards the blacks and Jews targeted by the Nazis? What about Nazism appealed to a decorated American soldier?

What can we learn from John Smith?

Smith’s nuanced portrayal differs from the way Nazis usually appear in popular media. On Man in the High Castle, Hitler was a crazed maniac obsessed with crushing the resistance to his rule and tracking down the films. In Wolfenstein: the New Collosus, Hitler is cartoonishly evil, vetting auditions for actors trying to play his nemesis Billy (a man fighting in the resitance to Nazi rule in the game) and shooting those who displease him. And Hitler wasn’t even the craziest on the show; that honor belongs to Reinhard Heydrich and others plotting to embroil the world in a war with Japan. It says something about the bloodlust of the Nazis on the show that Hitler is too meek for some of them.

An exception is the German movie Downfall, set during the last days of world war two. Hitler is shown at the beginning being kind to his secretary and dog and appreciative of the efforts his Hitler Youth soldiers make. Of course, there are limits to how much Downfall can humanize Hitler given the historical record. The movie recognizes this. Out of touch with reality, he orders around nonexistent German units to attack his enemies and fulminates against generals who accurately describe the military situation. His SS hunts down and hangs old men who refuse to fight against overwhelming odds.

The best Downfall can do is give Hitler’s monstrosity a human gloss. But there can be no doubt that a man who plunged the world into a war that continues to affect us today and ordered the genocide of people he deemed inferior is a monster.

The only way Hitler could have succeeded, though, was with the assitance of others. There were the millions of Germans who shared every aspect of his wretched ideology and cheered him on as he trampled on human rights and brought war. But even that was insufficient. To be as effective as he was, he needed the assistance of people like John Smith, people who had consciences and redeeming qualities. That is scary.

One enduring lesson from world war two is to vigilantly guard against leaders like Hitler. And yet to stop there lets us off too easy. To truly avoid repeating the atrocities, we have to be vigilant against men like John Smith.

Would Nazis Have Been Any Worse For Blacks Than Jim Crow?

History, politics, Pop Culture, Race

The question of what life in America would have looked like under Nazi rule continues to fascinate us. In 2019, shows like Man in the High Castle are still popular. The show’s three seasons, set in 1960s America, are plenty-thought provoking, but given that it makes only oblique references to race at a time the civil rights movement would have been blooming historically, it left me wondering what a Nazi-ruled America would have looked like for blacks.

Nazi Racial Ideology

Racism was core to Nazism. In Mein Kampf, everything good was associated with Aryans, the alleged master race. Hitler declared that “[a]ll the human culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan.” Blacks were inferior. For Hitler, in fact, they were part of a Jewish plot to degrade Germany: “[i]t was and it is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.”

These attitudes influenced Nazi policy. The few blacks in Germany found it impossible to become German citizens; their passports eventually read “stateless negroes.” In 1941, they were kicked out of German public schools. They were the focus of forced sterilization efforts.

Historian Eve Rosenhaft suggests that a 1942 survey of blacks in Europe was done with the intent of rounding them up. That never happened. But during the war, the Nazis used blacks as propaganda to stiffen the German people’s’ spines. Take a look at these pictures:

Ironically, the Nazis later targeted black soldiers in their propaganda efforts during the war too. Leaflets targeting black soldiers bragged “there have never been lynchings of colored men in Germany. They have always been treated decently.” Others claimed that “colored people living in Germany can go to any church they like. They have never been a problem to the Germans.”

But black soldiers would have seen this for the lie it was. Black newspapers drew parallels between Jim Crow and Nazism before the U.S. even entered the war. In 1938, the New York Amsterdam News reported that “[t]aking a leaf from United States Jim Crow practices against the Negro, German Nazis plan to Jim Crow Jews on German railways…” More ominously, it noted that “[t]he Nazis, in declaring their intentions of Jim-Crowing Jews within the Reich, specifically cited American Jim Crow customs against its Negro citizens…” Walter White of the NAACP even went so far as to ask Jesse Owens and other black athletes to boycott the 1936 Olympics because it was being held in Nazi Germany.  He warned that “if the Hitlers and Mussolinis of the world are successful it is inevitable that dictatorships based upon prejudice will spread throughout the world, as indeed they are now spreading.”

Nazi obsession with racial purity ultimately led to the holocaust where more than six million Jews were murdered. Other groups such as gypsies, gays, and slavs suffered grievously too.

Life for Blacks under Nazi Occupation

Given their propensity for genocide, what would the Nazis have done if they had taken over America and its millions of blacks? Surely nothing good. Man in the High Castle hints at this. At one point, Joe Blake, one of the main characters, reads the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to a child. After reading a passage about Jim, the child asks “how can he be good–he’s black!” At which point his mom notes that the Nazis banned the book. We can infer that when they took over America, the Nazis’ propaganda targeted blacks. In the show, one of the most important resistance fighters, Lemuel Washington, is black, and so are several others. So we can infer that whatever remained of the black community perceived the Nazis as a sufficiently serious threat that it was preferable to risk death in the resistance.

The book makes these implicit racial dynamics explicit. The Nazis reinstituted slavery in the United States. This outcome is so horrifying because it is so believable. Slavery legally ended with the 13th amendment. But it continued in all but name with things like peonage, sharecropping, and chain gangs. Well into the 20th century, an outside observer could look at the lives of many blacks and conclude they had not improved since slavery. Nazi occupiers could have used blacks (and other disfavored minorities) as slave labor to power their war effort the way they used slave labor in Europe. And Nazi slavery might have been even worse than American slavery. During the antebellum period, slaves had the hope–however distant and difficult–of running the underground railroad to freedom in the North. But with Nazis occupying all of America, where would they have gone?

An even more horrifying possibility could have greeted blacks when Nazis arrived: extermination. We know the Nazis viewed blacks as inferior, and we know from the holocaust that they were willing to commit genocide against groups they despised. The logical conclusion of these attitudes would be death camps. And just as Poles and Ukrainians aided Nazis in their persecution of Jews, we can imagine some racist Americans doing similarly. This would have made blacks especially likely to resist Nazi occupation. So in the video game Wolfenstein: the New Collosus, when a black woman was a key resistance leader, I was unsurprised. All Americans would have lost freedom and dignity under Nazi rule, just as those living in conquered European nations had. Blacks could have faced wholesale genocide. The resulting calculus would have been something like “I could die if I do resist, but I will die if I don’t.” As an aside, Wolfenstein surprisingly offers a more thoughtful look at race relations in Nazi-occupied America. A scene in the game features KKK members and others welcoming Nazi rule with open arms, grateful to be rid of blacks and Jews. It acknowledges the backwards racial attitudes too many had when, in a flashback, the protagonist’s father punishes him for befriending a black girl.

Perhaps the most horrifying possibility is that things would have stayed the same under Nazi rule. Blacks would have attended separate and unequal schools, drank from separate water fountains, been denied the ability to live in particular neighborhoods, and faced widespread lynchings…just like they did under Jim Crow. The reason I say this is perhaps worst of all is because it means the Nazis–some of the most evil people in history–would have said “black people were already oppressed enough before we got here.”

This possibility was reflected in Jesse Owen’s experience. At the 1936 Olympics, Owens put the lie to Nazi racial ideology by winning four gold medals. There was a persistent story that Hitler refused to shake Owen’s hand. But Owens wryly noted, “I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President, either.” He later reflected that “after all those stories about Hitler and his snub, I came back to my native country and I couldn’t ride in the front of the bus…I couldn’t live where I wanted. Now what’s the difference [between Nazi Germany and Jim Crow]?” At a reception in his honor at the Waldorf Astoria, he was relegated to the service lift instead of the regular one reserved for whites. The sad truth is that for Owens, there was no difference between Nazi ideology about blacks and Jim Crow ideology about blacks.

All of these possibilities are frightening. But there is a more uplifting one. It’s hard to imagine a people who rebelled against a king submitting to Nazi rule. I’m confident that there would have been widespread resistance. The only way for any resistance movement to succeed would have been to unify across racial and ethnic divides. And there is hope that even racists resisting the Nazis would have had reason to reconsider their prejudices. The more self-aware ones would have been able to draw parallels between Jim Crow and Nazi racial policies.

The trailer for season four of the Man in the High Castle looks promising when it comes to race. Lots of black resistance fighters are portrayed. And I hope the show will explore in more depth what racial dynamics look like in Nazi-occupied America.

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About the Confederate Flag Representing Southern Heritage

History, Pop Culture, Race

Memorials to confederate soldiers have become a point of contention in the past several years. This is something I welcome. The Civil War shook our country up in ways nothing else has. And even after all this time, we haven’t arrived at a consensus about how to remember it. Nothing puts a finer point on this than the confederate memorials. Should they stand to commemorate valiant southern soldiers or brilliant strategy from confederate generals? Or is their existence an affront of the worst order: a celebration of treasonous men who tore the country apart and fought for a cause that would have denied freedom to millions of blacks?

Free State of Jones provided an intriguing perspective on these questions. It is often said that the confederate flag and confederate memorials merely represent southern heritage that we should honor. But, the movie suggests the answer is more complicated. It follows Newton Knight, a southern farmer opposed to slavery who deserts after losing his nephew in the war.

When he gets back to Mississippi and sees the confederate home guard pillaging supplies from civilians, he decides to lead a rebellion of his own–against the rebels. Working with escaped slaves and other deserters, he fights guerilla style for years. At one point, he even tries to work with Union General William Tecumseh Sherman.

Ironically, a confederate memorial stands in in Ellisville, Mississippi, which was “ground zero” for the rebellion in Jones County. The real-life version of Knight supported the Union just as strongly as the fictional version did. He so undermined the tax system in Jones county that the confederacy sent two regiments to take him out. They failed. After the war, he was an ally to blacks, ensuring that masters freed their slaves and fighting the Klan.

Knight was hardly the only white Southerner opposed to the confederacy. By some estimates, in fact, over 100,000 white Southerners fought for the Union. These men were just as “southern” as the men who fought for the rebels. But if you could transport them to today, would we seriously think that men who carried the American flag into battle would consider the confederate flag as representing their heritage?

Holding up the confederate flag as the symbol of southern heritage has always been in tension with the historical record. As you might suspect, it leaves out the 90,000 former slaves who fought in the Union army. Would a Mississippi slave who fled his master to join the Union army really regard the confederate flag as representing his heritage? Would he feel honored that monuments and public places fly it?

The Civil War echoes into our time. The things we were fighting about–racial equality, the proper role of the federal government, etc–are things we still are. As we grapple with how to remember the conflict, I hope we will do so with nuance. On that score, there is no better place to start than recogizing that the oft-overlooked southern unionists are an important part of southern heritage.

What Kids With Autism Have to Teach Us

Pop Culture

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We expend a great deal of effort to make kids normal in school. We have all sorts of interventions to help students with learning and intellectual disabilities live a “normal” life. The show Atypical should make us reconsider how we view autism. Most of the time, we think “how can we help autistic kids become more like us.” The question the show raises, is “in what ways should we become more like them?”

The show focuses on a high school senior named Sam as he navigates school, work, and family drama with autism. His autism imposes some limits–it makes it hard for him to be in crowded environments or unfamiliar settings–but he is able to function well. He holds down a job from which it looks like he’s managed to save every cent he’s ever earned. He maintains a close friendship with a co-worker and is a loving sibling. He has a talent for art and gets accepted to a scientific illustration program. Most parents, I’m sure, would be proud to have a son like him.

His biggest problem is that he struggles to lie. It is wrong to lie, simple as that. Living by this clear moral vision makes it hard for him to engage in the white lies almost everyone else does. He’s so bad at lying in fact, that he asks his mom to help him. Knowing that she cheated on his dad, he figured she was an expert at lying and tells her so to her face. It is the sort of truth that perhaps only someone lacking in social graces would tell, and one that she probably needed to hear.

So he convinces his coworker and friend Zahid to teach him the “pants on fire” lying technique to hilarious effect. It’s a simple three step process: first offer the person being lied to praise, second, respond to every question with “obviously,” and third, flee the scene. Sam manages to successfully lie, but not without experiencing great discomfort–the sort of discomfort the rest of society would be well-served to feel before lying.

We manage to give kids mixed messages about truth telling. We extol the virtues of honesty and then expect kids to tell others that they look nice in that ugly outfit, or that they enjoyed someone’s cooking even though it’s terrible. Perhaps these white lies are necessary to keep the peace. We would all get upset really quickly if everyone confronted us with their every thought. Perhaps they help us keep relationships and self-esteem intact.

But even these noble goals don’t provide clarity about when to tell the truth. You could justify all manner of lies by telling yourself you’re doing it for other people. Sam’s autism doesn’t allow him to go down that slippery slope. For him, truth is truth and should never be obscured. Right is right and wrong is wrong. These are simple insights, but ones we fail to realize all the time.

Injustice Doesn’t Pay in the Long Run

History, Pop Culture

Image result for spartacus

Spartacus was an entertaining series while it was on the air. And it contained a simple but profound message: injustice doesn’t pay in the long run.

The show was–loosely I’m sure– based on the slave revolt in ancient Rome. Spartacus was minding his business in Thrace when the Romans came by asking them to fight a common enemy. When their commander, Claudius Glaber instead used the men to fight a different enemy to gain greater glory for himself, Spartacus led a mutiny. When it was put down, Spartacus’ village was burned down, his wife was sold into slavery, and he was sentenced to die.

Surviving his execution, Spartacus became a slave to a gladiatorial trainer. He and his fellow gladiators lived in cages. Their sole purpose in life was to amuse Roman crowds in brutal spectacle where someone invariably died. It already wasn’t much of an existence, but then his master promised to buy his wife, only to have her killed lest she distract him from his gladiatorial pursuits.

Unsurprisingly, he came to hate the Roman system enough to revolt. He started by killing the master who had treated him so horribly and convincing his fellow slaves to join him. Across two seasons, he pillaged, killed, and humiliated his Roman enemies until subdued in a costly battle. And it’s wasn’t only slaveholders affected. I suspect many of the soldiers who fought him and the civilians killed by enraged followers did not have slaves. Slavery may have brought the Romans free labor and entertainment. But then it brought them destruction.

You’d think would-be slave owners throughout history would have learned. You’d think the Romans would have said “this whole slavery thing hasn’t turned out that well for us, maybe we should give it up. We could even pay people a fair salary to compete as gladiators and keep all the spectacle.” You’d think plantation owners in the antebellum era would have said “slavery sure brought those Romans a lot of pain. Being out here in this heat is no fun, but maybe we should do our own work.”

But no. The lure of cheap labor was too strong. People weren’t willing to pay for their wealth with honest work. So amid slave revolts, some paid with their lives. When people are robbed of hope and dignity like Spartacus was, they will consider doing desperate things like, I don’t know, stirring up a bloody rebellion.

Oppression doesn’t just hurt the oppressed. It eventually results in ruinous consequences for the oppressors. And everyone left in their wake.

Time for Arrow to End

Pop Culture

Image result for oliver queen

It’s time for Arrow to end after this season. It bring me no pleasure to say that given how much I’ve enjoyed the show over the years. But Oliver’s storyline is over, and without him, the show can’t realistically continue.

He started as a former playboy turned violent vigilante killing people to save his city. For almost two seasons, he was a mayor before getting impeached. He ended season six as…a violent vigilante killing people to save his city before turning himself in. He had come full circle. So, I don’t see how his storyline can advance. He can’t go back to politics. Staying in prison for several seasons would make for a boring show. And it’s hard to see how he could do anything new as a vigilante after confronting Damien Darkh, Malcolm Merlyn, or the League of Assassins. His storyline is exhausted.

That’s not to say that season 7 couldn’t be good. We could see what becomes of Starling city and Team Arrow in Oliver’s absence. Maybe the FBI and a new city government can get things under control. Or maybe the city descends into chaos. Either outcome would help answer the show’s long-running question of whether vigilantism is justified. If the city goes down in flames, the Green Arrow will have turned out to be necessary.

And we could see how Oliver copes with prison. Does he grapple with the fact that he’s lied and murdered? Or does he stay defiant and insist that he did what he had to to save his city? Season 7 can be the season where we see Oliver finally reckon with what all of his years on Lian Yu, working for the Bratva, and being the Arrow have cost him.

And after that, as much as I love it, it’s time for Arrow to end.

Bring Lawrence Back

Pop Culture

 

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Word on the street is that Lawrence isn’t coming back to Insecure. I really hope he does.

When the show began, I didn’t think I would care about his story arc. He appeared to stay at home all day while Issa went out and earned money to support them both. Maybe he was working on the computer app he pitched in season two (without success), but mostly I think, he sat on the couch and watched T.V. He was technically in a relationship with Issa, but it had no spark. In fact, things were so bad that when he said Issa’s friend Molly’s standards for a romantic partner were too high, Issa sarcastically retorted something along the lines of “maybe she should lower her standards like I lowered mine.” It was hard to fault her. I understood why she thought about dating Daniel.

But then Lawrence grew up. He got a job at Best Buy and then another one at a tech company. I always thought he was motivated by a sense of shame about not being the man Issa needed and a desire to become that man. As Lawrence began contributing to their household again, his relationship with Issa improved. Unfortunately, Issa had sex with Daniel, whom she had started to think of in romantic terms when her relationship with Lawrence was at rock bottom. She felt guilty and confessed at the end of season one, leading Lawrence to break up with her.

In season two, Lawrence and Issa uneasily shadowed each other. They went from sleeping together in the first episode to fighting each other at a birthday party. Finally, they had a heart-to-heart at the end. Issa apologized for cheating on him; Lawrence acknowledged that for a long time, he had been a bad partner. At one point, there was a touching scene when Issa imagined Lawrence asking her to marry him and them having a long and happy marriage. Of course, that was not to be. He forgave her, but it felt like the door was closed on their relationship.

So why bring him back when their relationship won’t continue? The first two seasons made me care how his journey ends. One question I have is whether he can find love. So far, the show has explored how the characters’ hang ups prevent them from finding the love they desire. Molly has a narrow view of what can make a good partner, and when she finds someone who’s eligible in her mind, she clings to him so hard that she scares him off.

For Lawrence, I wonder whether he’ll be able to trust another woman enough to love her. His relationship with Aparna (from work) looked promising. And he’s matured a great deal. It took honest reflection and wisdom for him to realize the role he played in Issa’s poor choices. True, she made the choice to cheat and that’s on her. But he understood that the temptation was there because he wasn’t a loving and supportive partner for so long.

For his relationship with Aparna to succeed, he’ll have to open his heart to her. That means being willing to assume the best in her and believe she’s fully committed to him. He has work to do in that regard. He got jealous when she laughed at some of her ex’s jokes. I have to think he was on high alert for any evidence of cheating after what happened with Issa. But no relationship can succeed if there is not mutual trust. Somehow, Lawrence will have to regain the ability to trust. I would love it if he does.

At the end of the day, I want the same thing for Lawrence I do for Issa and Molly: to find love. So come on Insecure. Bring him back.

How Much Liberty Would You Trade For Security?

Pop Culture

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After 9/11, the country was drawn into a familiar debate. With a war on terrorism ramping up, we had to ask how much authority we would give the government to protect us. How much personal information would we be willing to share? How much safer would a security measure have to make us to justify diminishing our privacy? I’m not sure we fully answered those questions, or that they’re fully answerable.

But Person of Interest gave us another chance to think about them. The idea is that a reclusive billionaire (Harold Finch) has developed a machine that can predict crimes in New York City before they happen. He and his partner (John Reese) work together to save the person in danger. To make its predictions, the machine must rely on surveillance footage from around the city. In other words, someone is always listening to your calls or reading your emails.

In the first two seasons, this seems like a good thing. Finch and Reese stop several murders before they happen. But what if the machine is not in good hands? In season 3, another artificial intelligence named Samaritan comes online at the behest of John Greer, someone who thinks he has humanity’s best interests at heart. He survived the German destruction of London during World War II and is convinced that humanity cannot peaceably govern itself. The problem is that Samaritan’s willing to do anything. It’ll hack elections–in one episode, it rigged vote totals in New York so that its preferred candidate could win the governorship. And it’s willing to kill.

Would we rather live in a world with such an artificial intelligence? It can stop all crime and stop wars if we allow it to monitor us nonstop and run our lives for us. That is, if we give up our liberty, it can give us security. This might seem more palatable when it’s Finch’s machine because Finch is a good man. He programmed it with the best of intentions. But it is easy to see any number of governmental officials justifying their encroachments on our freedom and privacy that way. They would tell themselves that the tools they create are meant to keep us safe, and that they would never abuse them. And they probably mean it a lot of the time.

But once a technology is created, bad people as well as good can use it. Once the machine was created, someone would inevitably use the knowledge gained to build Samaritan. As we continue to contemplate how to deploy new tools to protect us from crime and terrorism, Person of Interest reminds us to ask “what if someone who isn’t so noble gets their hands on this?”

Molly and Issa Already Found Love

Pop Culture

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When most of us talk about love, we mean romantic love. Issa Rae’s Insecure reminds us that that term applies just as much to our other relationships. At the center of the show are Issa and Molly, two awkward black girls trying to make their way in LA. The two spend much of their time trying to find satisfactory romantic relationships.

Issa starts season one with her boyfriend Lawrence. Unfortunately, Lawrence isn’t motivated to do anything. He’s been unemployed for four years and has refused to look for other jobs. He doesn’t appear to contribute to their relationship. When the tension boils over and they break up, Issa becomes involved with Daniel, an old flame. Lawrence eventually gets his act together, takes on one job, and then gets a job he’s passionate about. Their relationship improves. But the truth ultimately comes out. Just when their relationship is stronger than ever, Lawrence meets Daniel at a party and asks Issa how she knows him. Issa confesses she had an affair. This time, Lawrence breaks things off. At the end of season two, they had a heart to heart about their relationship, and while they both reached a place of understanding, I doubt they will get back together.

While Issa drifts out of a relationship, Molly fights to get in one. But one of two things always happens. Either she comes across as too clingy and drives the guy away or she writes a guy off who doesn’t meet her checklist of requirements. In the end, the best relationship she’s found is arguably with a man in an open marriage–a far cry from where she wants to be relationship-wise. Unless the show surprises us in season three, neither Issa nor Molly looks destined to find the romance she desires.

For me, one of the highlights is when Molly learns that her dad cheated on her mom. Her whole life, she has seen their marriage as the pinnacle of happiness. Here parents always support each other. They have a great rapport. They can finish each other’s sentences. They have history. And they both light up in each other’s presence. To Molly’s mind, this sort of connection is only possible in marriage.

Yet, that is what she has with Issa. The two always support each other, no matter what. When Issa is trying to raise money for her job at “We Got Ya’ll,” Molly contributes and attends a fundraiser. When Issa wrecks her car, Molly is the one to drive her around. They’re able to speak the truth to each other, even when it hurts, and have their friendship remain in tact. Issa tells Molly that all of her failed relationships have the same common denominator: Molly. Molly hates hearing that, of course, but eventually takes Issa’s suggestion to try therapy. They have fights where they scream horrible things at each other, but you never doubt they’ll make up afterwards.

At the end of the day, you always know they’ll be there for each other. You know they’ll sacrifice for each other and be vulnerable with each other. And they (usually) really like each other. That sounds like love to me. So, no matter what happens with their romantic endeavors, it isn’t right to say they’re looking for love. In each other, they already found it.