On Kevin Williamson And “Primate Territoral Challenge”

Ok I gave this issue some considerable thought.

...‘Hey, hey craaaaaacka! Cracka!White devil! F*** you, white devil!” The guy looks remarkably like Snoop Dogg: skinny enough for a Vogue advertisement, lean-faced with a wry expression, long braids. He glances slyly from side to side, making sure his audience is taking all this in, before raising his palms to his clavicles, elbows akimbo, in the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge. Luckily for me, he’s more like a three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg, a few inches shy of four feet high, probably about nine years old, and his mom — I assume she’s his mom — is looking at me with an expression that is a complex blend of embarrassment, pity, and amusement, as though to say: “Kids say the darnedest things, do they not, white devil?”....

While I’d heard of the brouhaha over Williamson’s hiring, I only came upon this specific issue today. I’ve occasionally read pieces by Williamson and am not a big fan. He’s smart; he’s provocative; he’s erudite. And his biggest strength is that he writes a terrific prose. And yet I find him in his writing creepily quirky, creepily idiosyncratic and with an angry sensibility. All that said, isn’t it making too much of this—“....in the universal gesture of *primate territorial challenge*...”—for it to anchor the argument that the Atlantic shouldn’t have hired him?

First, the phrase “primate territorial challenge” is more defensible than it is attackable. He’s not literally calling the kid a monkey. That view takes some reading in and extrapolating, which isn’t to say that that case can’t be made. But I judge it a weak one. He’s saying literally that the kid puts his palms on his collarbone with his elbows extended outwards. That’s the literal description. Then he characterizes that literal gesture as the “universal” one of primate territorial challenge. That it’s “universal” cuts against the reading that sees the kid being called a monkey. What Williamson describes is himself being seen and called out as the enemy, the “white devil,” “Cracka,” who gets a “Fuck you,” invading a foreign land where he ought not be. Williamson is setting up an elemental opposition here in wanting to paint how dire things are racially in East St. Louis, Illinois, so dire that what’s going is primal, elemental and in that universal. So in that context the reference to a “primate” gesture is apt. It’s white and black stripped down in East St. Louis to what is humanly basic, turf and its invasion. Williamson’s own defense of his phrase is that “we’re all primates,” (which is true, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-are-humans-primates-97419056/). And that defense comports with how I suggest that opening paragraph should be read. 

Defending textually what Williamson’s written actually leads to understanding how literarily skillful the whole paragraph is, how much is going on it beyond what I’ve just pointed out. The little basic drama between invading white man and kid is couched in humor, the humor of it being a little nine year old kid who is the main actor, the humor in the description of him as a pint size, fractional Snoop Dog, the humor in the shift in point of view to the kid’s mother expressing by her look yet another human universal gesture, namely, “....as though to say, “Kids say the darnedest things...” and the humor of the juxtaposed tail end of what she seems to be expressing, “...do they not white devil?” fusing humorously Williamson as the perceived “white devil” with “white devil” being simply the name he goes by in casual conversation. 

In sum, it’s a literarily rich paragraph, which when properly understood betrays no racism. 

But even if we were to stipulate that it does, still it’s incidental to the thrust of the long piece, which is an impassioned take down of a moribund, impotent failure of a white governor and an impassioned take down of a failed politics, as Williamson sees it from his perspective, which has exacerbated the immiseration he describes. (In fact, the very brunt of the piece and its tone of moral outrage at that exacerbation cut further against the charge of any racist writing in it.) So, on that stipulation, it’s one bad phrase in an otherwise stellar piece of writing; and it’s one bad phrase among countless pieces of Williamson’s journalism and the many books he’s written. That sentence and a few eccentric opinions can’t be the basis for the argument that the Atlantic oughtn’t have hired him. And maybe that’s what Jeffrey Goldberg, misreading the same impugned phrase, meant in his memo to the Atlantic staff when he said, paraphrase, “We’ve all made mistakes in our line of work. And we all deserve not to have our careers live or die by just them.”

Finally, there is nothing offensive in what Williamson has said that is anything more outrageously provocative than things Coates has said, Coates who—not for nothing—apparently counts Williamson as his favorite conservative writer.

On Nathan Robinson’s Take Down Of Jordan Peterson

3/26/18

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve

Jordan Peterson taken down here...

and hard.

The person who sent this said:

....Pretty good review of Peterson.  Robinson makes the point I was trying to make.  If you read Peterson with an open mind, you are going to be confused.  He says things in a vague and contradictory way, that don't allow rational debate.  To be fair, any position attributed to Peterson that he doesn't like he can always successfully refuted, because he has said something that is vague or contradictory that can be cited to "prove" the characterization is incorrect.

Robinson makes a good decision to quote at length from Peterson's own writing, so you can get a sense of just how nonsensical it really is.

Peterson is a bogus poseur and should be dismissed....

But read the below. 

I find it persuasive. 

Read Peterson.

I report. You decide.

——————————-

P.S. But now a day later with some thinking about this article, I responded to the above writer as follows about Peterson:

....I’ve thought more about this take down.

I think it operates at two levels, one good and one bad.

The good is that it points to what is evasive and hazy in Peterson, at his making word salad over some things that are so and wrapping them in inaccessible grand pronouncements that yield, as Robinson notes, the common reaction, “It’s me not him in my not fully getting him. I assume his depth and brilliance.” So there is some trying to hold on to water in trying to come to complete terms with him.

The bad is the obvious ideological bias and Robinson’s need over and over to overstate his case: nothing of what Peterson says makes sense; he’s quite empty; he’s dumb; he’s wrong on any point he makes;  it’s all a huge con. This line of criticism is absurd, actually. There is a lot that’s discernible in what he says, even short of ultimately understanding him. That’s evident where Robinson takes him on point by point and then keeps apologizing for lending Peterson a coherence of thought he does not have. So, it follows that 

Peterson’s obviously not simply fatuous. And this particular  criticism conflates what is hazy and inaccessible with what isn’t. So this criticism is absurd. He’s obviously not dumb. There’s no appraisal, for example, of his academic work. Not for nothing, but he was on a tenure track at Harvard and is a full prof at U of T, just being credentialist about it. And simply from observing him live, alone or in debate, and reading him, it’s plain and obvious there’s an erudite and high intelligence in operation. So that criticism, his stupidity, is absurd. Further on many of his discrete points—the excesses of feminist and queer theory, generically post modern theory, the excesses of social construction theory, the differences between male and female, the near inexorable relation between gender and sex, the profound overreach of progressivism as manifest, for one example, in the demand for equality of outcome, the scourge of identity politics, the zealotry of political correctness, the callowness of youth, the cult of victimization, grievance mongering, the institutionalizing of some parts of post modern theory, I could go on—he’s right, at least as I see it. So this criticism is absurd too and here Robinson’s ideological underwear shows explicitly as he assimilates his point by point disagreements with Peterson into his overall thesis of overstated fatuity. Which all of which  makes it clear that Peterson’s not a bedazzling con man. 

You and or your first source say what?

Glenn Loury And Amy Wax: Exploring The Need To State Facts Forthrightly And To Say What Needs To be Said On Race

https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/51751?in=03:13&out=07:07

A deep and searching exploration of the issues involved here,  which stem from Amy Wax having publicly said that black students significantly underperform at Penn Law School where she’s a full professor.

In two comments below is the beginning of some discussion about the diavlogue.

S:

....I have to say, I find her to be quite compelling in her arguments as well.

But at times I think she wants to have it both ways. She insists that she was making a very limited point in a very specific area: that on average, her black students simply aren't performing at the level of other racial groups in her classes, and that their energies would be better spent studying than looking for racism as an explanation for why that's the case. And she wants to rest on that being empirically true, and to leave it at that.

But she also seems very comfortable with the idea that this is a much more generalizable phenomenon. From her criticisms and examples (the ivy league Dean position at a medical school for instance), it seems very clear that in her mind, what's happening in her class is what's happening everywhere. And she doesn't seem very curious about whether anything but good old fashioned hard work explains it.

Now, it's true that part of her argument is that we simply don't have the data to know what's really going on. I'm not totally sure whether that's a problem or not. As Loury says, there are many things we don't say, or don't publish, for many reasons. Would a racial breakdown of grades at schools across the country improve or harm things? It seems to me that could go both ways. And in any case, the reasons for why those disparities exist would bring us right back to the same place we've been, with competing stories from progressives and conservatives. 

One thing I would have liked Wax to do was to be more curious about a broader scope of literature than performance measurement. I would think a great many social scientists would have a great many things to say about the topic - sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, etc. It sometimes seems as though she's stuck on a particular line of thought.....

Me:

Me in answer:

....Thanks S for your thoughtful perspective.

A few comments on your first two paragraphs, which I think are, too, responsive to your final ones.

I see no both wayism and that’s my main point here.

As to your first paragraph: I go back first of all to one of Loury’s last questions: he says, paraphrase, she can’t say that her conclusions about black underperformance are based on a rigorous study of voluminous data, can she? She says she cannot. She says here and elsewhere that she was making a narrow point based on her own observations and teaching experience. She says generally that what prompted her saying back in September what she did about underperformance was in the context of a question, if I have this right, about “mismatch,” a term of art, in affirmative action. She doesn’t say she has a rigorous empirical basis for what she’s observed—partly because her school, like others, won’t release racially gathered records of performance—but she does say that it’s settled statistics that blacks on average do measurably less well than whites and Asians on the LSAT, in law school performance measured by grades, in finishing law school and in passing the bar. She notes that what she observes is pretty consistent with that settled data. And she generally notes that there is a grievance culture that pettifogs everything as racist, that the students who purvey it don’t get down to their main task—say mastering in one instance the law or medicine or whatever else they’re to learn—and that that culture finds validation and vindication in grievance rather than in buckling down and succeeding. This last point, the cultural observations about grievance, *isn’t* claimed by her to be empirically supported but is rather what she observes and, so, characterizes. 

Still with your first paragraph, I don’t know what exactly you mean by “leave it that.” She’s here essentially  reprising and giving context to what she said back in September and answering Loury’s effective devil’s advocate criticisms of her position and how she had set it out.

Getting to your second paragraph that fills in your charge of two wayism, I don’t agree with your characterization as it appears there. In answer to Loury’s illogical counter argument that no one knows all the facts, and so there may be ways of her articulating her position without stressing what is evidently so personally hurtful and diminishing to the subjects of it, she says, that we must proceed in clearly stated, non gratuitous way from what the facts are—facts have no feelings—to what remedies lie at hand to ameliorate them. There is no other way. And one of the facts is the paucity of black and Hispanic candidates for very top positions that require the highest level of academic excellence—the top of the top 1%. (She is vehement, as am I, in her rejection of equality of outcome and disparate impact theory.) But to make clear that plain fact—paucity of candidates—is verboten, even in answer to a charge of racism as explaining racially disproportionate outcomes. All of this is getting down to the brunt of her argument in defending what she’s charged with and critiquing the critics. 

Having just said all that in the foregoing paragraph, my first point in answer to two wayism is that the why of underperformance isn’t the subject of this exchange. It’s implicated in it to be sure, but it’s hardly two wayism not to explore in depth a question that isn’t essential *to this particular discussion.*

My second point is that in any event her alleged incuriosity is a canard. Besides that the why of underperformance isn’t the point of the diavlogue, she in fact is curious enough to have written a book on the why of it—Race, Wrongs, and Remedies—as well as any number of essays, op eds and articles. And from her studies she has an analysis and a position. To reduce it all simply to “good old fashioned work hard” is reductive and superficial but not necessarily inaccurate as a metonym for a deep analysis of what can be done as a matter of state craft and what must be done as a matter of “self craft” and “community craft” to ameliorate an undoubted horrific past of terrible treatment. It’s to be noted tangentially that there are plenty of black thinkers, including Loury, who either share her view or at least don’t dissent from it.

A general point: it’s not that she’s heedless of or indifferent to or doesn’t  bother with other perspectives. In her work on the culture and data of why, she’s reviewed plenty of them and doesn’t agree with them, especially on how much the state can ultimately do, and on the ascriptions of systemic and institutional racism as the why. 

Finally, as I first noted, my read is that Loury in the end, after playing the devil’s advocate, which he does I think very effectively, is somewhere between agreeing with her and not dissenting sharply from her.......

Yale vs Hard Knocks: Founders As Devisors Of Limited Government

3/21/18

A slight disagreement between me and my friend who went to Yale:

Yale:

....The Founding fathers were worried about factionalism and the people.  Thus the Senate and the electoral college and the division of powers.  In other words, afraid of parliamentary government.  They were members of an elite and elitist.  They were "Romans" not democrats.  Or so I learned in school.  Never explored it for myself...

Me—The School of Hard Knocks:

....They were also worried, axiomatically worried, about majority tyranny. Rights, they said, come first, then comes Government. Every citizen is sovereign unto himself, endowed by his Deistic creator with inalienable rights constituting their individual liberty, not to be trenched on, not to be unreasonably infringed. For the founders govt exists to protect these rights, which are susceptible to both overweening govt and majority tyranny:

....That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed....

And so the founders’ conception is of limited government, limited because unnnecssary due to self governing individuals, which makes education fundamental to an informed citizenry, which itself makes individual self government possible....

Yale:

....I think they were concerned with tyranny, however it came into being (democracy did not preclude tyranny, indeed tyrants got into power via the people) and were concerned that the people might be swayed in the moment, so they interposed a deliberative elite between the people and the final outcome.  I think limited government is a more recent notion that follows on the great extension of the federal power over the years...

Hard Knocks (goat a little gotten):

....You’re dead wrong.

If the founders weren’t concerned with limiting govt right from the jump, they wouldn’t have limited the federal govt to a few *enumerated* heads of jurisdiction, and wouldn’t have made  it the opposite of our (Canadian) constitution, which gives the federal govt all residual power under POGG—Peace, Order and Good Government. 

The animating theory of the founding documents derived from Locke who argued that we’re by nature free and equal and argued against claims that God made all people *naturally* subject to a monarch or a civil authority....

Yale:

....This is from a conservative website:

"Many believe that the tenth amendment reserved to the states all power not enumerated in the Constitution for the national government.  This is an over-simplification.  The Tenth Amendment reads: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.  The people ratified the Constitution which gave the national government enumerated powers.  The people also delegated differing levels of power to the various state governments. All power not delegated to a component of this federal system, is reserved to the people."

The  Bill of Rights limits the powers of those governments.  I think you are thinking of federal over-reach, when talk of "limited government" with great passion.  It is not that government as such over-reaches, but the US federal government, and state governments have done so too.  No-one thinks government power is absolute.  I don't see why that is an issue.  

Elite was the wrong word.  They wanted to ensure deliberation and not have direct democracy, which they thought could be dangerous, given to quick shifts of opinion.    

Hard Knocks, (coup de grace, maybe):

...I don’t know if we’re quarreling over semantics. 

The states that formed the United States had their powers set before that formation. They convened to define how they would come together under a central authority. Broadly, their concern was to limit the power of that central authority, the federal government. England, not so much now, was a unitary state with its form of parliamentary democracy marked by the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy, which itself is rooted in the unlimited power of the king, in whose name the government acts. 

So when I speak of limited government, I mean precisely that, a government with a limited, enumerated, set of jurisdictional powers and no residual power. 

So of course there was a concern with central govt overreach but that notion isn’t exclusive of limiting the powers of the federal government. Overreach, then, goes to the government trenching, or legislating, or reaching outside it competence, beyond its enumerated powers. That is a “division of powers” issue. And overreaching goes to the government overreaching even when purporting to legislate within its proper sphere of power. 

From Wiki:

....The reasons why the authors of the Constitution saw fit to limit the power of the government are set forth in the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson. Here, Jefferson outlines three basic assumptions widely held in the American colonies that supporters of the Declaration believed were not held by the English monarchy. These assumptions are that all men are created equal, they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights and governments are instituted in order to preserve these rights. It was the fact that the English government was not adhering to these premises that the colonies saw fit to establish their own government in which all three would be respected...

The literature on the founders as devisors of limited government is big. You must have taken a Civics course in your wayward youth....

....P.S. Limited government of course also inheres in the founders’ devising of a separation of coequal powers among the executive, the legislature and the judiciary and of checks and balances...

Darkest Hour

3/15/18

I just saw Darkest Hour and I liked the movie a lot. I read that Churchill’s grandson, who now sits in the British parliament, said that besides some understandable artistic license, the movie is an accurate portrayal. 

I can’t judge how far off from the historical record the portrayal of Churchill is but I see it as of the emergence of this great shambles of a highly, highly talented man, imperfect in many respects, a failure in many respects, to great leadership and resolve when the times most called for it. 

So I don’t see the portrayal of his many warts and blemishes as our moments’s need to downsize greatness. I see it rather as an effective dramatization of his dealing both within himself and externally with the all the incredible pressures raining downing on him at this time of greatest existential peril. 

In fact I think that critics are too harsh in judging Lord Halifax as the movie presents him. I think the movie gives his argument fair force and dramatizes superbly the Churchill Halifax/Chamberlain debate with compelling arguments on both sides as to whether to negotiate or fight. 

Sure, Darkest Hour, (which is just before dawn,) gets schmaltzy near the end with the subway ride and Churchill drawing strength and wisdom from the people as King George advises him to do. But there’s nothing schmaltzy about Churchill’s great parliamentary speech that ends the movie on a properly rousing note. 

And hey, any historical inaccuracy notwithstanding, Gary Oldman’s performance is one for the record books....

A Reverse Modest Proposal: Conrad Black, Jonathan Swift And Justin Trudeau?

http://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-mr-trudeau-if-he-can-should-get-serious-about-running-this-country

3/14/18

A reverse Modest Proposal? 

Sure, there is a certain bluster in his tone, an overweening self confidence that might be taken down a notch. But for all that, there is in his journalism an authoritativeness in combination with his wide and deep understanding of a broad range of policy issues, born of his erudtion and experience, that marks Conrad Black’s unique excellence among Canadian journalists. Not many can match him for erudition and polemical forcefulness.

Here his advice to Justin Trudeau reads like Swift’s Modest Proposal. Not that his culminating hope, namely: 

....It is not too late for the Trudeau government to assemble a good record for its re-election, and it is time for better government in Toronto and Ottawa, whether by change of party or the grace of conversion....

rests on advice akin to the poor Irish selling their children to the wealthy for their dining. Rather the satiric absurdity of Swift’s proposal measures how remotely far from probability it is that Black’s sane policy advice will be taken up by the liberals as opposed to the virtue tolling that marks so much of liberal policy. The heights of this tolling seem evident in Trudeau’s ridiculous costuming of himself and his family in traditional Indian get up, a photo op bridge way  too far. 

My Take On Three Billboards Outside, Ebbing Missouri

3/10/18

Three Billboards: 2.9 out of 5.

I’m long to be sure as to why but what the hell.

Spoiler alerts up the yin yang. 

I didn’t much like Three Billboards Outside, Ebbing Missouri, which I saw yesterday.

It focuses on two central characters, Frances McDormand as Mildred and Sam Rockwell as Dixon, who both have ugly souls, and are near to crazy, near to sociopathic. I don’t see where the screenwriter-director, McDonagh, has any sympathy for them save for an undercut smidge at movie’s end when he allows some humanity in, some of it showing up as McDormand and Rockwell drive to Idaho debating whether to kill a guy who had nothing to do with the rape and burning to death of McCormand’s daughter but who, they think, must have raped and burned some other girl. 

After initial enthusiasm to go and do it, doubts emerge in both of them as they start their drive to Idaho. They’ll decide as they go, they agree and so the movie ends, pointlessly. 

To me, the intense drama and the black humor, abundant in the movie,  mitigate each other. So what is the point of including them both? Black humor is at bottom a mode of fantasy; it involves cruelty, hurt and violence wrenched out of all realism, like a Roadrunner cartoon, so that we laugh at what we’re seeing and maybe our laughter gets us some insight into our own insensitivity to the human darkness of what we laugh at. 

So black humor doesn’t sit consistently or easily with intense drama, which wants to rivet us so that our emotions respond to that intensity. Intense drama and black humour come at us from opposed thematic premises and when mixed together the effects are incoherent, which is to say, pointless.

Therefore Frances McDormand’s unrelenting fury over her daughter’s horrific murder, her fury blackened even more by the crime having become just another cold case, is at first understandable. The three billboards are understandable. But her gnawing, one note anger starts to wear a little thin. Her inner ugliness becomes dominant and she wears it vividly in face, body and dress. 

After Harrelson as Willoughby the sheriff explains to her that case has gone cold and that he’s dying of cancer and would she please take the billboards down, our sympathies shift. She refuses. He’s right and her she’s wrong. 

Her rapt fury, intensifying by the minute, comes to seem increasingly  unjustified and unhinged. She drives a dental drill through the finger of an opinionated dentist, who proclaims his loyalty to Willoughby. She’s a crazed antihero, a crazed vigilante, fuelled by her own resolute, absolute sense of moral justification. She fire bombs the police station and then lets the town’s dwarf car salesman alibi her, which then gets her to promise him dinner but only with an assurance that he can’t fuck her. So the horror of the fire bombing that nearly burns Rockwell alive becomes in the end bizarrely blackly comic. 

Why? 

To what end?  

Why is her crazed, embittered self righteousness made in the end here laughable? As I say, the movie ends with her, in a more mellow tone, wondering whether maybe she shouldn’t kill a guy who had nothing to do with her daughter’s death after all. So, again, what’s the point? 

I could make a similar run through Rockwell as Dixon, a swaggering, drunken, comic book-reading, dumb, violent racist cop who is also the mama’s boy to an old, salty boot of a mother who guides him in trying to force the removal of the billboards by suggesting that he manipulatively arrest McDormand’s friends.

But in this do we maybe have a clue as to Three Billboards’s point? Maybe he’s not as dumb as he seems;  no one is all that they seem to be; continually the movie undercuts our expectations by details and little incidents that defy them. This all gives way to the theme of a more complex humanity than we might otherwise have expected. 

So Willoughby in his ante-suicide letter to Rockwell tells him he has the makings of a good detective if he’d only stop and think before he acts out of rage. And the letter lets us know that Rockwell’s father died when Rockwell was young and he had the burden from then on of needing to support his mother, which has fuelled his own malevolent anger. 

Similarly, Willoughby, a seeming saint of a man, in the right against Mildred being in the wrong as to the unsolved murder, has twists to him. His sewer mouth before his children, two little girls, takes us at least mildly aback. His suicide, a unilateral act, is morally ambiguous, at a minimum. 

Why shock his wife and kids that way? Why take his own life right on his property where his dead body with massacred bloody head will be shockingly found? Why not eke out more life with his family before living becomes unbearable? There’s no indication he’s in pain or even dysfunctional: as his unknowing wife says to him on the evidence of her own body and just before his shoots himself,

 ...That was a real nice day. That was a real nice fuck. You got a real nice cock, Mr. Willoughby...

Most of all, Willoughby while alive abides on the  job his dumb, racist thug deputy, Rockwell, the very Rockwell who tortures prisoners, who beats on the blacks he arrests, who’s a drunk on the job, who’s menacingly violent on and off the job, who’s in a nutshell the archetypal good ol’ boy southern Sheriff like Jim Clark. And Willoughby, as I noted, tells Rockwell in his letter to him that he’s got the makings of a good detective. 

There’s been a criticism of the movie that it oughtn’t have allowed Rockwell any semblance of redemption. That criticism may be overwrought and may misread the ending. True enough, he and Mildred find some compassion for each other later in the film. In that, Rockwell sacrifices his body and endures a vicious beating to get the DNA of a guy—a dark presence in the film—he thinks has admitted to the rape and burning murder of Mildred’s daughter.

But what’s the upshot of this semblance of redemption? Rockwell and McDormand presumptively agree to kill that guy in some bizarre attempt at revenge and expiation even though they both know he’s innocent of that crime. And that’s all they know. (It’s to be remembered that Mildred fought with her daughter, who could no longer stand living with her, on the fateful night, refusing her use of the car. Her daughter screams at her, paraphrase, “Ok, I’ll walk. I hope I get raped.” Mildred screams back at her, paraphrase, “I hope you do too.” Mildred throughout the movie is trying to expiate her guilt over that. In trying to do that she rides remorselessly roughshod over others.)  Mildred is an unconstrained ugly bag of human misery: but she’s been that before the murder; and she’s even more of that after it. 

So what’s the point of this illusory redemption; what’s the thematic resolution here, which can include coherent irresolution? I’m saying there’s none, that Three Billboards collapses in its own incoherence with its director, McDonagh, too clever by half, thematically flailing in his unholy mixing of intense drama and black humor, each biting into the effect of the other.

I have two other considerable bones to pick.

First, for all the moral deficiencies and enigmas marking almost all the white characters, why are all the black characters shown as wholly good and  morally uncompromised? This cleavage cuts against what I strugglingly understand the movie’s theme to be: something like that people and events are wretchedly ugly but complicated, with the worst people having back stories that provide some ameliorating understanding and with the repulsive characters having some smidgeons of decency and humanity, all of which continually defies our expectations. 

One example: McDormand in a restaurant walks menacingly up to her wife beating ex husband and his extremely dumb 19 year old girlfriend, who doesn’t know the difference between polo and polio, menacingly carrying a bottle of wine but then winds up giving them the bottle and admonishing her ex, paraphrase, to “take good care of her.” 

But there are no surprises complicating the black characters’ unmitigated goodness. Seems like some sucky, virtue signaling pc to me. 

Second, apart from the black characters, why is almost everyone else in the film so sneered at, so looked down on, so presented as miserable, dumb, ugly fucks? To me it smacks sharply of harsh fly over dismissive condescension, an awful lot of shitting on southern midwest hicks. That together with the angelic representation of the black characters stamps this film with the blurry ink of the worst kind of smug, elitist liberalism. 

Is all what I think anyway.