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Source: lgbtq.yale.edu
1946, a documentary film made in 2022 by Sharon "Rocky" Roggio, refers to the fateful decision by the committee producing the Revised Standard Version of the Bible to render two Greek words in I Corinthians 6:9 as the single word "homosexuals," thus including gays and lesbians with "the immoral, nor idolators, nor adulterers" and others as the "unrighteous [who] will not inherit the kingdom of God." I saw her film at St. Stephen's Lutheran Church in Cedar Rapids.
Watching "1946" at St. Stephen's Cburch
1946 is not about the translation itself, the origins of which remain mysterious even in the committee's archives at Yale University, but about those of us who live in its aftermath. We meet Roggio herself, a lesbian who struggles to maintain her family relationship even as her father becomes a prominent anti-gay preacher; Kathy Baldock, whose dogged research provides the basis for the film's argument; Ed Oxford, a gay theology scholar who works with her; and Davis S., whose 1959 letter documented the committee's error, prior to a long career as a pastor in the United Church of Canada. Each suffers some impacts from the dominant theological interpretation.
Their inquiries are supported throughout the film by a number of biblical scholars, most memorably Rabbi Steven Greenberg, author of Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition (Wisconsin, 2004), whose reflection on the phrase "Fuck you" I will be pondering for a long time.
By the time (1969) the RSV committee, spurred by Davis S.'s criticism, voted to change their translation from "homosexuals" to "sexual perverts," the horse was out of the barn. Other versions of the Bible, like the New International Version and the Living Bible, continued to follow the RSV's use of "homosexuals," and today are in much wider use than the RSV and its successor versions. In fact, according to the film, the Living Bible added five more references to "homosexuals" that don't appear in the RSV.
My third grade presentation Bible, Revised Standard Version
The scholars walk us through the context that is often lost when people quote other Biblical passages that have been used to condemn homosexuality: the destruction of Sodom in Genesis 19 with its echo in Judges 19, a series of verses in Leviticus 18 and 20 known as "the clobber verses," Romans 1:26-27. They argue that the verses condemn sexual exploitation and/or decadent living, not to same-sex relationships.
The personal focus of the film, even as it works through the minutiae of biblical translation and interpretation, is essential. As I wrote concerning Pope Francis a few days ago, so much changes when we make the subject people rather than rules. 1946 clearly shows the damage done by biblical interpretation that casts out gays and lesbians. I don't know, however, that they make the case that the committee "shifted culture" with their decision. As another viewer at St. Stephen's--it was Jonathan Ice, in case you happen to know him--noted, "Homophobia was not invented in 1946."
But the committee's chosen language was certainly handy in the 1970s when the burgeoning gay rights movement met with backlash. It was 1972, for example, when the United Methodist Church added a statement that homosexuality was "incompatible" with Christian teaching to its Book of Discipline. The 1970s saw the emergence of the Moral Majority, Christian Broadcasting Network, National Christian Action Coalition, and other organizations that the Republican Party led by Ronald Reagan skillfully wove into its electoral coalition. They had the RSV language to draw on, but orthodox Christians and political opportunists probably could have made just as much hay with previous constructions.
I don't know, either, how many minds will be changed by 1946. Textual criticism of the Bible has been suspect in a lot of believers' eyes since its emergence in the latter half of the 19th century. However, I think Sharon Roggio's careful presentation provides a path to reconciliation for those who are increasingly troubled by what they've been taught the Bible says. It surely provides assurance to Christians, like young Sharon and young Ed Oxford, who feel cast out of the presence of God by their sexuality.
So, what did English-language Bibles say before 1946? Fortunately, I have a small collection of my family's pre-RSV Bibles. Here's how they render I Corinthians 6:9-10.
Both my mom and my mother-in-law received presentation Bibles in the King James Version:
Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind. Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
My dad received the Standard American edition of the Revised Version (1901), which varied only slightly from the original King James Version but with possible significance:
Or know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with men...
My copy of The Bible: An American Translation (1935) was formerly owned by my Uncle Ralph and Aunt Margaret:
Do you not know that wrongdoers will not have any share in God's kingdom? Do not let anyone mislead you. People who are immoral or idolaters or adulterers or sensual or given to unnatural vice or thieves or greedy--drunkards, abusive people, robbers--will not have any share in God's kingdom.
The oldest non-KJV translation I found at my church's library was A New Translation by James Moffatt (1935 edition):
What! Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the Realm of God? Make no mistake about it, neither the immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor catamites nor sodomites nor thieves nor the lustful nor the drunken nor the abusive nor robbers will inherit the Realm of God.
"Catamites" are, it turns out, the victims of homosexual pedophiles. Based on the scholarship in 1946, that is a worse translation of the Greek than the RSV.
Whatever the translation you're consulting, if you want to find the whole population of gays and lesbians on those lists, you'll find them, however uncharitable your quest. As for the "clobber verses," Leviticus spends at least as much time on menstruating women than it arguably does on homosexual men (not lesbians, interestingly). "If a man lies with a woman during her period, and uncovers her nakedness, he has laid bare her flow, and she has laid bare her flow of blood; both of them shall be cut off from their people" (Lev. 20:18, NRSV). Any attempt to make that the foundation of a doctrinal schism, such as the United Methodists lately have experienced, would be ridiculous. If we as a society can get used to the idea that some of us menstruate, we can get used to the idea of same-sex relationships.
The documentary Cooked: Survival by Zip Code had its genesis in telling the story of a tortuous heat wave in Chicago in July 1995, in which 739 people died. Filmmaker/narrator Judith Helfand observes early that this event is "not part of our collective memory" the way that 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina are. Author Eric Klinenberg, who served as content advisor for Cooked, called the heat wave a "disaster in slow motion," which might have made it less memorable.
Judith Helfand (from pbs.,org)
For urbanists, the Chicago heat wave is recalled mainly thanks to Klinenberg's book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago, 2003), which investigated the effects of place ("zip code") on mortality in the event. Klinenberg's book is plugged by Jane Jacobs in Dark Age Ahead (Random House, 2004), which I had just finished rereading before I saw the film. Jacobs praises Klinenberg for pursuing the trail of evidence to make significant connections, rather than fitting the catastrophe into a convenient existing narrative.
As Helfand spins out the story, we see the City of Chicago's improvised response, including a bunch of refrigerator trucks full of corpses that were parked outside the coroner's office for weeks until they were able to sort through all the bodies. We see Mayor Richard M. Daley at press conferences doing rather obvious blame avoidance. It took years for Klinenberg's research to clarify what a lot of people already suspected: the deaths during the heat wave were predominantly occurring in neighborhoods that were largely nonwhite and poor. It is in those neighborhoods--Englewood and North Lawndale are two examples--where large numbers of people don't have air conditioning, have their windows nailed shut to thwart home invasion, lack nearby grocery stores where they could buy ice, and lack places to gather (like public libraries or senior centers) where they might find relief during hottest part of the day. (Some police stations made themselves available, but not surprisingly there were few takers.)
Getting better in Gage Park? Pete's Fresh Market, 57th and Kedzie (Google Earth screenshot)
Cooked draws the obvious conclusion: Those who died in that heat wave almost 30 years ago, like those who died or lost their homes in Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, died of heat or some other proximate cause, but what killed them was the systemic racism and poverty. "This disaster was man made," Helfand concludes. (For the disproportionate impact of urban heat islands on poor people, see Fitzpatrick 2024 and Anderson and McMinn 2019.) Here Jacobs, following Klinenberg, makes the additional point that black neighborhoods with better urban fabric had a lot fewer deaths than North Lawndale.)
There is some though not very much attempt to describe how racism in particular is responsible for so much death and misery: there is a brief discussion of redlining, and how that influenced blacks' ability to buy and maintain their homes; there are some pictures and memories of a vibrant business district in Englewood that no longer exists since manufacturing employment dried up; and research showing segregation (both racial and economic) has devastating lifelong effects on people consigned to the underclass.
Concentrated poverty affects crime victimization, too (Source: Pattillo et al. 2018)
Helfand spends too much time staging "gotcha" questions for people who provide disaster preparedness equipment and services. (The city now has its own refrigerator truck for corpses, so it no longer will have to use trucks owned by private firms!) Given the accumulated evidence, it's fair to ask why we spend so much on equipment and flood walls to reduce damage from extreme weather, but don't address the poverty and racism that are at the root of disaster mortality ("extreme social fault lines"). I just don't think it's fair to ask people who are immersed in other things.
16th and Central Park in North Lawndale, 2022 (Google Earth screenshot)
Late in the film we meet Michelle Dauber, author of The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (University of Chicago, 2012), who argues that those impacted by natural disasters are seen as deserving of help, but "our history and tradition" is that the poor do not. She speculates that people with resources can imagine being impacted by a weather event, and want and expect to be protected, but they can't imagine being black or extremely poor. I would add that we know how to build flood walls and levees, and how to mitigate the effects of urban heat islands (Kingson 2024), but even expensive engineering is less complicated than solving racism. So the film shows us the irony of a lavishly-funded tornado response drill amidst the abandoned and derelict buildings of Englewood. (I make the same argument about Bike to Work Week.)
As a social scientist, I would have liked more discussion of the ways in which racism and poverty have informed and been replicated by policy choices, and how those choices have differentially affected people's life prospects. I don't remember them even mentioning the Interstate Highway System, or antiblack riots, of which Tulsa's is the best known but Chicago had one, too, two years earlier, in 1919.
Houses and shops that got bulldozed for the Dan Ryan Expressway (my photo at the National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.)
The coverage in Cooked of how the heat wave played out in poor black neighborhoods is eye-opening and shocking to the conscience. There's not a lot about what needs to be done about racism and poverty, only that it needs to be done. So it's too easy for a viewer to say, well, I'm not racist, so what can I do? Many people know about slavery (which ended in 1865), and Southern Jim Crow laws, but it's less widely known how racial preference has pervaded American society since then, and even racial preferences that have ended (like in housing) have persistent effects. One of the things that keeps your humble blogger humble is that as a white person born to a middle class family in suburbs that were long closed to nonwhites, he has had opportunities that others have not had.
Undoing those advantages is not going to be easy. I think part of it is going to be to create a broader social safety net, so that social goods are not zerosum i.e. the perception that any remedial gains made by blacks are going to come at the expense of whites. Neoconservative economic policy and loose inheritance taxes have been good for a few but have created vulnerability for the many--of all races--that has constrained social justice (and made a lot of young people cynical about capitalism in general) while limiting opportunities for anyone not a "knowledge worker." Most people who oppose housing integration are worried about their property values, which comprise the larger part of their life savings.
Poverty is complex: housing matters, but so do transportation and connections to opportunities
If we can tamp down the widespread and mostly accurate feeling that if you fall no one is going to be there to catch you, then we can move on to undoing the effects the policies that have favored white people for years, which means... reparations. We need some intelligent, inclusive way of compensating for years of thwarted opportunities.
Short of that, and I admit these goals seem overly ambitious these days, we need to make policy with more attention to second-order consequences, specifically how it will affect poor and other vulnerable populations. The good news is the double-win of addressing poverty and racism means, not only we do right by the ideals we profess like equal justice and opportunity, but also, everyone is better off. Pete Saunders, whom I quote at every opportunity, argues on his Substack (as well as in Crain's Chicago Business) that "inequality is inefficiency," and "the industrial cities of the north have long been hamstrung economically by the most intense racial divides in the country," in part because "white Northern community leaders aggressively worked to keep the races apart."
If we can make inclusive opportunity the focus of broad public policy, we make a lot of social goals achievable. Helfand's documentary vividly shows the awful human consequences of not doing that.
For the role of large retailers in concentrated poverty, see Susan Holmberg, Power Play: How Monopolies Leverage Systemic Racism to Dominate Markets, and What We Can Do to Democratize Economic Power (Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 2024). Maybe we should start by vigorously pursuing anti-trust enforcement, instead of dismantling the regulatory apparatus. In the meantime, communities are often at the mercy of megaretailers, megabanks, and megawaste disposal firms. A video presentation by Holmberg is available here.
For efforts at inclusive investing, see Lynne Richardson and Tracy Hadden Loh, "Helping Community Leaders Buy Back the Block," Brookings, 11 July 2024. "Redefine what kinds of projects are considered good when evaluating impact and return on investment. If a small project brings new and/or additional needed goods, services, and amenities to a community and performs financially to be sufficiently profitable and self-sustaining, that is good. If such a project is led or owned by a local resident or a person of color (inclusive economic development) and is not extractive (as opposed to businesses offering check cashing or furniture rental at predatory rates) and is not detrimental to residents’ life expectancy, that is even better. If such a project checks all of these boxes and is also desired by residents, that is the Holy Grail."
Last year's National Geographic documentary, Paris to Pittsburgh, highlights local and grass-roots efforts to combat climate change, against the backdrop of the growing threat and the utter failure of the American national government (and most state governments) to take it seriously. The film's tone is positive--encouraging as well as optimistic--which is both a strength and a weakness.
The warning signs keep coming. Tuesday the World Resources Institute published a report showing declining groundwater supplies causing "extremely high water stress" in 33 large cities with a combined population of 255 million; climate change exacerbates the problem, due to droughts as well as faster evaporation on hotter days (Sengupta and Cai 2019). Today the United Nations reports that climate change is exacerbating stress on land and water resources caused by overpopulation and poor management (Flavelle 2019). Scientists have found evidence for the impact of climate change on a broad variety of fronts. (See theseposts for a sampling of such research from 2014.) And there's the escalating pile of natural disasters that happen around America and compete for attention and federal governmental relief.
Attention, as the saying goes, must be paid. And yet year after year, American politics remains stuck on whether this phenomenon exists at all. The film takes its title from President Trump's 2017 statement announcing American withdrawal from the international agreement known as the Paris Accord: "I was elected to represent the people of Pittsburgh, not Paris." The statement was apparently crafted for its alliterative charm rather than actual engagement with anyone in actual Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as one theme repeated throughout the film was the efforts of the mayor, city council, and citizens to do what they could in the absence of national action. Meanwhile, the administration props up coal mining corporations, staffs itself with climate change deniers, and tries to block states like California from mandating higher fuel efficiency standards.
This approach has been politically successful, which surely terrifies anyone who finds the climate change models even somewhat persuasive. President Trump was elected once, and may well be elected again, and anyhow Republicans at the state level have taken a similar approach: Florida (Florida, readers!) governor Rick Scott has banned the phrase "climate change" from state agency communications, and North Carolina in the administration of Pat McCrory barred any research at all into mitigation. The Atlantic Ocean is, I assume, duly impressed.
Getting ready to watch the film at St. Paul's United Methodist Church
I suppose no one can possibly take a position like "our activities are destroying life on the planet, but I refuse to do anything about it." So the only available way to justify refusal to act is to deny that there's anything to act against. Some may be motivated by economic interests: the film calls out Exxon, Koch Industries, and Shell. But that's a tiny number of people. Why are their denials falling on such fertile soil? I think there are three reasons:
political/ideological resistance. Climate change evidence has been produced by scientists, who are elites; policies to address it have been pushed by environmentalists; and effective action will require government at the national and international levels. There are a lot of people who find some or all of those to be anathema.
complexity. Climate is complicated. A number of factors influence it, including but not restricted to human activities; it's easily confused with weather, which by the way is just gorgeous in Cedar Rapids today; scientific projections have a wide range of outcomes; and the impact so far includes a wide variety of sometimes-opposite phenomena (floods, droughts, heat waves, cold waves). Climate change is at the same time both too erratic and too subtle.
despair. The international scope of climate change means anything we do, or the United States does, can be counteracted by someone else. Moreover, seven decades of the suburban development pattern that is decried by urbanists mean we're stuck in a particular kind of built environment that constrains efforts to live more sustainably. It can seem hopeless.
Wisely, Paris to Pittsburgh focuses its effort on the despair obstacle. Its callouts are few and brief, it spends a little but not much time on the science, and it doesn't spend much time arming you for Thanksgiving arguments with your Ann Coulter-fixated uncle. But if you are inclined to ignore the climate threat because you feel powerless to do anything, the filmmakers are ready to give you the halftime locker room peptalk of your life.
"A movement was galvanized around the country" when Trump took the national government backward on the issue; "a revolution is underway." The film visits Miami, where rising ocean levels are destroying beaches, larger "king tides" regularly cause widespread flooding, and "salt water intrusion" in the Everglades threatens the supply of fresh water; Kalona, Iowa, where farmers struggle with erratic weather during growing seasons, and the state has dealt with a succession of massive floods; Ventura, California, reeling from a catastrophic fire; and, of course, Pittsburgh. In each place, locals in and out of government are taking aggressive, positive action against the climate threat--even in "very conservative politically" rural Iowa. The State of New Jersey became the 16th state to join the interstate climate alliance when Republican governor Chris Christie was succeeded by Democrat Phil Murphy in 2018. Towards the end of the film, we see scenes from the Youth for Climate Action massing in Washington, D.C. [Locally, the Iowa City City Council last night declared a "climate crisis," and voted to accelerate the town's greenhouse gas emissions targets (Smith 2019).] The kids are all right, and so are a lot of other people in a lot of places.
Sandbags against the rising river, New Bohemia, June 2013
Of what does this revolution consist? Mostly switching from fossil fuels to renewables. The City of Orlando is not just wondering where they're going to put a potential 2.5 million climate refugees from south Florida, but has moved to an all-electric bus fleet, experimented with floating solar arrays on lakes, and has facilitated citizen "fleet farming" in private yards to increase the supply of local produce. Casa Pueblo, Puerto Rico, runs entirely on alternative energy, which protected it from the long-term effects of the 2017 hurricane. The rural electric cooperative in Kalona, Iowa, is switching to all solar and wind to save money; Iowa is the nation's leader in wind energy, and the film profiles two female students at Iowa Lakes Community College planning careers in the booming field of renewable energy. The State of California has passed ambitious renewable fuel (and emissions reduction) mandates, though a lot of their state wealth comes from fossil fuel extraction.
The makers of Paris to Pittsburgh are to be commended for avoiding the pitfall of much environmental rhetoric, which tends toward the doom-and-gloom. Solar energy is more accessible and less expensive than ever, and the same goes for hybrid or all-electric cars. These are steps that require some but not that much effort, and are within the reach of many families.
Another strong point is the emphasis on local cooperative effort. The opening montage segues from various dismissive statements by President Trump to more urgency from local officials. As any urbanist will tell you, good change starts when neighbors meet to work together. Localities can be parochial, and clannish, but the need to address direct real-world problems tends to cause both public officials and citizens to be less ideological in their response.
There's a danger in making response to climate change seem too easy. If throwing on some solar panels and switching to electric vehicles were all it took to solve it, climate change wouldn't be much of a crisis. I'm no scientist, but intuition tells me even mitigating the damage is going to require some heavy lifting. And not just of sandbags: Iowa state senator Rob Hogg (D-Cedar Rapids), author of America's Climate Century (CreateSpace, 2013),who is quoted extensively in the film, hopes the "spirit of the sandbag" seen in 2016 flood protection efforts could translate into preventative measures. Those are reactions to entirely different phenomena, however.
And the economic incentives seem so strong as to be irresistible, but they aren't rooted in any sort of moral or community concern. Sure, cheaper solar got the "very conservative politically" farmers of Kalona off the dime, but if someone came up with an even cheaper fuel made from, say, meadowlarks, those farmers would switch again in a minute. It's nice that economic incentives seem to dovetail with what needs to be done--Iowa's superannuated U.S. Senator Charles Grassley is shown marveling at the jobs created by wind energy--that can turn in a minute. It's a lot easier to be an urbanist when gas is $5 a gallon than when it's half that.
Jeff Speck
The happy talk verges on what urbanist Jeff Speck calls "Gizmo green" i.e. just buy this product and both you and the Earth will be happier. In Walkable City (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011) he quotes Witold Rybczynski:
Rather than trying to change behavior to reduce carbon emissions, politicians and entrepreneurs have sold greening to the public as a kind of accessorizing. "Keep doing what you're doing," is the message, just add another solar panel, a wind turbine, a bamboo floor, whatever. But a solar-heated house in the suburbs is still a house in the suburbs, and if you have to drive to it--even in a Prius--it's hardly green.
Speck cites a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study finding driveable vs. walkable location had a bigger effect on climate footprint than type of car, housing material, or single- versus multi-family housing. Then he notes the EPA moved its Kansas City headquarters to a LEED-certified building in the suburbs... to which employees had to drive instead of walk to work (Speck 2012).
Enough dyspepsia. Would I rather people act against climate change, however incompletely, or not? Put that way, the answer's obvious; if people are going to be in suburbs anyway, better that they drive hybrids and install solar panels. Paris to Pittsburgh gets points for nudging us, passionately and encouragingly, in the right direction. Still, it would be better for the climate if we slammed the brakes on the suburban model of development.
Rogers studied for the ministry and briefly attempted a show aimed at adults, but found his calling as the host of a children's TV program for more than 30 years. Throughout the documentary he is shown taking children seriously, listening to them and speaking to their concerns, eschewing cheap laughs and practically any ornament of stage production whatsoever. His unadorned set might reflect his Calvinist background, but if so he moves past that background as he visibly seeks the good in everyone he encounters. The "neighborhood" is full of people, with the city's characteristic diversity. As the signs around town say, "All are welcome here," and he lived that.
Ginsburg was attracted to the law watching lawyers defend those accused by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. She has used her position, particularly as a Supreme Court justice, to promote arguments for the legal equality of women. A brilliant law student in an era when few women attended law schools, once graduated she had to fight to find a job at all. Eventually, both as a lawyer and a judge, her arena was the courtroom. She was appointed to the federal bench in 1980 after spending the 1970s litigating women's rights cases; she won five of the six cases she argued before the then all-male Supreme Court. Portrayed as a folk hero, "The Notorious R.B.G.," in various scenes of cartoon combat, she is in reality the opposite of flamboyant, personally reserved and relying on her mind and the force of argument in an increasing pile of dissenting opinions.
Ginsburg in "R.B.G." is the warrior-hero, while Rogers in "Neighbor" is all about love. Yet Ginsburg follows her mother's advice never to lash out in anger, and reaches across the ideological spectrum to befriend colleague Antonin Scalia. Rogers vigorously defends federal funding for PBS, and is unsparing in his criticism of children's programs that take a sillier approach.
Jeffrey Erlanger, an early guest on the show
(Source: archive.org)
Many similarities emerge, too, that are important to the urbanist project. Both have worked phenomenally hard at their vocations. Both are about building community, additively, mainly by including women (Ginsburg) and children (Rogers), but other types of people are included as well. Both exhibit moments of human weakness: Rogers when he insists a gay actor remain closeted as a condition of continuing on the show, Ginsburg when making some highly injudicious comments about Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in summer 2016.
Though "Neighbor" mentions--twice--that Rogers was "a lifelong Republican," he like Ginsburg drew fire from the new right. Both films feature a medley of conservative media venom, with "R.B.G." weirdly showing it as coming from statues around Capitol Hill.
And both endured late career setbacks in their efforts to shape the culture. After winning all those cases in the 1970s and early in her judicial career, Ginsburg has become "the great dissenter" as new members move the Court rightward. Rogers's late-career frustration shows as he seems to identify less with meek, hug-seeking Daniel Tiger and more with ornery King Friday XIII.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Fred Rogers are urbanist heroes because they exemplify the hopeful-inclusive ethos of the city; the need both to love extravagantly and to be militant on behalf of what we're creating; and the affirmation both of their own humanity and that of the people around them.
(Loudon Wainwright III sings his tribute song, "Hank and Fred")
Friday's Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges ruling state marriage laws cannot discriminate against same-sex couples added a special poignancy to today's screening of "Stonewall Uprising" in the Whipple Auditorium of the Cedar Rapids Public Library. The film, first aired as part of the PBS series American Experience in 2011, portrays the pivotal events at the Stonewall Inn in New York City that began 46 years ago today.
The filmmakers do their best with a paucity of archival material. Stonewall was by all accounts unplanned, and its significance appeared only in retrospect. (In 2015 The events were downplayed in New York City media at the time, and hardly reached news elsewhere. I was a young news junkie in 1969, but never heard of Stonewall until years later. I also didn't know that I was, according to the film, living in the only state in the Union (Illinois) that did not criminalize gay sex.) It is now clear that the road to Obergefell, not to mention ending the exclusion of gays from military service, began at a dive in New York's Greenwich Village.
The first two-thirds of the 82-minute documentary is spent establishing the context. It is important to remember, in these heady days for gay rights, that not too long ago the environment was very, very different. A variety of first-person recollections, mostly from gays and lesbians but including one government official (Ed Koch) and one police officer, vividly paint this picture. Homosexuality was considered an acquired preference, a mental illness and a menace to society; the choices for gays were limited to learning to act "normal," being tortured by medical "remedies," or meeting furtively in dangerous places. Exclusion from society is not only psychically damaging, it can be physically dangerous.
The last half hour discusses the events themselves, and their aftermath. Police had stepped up raids and other enforcement mechanisms, because--well, because there was a mayoral election campaign, and the incumbent administration was looking to score political points. (The film does not neglect the awful and terrifying position in which the police found themselves, and really, I think someone could do a documentary on how police officers get stuck being the enforcers of bad public policy.) The main theme, though, is that after years of being pushed around and chased and beaten up, something snapped among the gays in the bar and eventually in the surrounding neighborhood, leading to several days of clashes and vandalism.
Finally, the film makes the case for the pivotal importance of Stonewall. Between the protests, and the city's first gay pride parade exactly one year later, there was a flurry of organization that built upon the shared outrage they had discovered in June 1969. They leave off at the parade in 1970, but the arc that led to wholesale change in American public opinion and law is clearly implied. Divisiveness can stoke political passions, and may continue to do so for a long time (see Hudak, cited below); this tide that turned in 1969 appears unlikely to recede.
By 2015 it seems obvious, or should, that wherever possible inclusion is better than exclusion: it makes communities stronger, it allows us to put our energies into building things other than walls, it is consistent with the American constitutional value of individual rights--and for what it's worth, the Christian gospel as well--and it allows gays and lesbians (or whoever we're talking about) to live within the constructs of society. We progress toward this goal, but sometimes we get sanguine and then we forget. Films like "Stonewall Uprising" help us remember where we've been, where we're going, and why we're going there.
Robert Reich's 2013 film, "Inequality for All," takes on the issue of economic opportunity, which I consider to be foremost among the core issues surrounding our common life in 21st century America. Using a similar approach to "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's 2006 film on climate change, Reich mixes clips of his public presentations, interviews with people affected by current economic trends, data presented with snazzy graphics, and personal reflections. For people who realize that something is seriously wrong with the American economy, but who are not sure what it is, Reich makes a clear, accessible case that political decisions have reinforced rather than mitigated four decades of dislocating economic change. On the other hand, if you believe today's problems are caused by a corrupt presidential administration funneling money to the health care industry--the actual theme of a current media blitz by the Koch Brothers' Americans for Prosperity group--you will probably not find anything Reich says convincing.
Reich is a professor of economic and social policy at the University of California, Berkeley, is a frequent commentator on public affairs programs, and has worked in several presidential administrations, most recently as Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor. I first encountered him in The Work of Nations (1991), and a lot of those ideas reappear here. He sets out three goals for the film at the start: to describe what is happening; to explain why it is happening; and to determine whether the current degree of inequality has become too great. He jumps around among these three quickly, albeit engagingly, so you have either to pay close attention or else take notes (as I did) to be able to reconstruct the whole argument.
Reich's argument, in very brief:
What is happening: The problem is not inequality per se, but widespread loss of economic opportunity as inequality widens. The U.S. economy has grown a lot since 1978, but nearly all of those gains have been concentrated at the top levels of incomes, while the real income of the typical male worker has actually dropped. 1 percent of the population (knowledge/tech workers, CEOs and financial whizzes) now makes 23 percent of national income, a record high. Most of that income is invested, flowing all over the world without regard to where the investors happen to live. Down at the level where the rest of us are, companies have cut jobs and paid as little as possible in order to stay profitable and competitive; ordinary families have tried to keep up with these trends by moving moms out of the home and into the workforce, working longer hours, and borrowing against the value of their homes, but each of these tactics has played itself out.
Why it is happening: The most basic causes are globalization and technology, which mean that most production can be done more cheaply with fewer workers or moving operations overseas. New jobs pay less well on the whole. Opportunities for displaced workers to get better-paying jobs are limited by the government's declining investment in workforce education and training. (Here the U.S. response contrasts with western European countries and Japan, who are graduating a larger proportion of their youth from college.) Meanwhile, the government, which always sets the rules for the marketplace ("no such thing as a purely free market," claims Reich) has in the U.S. catalyzed this process by extensive deregulation. The new superrich have used their wealth to lobby for bailouts, subsidies and tax laws that entrench their wealth, abetted by court decisions that have struck down campaign finance and lobbying restrictions on free speech grounds.
Is this a problem?: Yes. Reich and his interviewees argue that economic opportunity is only created when the middle class has money to spend. (They pointedly take issue with conservative sanctification of rich "job-creators.") A president of a company that makes pillows points out that CEOs who make many times the salary of the average worker [331x according to the latest data] don't buy 331 times as many pillows, and calls for a "middle-out" economics instead of "trickle-down." He draws parallels between economic inequality now and that which preceded economic upheavals in the 1890s and 1920s. He further notes that the current round economic stress has brought characteristic political stresses: increased partisan polarization, middle class protest movements, and incidents of hate attacks.
Reich concludes on a positive note, telling the final session of a class at Berkeley to "consider where we [in the United States] have been.... History is on the side of positive social change." I hope he's right. But I can think of ways that our currently bad situation can get horribly worse: frustration turning to widespread violence (Russia in 1917 or Germany in 1933), or else political quiescence and social stagnation thanks to successful smoke-blowing by empowered super PACs.
The independent film "Detropia" is available at the PBS website until June 17. It is co-directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. "Detropia" is a disturbing look at the troubled city of Detroit that tries to end on some hopeful notes (the people we meet are resilient, the auto industry has added some jobs, there are opportunities for artists to live and work in really cheap space). A question repeatedly raised in the film, though, is whether the tribulations of Detroit are harbingers for other parts of America. To be sure, there are echoes of Detroit, albeit on much smaller communities, in farm towns across the country. Yet Detroit is in many ways unique among American cities: its quantum growth from 1930-1960 was driven by a single industry, and today it has an unusually low percentage of college graduates (though Cleveland is close). Even so, as the poster child for the twin demons of suburban sprawl and urban poverty, Detroit's experience raises difficult questions about the sustainability of America's current lifestyle.
I have never been to Detroit. Even though I've lived my entire life (except for one summer) in the Midwest, and even though my family travels at least once a year from Iowa to Ohio, I've never had occasion to visit the Motor City. So I have no personal experience to use in placing the film's content into context. Nor is there any immediate prospect of Cedar Rapids becoming a mini-Detroit. Yet there surely there hangs a cautionary tale here from which we might learn something.
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