The Other Side of the California Dream

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 52
Carl Franklin (writer/director), Devil in a Blue Dress

Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins only wanted to earn an honest dollar and pay his mounting Los Angeles mortgage bills. Not many Black men own their own houses in his city and time, after all. So when a hulking White man in a flashy suit offers Easy straight cash to find a missing White girl who enjoys visiting Black jazz clubs, it feels like a welcome payday. That us, until leads Easy questions start turning up dead.

We generally don’t associate the Left Coast with the pervasive “color line” that divided many Twentieth Century American cities. But in the years surrounding World War II, California had every bit the segregated culture and bigoted tendencies. Black Americans from Texas and Louisiana came to La-La Land for the same reasons they settled in Chicago and New York, because the big cities offered work. But as elsewhere, what one hand offered, the other took away.

Easy finds himself managing the tension between two communities while seeking his target, Daphne Monet. White people need information from the Black community, and having aggressively built segregated institutions, they cannot cross the borders they’ve created. Black people need White money, and also White tolerance, both of which they can purchase if they’re willing to sell their integrity. But once the two start mingling, the implicit violence that keeps the communities divided starts becoming explicit.

This slow, thoughtful neo-noir already appeared like an artifact from another era when it appeared in 1995. Director Carl Franklin overexposed several key shots to create California’s sun-streaked postwar fatigue. In Franklin’s distinctively dated cinematography, Easy is proud of owning his single-family home with lawn and picket fence, but that house looks slightly singed, with dust permeating every crevice. L.A. is a city of promise, but to Franklin, that promise has already started wearing thin.

As crimes start accumulating, people on both sides of the color barrier consider Easy a trustworthy source. Though hired to find Daphne Monet, she quickly finds him, begging his help negotiating her return to her fiancé. But that fiancé, in whose name Easy has been seeking Daphne, appears never to have heard of Easy. Who, then, sent flashy DeWitt Albright into central L.A. to find Daphne? And how does this affect the L.A. mayoral race?

Franklin’s storytelling deliberately channels previous Southern California noir thrillers, like Double Idemnity and Chinatown. Unlike the French movies that originated the smog-shrouded noir genre, L.A. noir is notable for its unrelenting sunlight, making warmth and visibility feel as oppressive as European mist. This movie appeared around the same time as other neo-noirs, like L.A. Confidential and Mulholland Drive. But its specifically Black sensibilities set it apart, emphasizing those neglected by California’s booming postwar bonanza economy.

Jennifer Beals and Denzel Washington in Carl Franklin's Devil in a Blue Dress

Cinematography emphasizes this movie’s oppressive ethos. Franklin shoots many scenes from a low angle that places the horizon above the midpoint, placing the viewer below the characters’ eye level, making us feel low to the ground. Although Franklin has few scenes of out-and-out violence, those he does have distinctly lack glamour and grace. Fighting, for him, is a clumsy enterprise; none of that “gun fu” that would start infecting Hollywood soon after, with The Matrix.

Against this visual austerity, Franklin contrasts a lush Elmer Bernstein score. The sound reflects a changing attitude in jazz: though the musician favor traditional instruments and rhythms, their compositions are altered by electronic amplification and a harder, more aggressive backbeat. Bernstein judiciously mingles his own compositions with period icons like Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, and in the noir style, he leaves several key scenes silent, letting character, dialog, and action convey the thoughtful story.

Like the Walter Mosley novel upon which it’s based, this movie was an experiment, to determine whether the market would support a franchise. The novel launched the Easy Rawlins franchise, and helped elevate Mosley to the first tier of commercial success. Despite a star cast and critical praise, the movie failed to recreate that success, barely breaking even at the box office. Denzel Washington’s performance was iconic, but only to those few who saw it.

Too bad audiences missed it, though. It provides a view into the institutions that enforced the color barrier during a time that California tried to romanticize itself, selling the “California dream” to anyone who could afford it. Easy shows us the unromantic side, the side that didn’t profit from postwar excess. He shows a man, dragged into the institutions of power, who grows into his role, becoming the defender his people never knew they needed.

The Police Are Lying Liars Who Lie To You

Thomas Perez, Jr., tears his clothing several hours into the interrogation for a murder
he not only did not commit, but it did not even happen. (San Bernardino Sun)

The mathematical subdiscipline called Game Theory uses an influential thought experiment called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In this exercise, police question you and your friend separately for some crime. Interrogators claim to have substantive proof of your guilt. If neither of you confesses, you’ll receive moderate sentences. But if one confesses and implicates the other, the confessor walks free, while the other does hard time. Using subjective measures of likelihood, should you stand fast or confess?

I’ve seen this exercise repeated in popular science and mathematics books, and in introductory undergraduate textbooks. But the narration always focuses on the likelihood of you or your friend confessing. It consistently omits one other subjective likelihood: how likely we consider it that interrogators are lying. Under the Supreme Court standard in Frazier v. Cupp (1969), police have qualified immunity for what jurists call “deceptive interrogation tactics.” That is, they’re permitted to lie with impunity.

According to the San Bernardino Sun, police in Fontana, California, arrested Thomas Perez, Jr., in August 2018 on suspicion of murdering his father. Thomas Perez, Sr., wasn’t dead; he hadn’t even been missing particularly long. Four officers grilled Perez Jr. so long and hard that, per the Sun, he struck himself, screamed, and tore his clothes. According to the Guardian, the interrogation lasted seventeen hours, long enough for Perez to become “sleep-deprived” and possibly delusional.

According to both sources, the police response looks wildly slipshod. Though Perez Jr. commenced the investigation for his putatively missing father, the dispatch officer who took his call deemed him suspicious for being insufficiently attentive. Therefore they brought Perez in for questioning, having deemed him the prime suspect, before commencing the investigation or gathering any evidence. In other words, police unilaterally decided not only that a crime had occurred, but who was responsible for it.

Worse, though, were the primary tactics employed. Police told Perez they had overwhelming evidence that didn’t exist. They insisted they had Perez Sr.’s body in the building, although as noted, he wasn’t dead; he’d simply gone on an unannounced wander. They withheld Perez Jr’s depression and hypertension medications, claiming he didn’t really need them. There was no crime, no evidence, and trivially little investigation. Police simply fabricated everything, then used their lurid fantasies as “proof.”

After coercing a confession out of Thomas Perez Jr., police left him alone with his
dog. Moments after this still was taken, he used the drawstring from his shorts to attempt
to hang himself. (San Bernardino Sun)

Since the 1950s, police interrogators have mostly used the Reid Technique, an approach based on the most up-to-date psychological assessments of the Eisenhower era. Rather than physical force, the preferred prior technique, Reid Technique interrogators apply psychological pressure to achieve what courts still consider the gold standard of evidence, a confession. One problem: according to informed critics, the Reid Technique produces false confessions over fifty percent of the time. Its outcomes simply are not reliable.

The Reid Technique actively aims to leave suspects desperate, isolated, and dependent on police. Lies and leading questions are totally permissible. If you’ve ever watched cop dramas and heard an interrogator say “Here’s what I think happened,” that’s the Reid Technique. The technique also permits threatening suspects. Many commentators have expressed greatest outrage at interrogators’ threat to euthanize Perez Jr.’s dog, though that too was probably a lie; they probably lacked authority to do that.

All these tools are completely impermissible when interrogating foreign combatants under the Geneva Convention. If you remember the transnational outrage surrounding the Abu-Ghraib prison scandal, you know this. Attempts to psychologically degrade prisoners are crimes against humanity. But these same techniques—lying, torture, threats, withholding medical care, and more—are perfectly acceptable when applied by American police to American citizens. Legality doesn’t matter, as any crimes get swept together under the rubric of “qualified immunity.”

Beyond the legal and moral implications, the Reid Technique just doesn’t work. Fontana police coerced a confession from Perez Jr. and continued holding him for psychiatric evaluation for several days after they knew Perez Sr. was alive. As noted, around half of Reid Technique confessions are demonstrably false, but juries often don’t know that, and consider confessions binding. In my adopted home state, the Beatrice Six demonstrates how powerful and destructive false confessions can be.

Qualified immunity bakes dishonesty into police procedure. Evaluating police work by case closures rather than accuracy, creates perverse incentives to produce confessions by any available means. Even police who mean well and work honestly are evaluated by the same yardstick, forcing them to adopt specious methods if they work. We can argue whether the police can be reformed, but one thing is clear: abuses like the Fontana police will always squeak through on qualified immunity.

Fear of the Monster You Created

Vladimir Putin and friends, in a still from Netflix’s
Turning Point: the Bomb and the Cold War

Readers who know me, will already know my longstanding interest in Haitian history and politics, dating back to the 1991 coup. The unique and remarkable circumstances which brought Haiti into existence make it distinct from other countries born of European colonialism. Among the many rare qualities, Haiti, unlike most former European colonies, doesn’t have a native-born White population. No French colonists generated a persistent minority population in free Haiti.

This happened because Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the general who pushed the Haitian slave rebellion to victory, refused to accept victory. Flush with triumph, Dessalines declared a purge of French-speaking Whites in 1804, under the battle cry: “Cut off heads, burn down houses.” Anyone descended from French colonists and plantation owners had to flee Haiti, leaving everything they owned, or face the wrath of their former slaves, now Haiti’s unquestioned masters.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. Such reprisals aren’t inevitable. Mexico, Nigeria, and Brazil have native-born White minorities, descended from former colonists who willingly accepted the Empire’s end. The fact that South Africa still reckons with economic inequity stemming from Apartheid proves that ethnic cleansing needn’t necessarily happen in post-colonial states. But especially in the heady early days of independence, violent reprisals can, and often do, happen.

Timothy Snyder, in the conclusion to Bloodlands, writes that Israel, Russia, and Ukraine all intensely remember the injustices inflicted upon them during World War II. Ukraine asserts its independence, in large part, for fear that Stalin’s Great Terror might repeat itself. Russia zealously recalls the privations and violence of Germany’s invasion, in almost the same terms Americans recall Pearl Harbor, making that violence part of Russian national mythology.

Snyder wrote before the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Just as Putin and Zelenskyy each justify their military actions with collective memory of nationalist agendas during the 1930s and 1940s, Israel uses fears of the Holocaust to justify overwhelming military force. Whenever international critics of the Israeli state (including international Jews and Holocaust survivors) condemn Israel’s apparent targeting of schools and hospitals, they get accused of National Socialist apologia.

Benjamin Netanyahu, acolyte
of his country's secular Priesthood

Thus we see past injustice mold the legal and moral justification of current, ongoing injustice. Your evil makes my evil acceptable. Again, such reprisals aren’t inevitable; France and Germany, historic enemies for over a thousand years, now form the political and economic backbone of the European Union. But especially for strongman leaders who rule by force of personality, like Putin and Netanyahu, old grievances support new nationalist sentiment and violence.

Such conditions especially prevail in nations willed into existence by retreating European empires. The de-Ba’athification process instituted in Iraq following America’s 2003 invasion often had an ethnic component, especially in the Shi’ite-majority south, where the toppled Sunni-led government was especially unpopular. Many Arab Spring countries suffered ethnic cleansing when minority-led governments fell. The Syrian Civil War drags on thirteen years later, partly, because Assad’s Alawite government fears reprisals.

This brings us to America. In most circles, it’s become unacceptable to espouse bigotry, at least publicly; even the race-baiting Former President calls himself “the least racist person” in the face of evidence. Yet a powerful voting bloc remains terrified of structural changes which will reverse systemic racism, sexism, and ableism. Countless interviews at TFG campaign rallies show majority populations, including Whites, Christians, and heterosexuals, consider themselves embattled minorities.

However, as Tim Alberta writes, America is on-track to see both White people and Christians become minority populations within two generations. This assumes current demographic trends continue, which will certainly never happen. But those current majority populations see demographic change happening rapidly, and their power base disintegrating. They fear becoming a minority in their own country—and being treated like America has always treated minorities.

Again, history proves that reprisals following power reversals aren’t inevitable. But they are possible, and certainly precedented. State power always involves the possibility of violence to control dissidents, minority powers, and nonconformists; as those who flourished under unjust laws find themselves suddenly thrust into minority status, they aren’t unjustified in fearing receiving the treatment they formerly dispensed onto others. Unjust people are rightly attuned to further injustice.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes that authoritarian governments let by strongman personalities generally end two ways: the strongman leaves the halls of power in chains, or in a hearse. TFG is witnessing that happening right now: he needs to be reelected President, or face dying in prison. He weaponized the justice system against protestors, refugees, and other dissidents; now he fears his own justice system. His adherents fear the exact same consequences.

The Kingdom Is Not Of This World

Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

When journalist Tim Alberta chronicles the corruption of American Evangelicals, he writes from both an insider and outsider perspective. He commences this, his second book, with that most conventional of Evangelical theological devices, the testimony. That is, he recounts his Christian journey to date, to verify his “born again” credentials. Son of a Michigan pastor, Alberta grew up surrounded by Christianity and church culture, and absorbed it into his bones.

But like many young American Christians, he believed the principles Christianity taught him, and that created a paradox. He witnessed the gulf between the teachings proclaimed from Sunday pulpits, and the lives Christians actually lived. Too many American Christians are discipled by talk radio and basic cable, not Jesus. Things reached a peak when he delivered his father’s eulogy—and got castigated for not being Republican enough in the pulpit.

Alberta did something most disillusioned young Christians can’t do. Already possessing journalism credentials, he undertook an investigation of American Christendom. (The “White” part of that equation goes mostly unspoken.) He visits revivalist preachers like Greg Locke, whose pro-Trump homilies have become a YouTube sensation, and Robert Jeffress, a Dallas megachurch pastor whom others have described as Donald Trump’s pastor.

He also visits pastors, and invested lay Christians, whose witness against Christian dominionism has sometimes helped reverse this march. Russell Moore, a former ranking theologian in the Southern Baptist Convention, left the denomination when too many denominational leaders cared more about Donald Trump and COVID-19 than discipleship. Activist Rachel Denhollander became both loved and hated when she advocated for survivors of clergy abuse and religious trauma.

This book recounts a religion torn between conflicting forces. Some Christians love America, support the existing political order, and literally use the Constitution as a theological heuristic. Others take seriously Christ’s commands to embrace the downtrodden and heal the wounded. One recalls, reading this book, that Jesus quarreled most fiercely with temple priests and congregational elders, because religion is frequently the death of spirituality.

Tim Alberta

Alberta crisscrosses America—and even, briefly, Europe—to better understand the combined forces turning Evangelicalism into a “state religion.” The conditions he finds are frequently bleak. Revivalist preachers cultivate large followings by ginning fear of an ill-defined “other” who threatens the social order, and parishioners who believe that order is God-given. Many Christians seemingly worship their own fears of uncertainty and disempowerment.

Others, seemingly, embrace uncertainty and disempowerment. While fearmongers pay publicists to flood American culture with their message, other Christians prefer to work quietly, receiving reward not from public acclaim, but from the healing they see blooming around them. These Christians generally don’t seek mass audiences and, in Alberta’s telling, sometimes feel uncomfortable when they do accrue notice. But they, and the work they do, still exist.

Intermittently, Alberta acknowledges a third contributing factor: a media landscape driven by a perverse incentive structure, which gets ratings and sells advertising by pandering to audiences’ paranoia. Anger drives cable TV ratings and YouTube clicks. There’s an entire argument brewing here about how what serves owners’ pocketbooks frequently doesn’t serve the common good, an argument Alberta doesn’t engage because it exceeds his scope. But it’s there.

This reciprocal relationship between media attention and leaders appealing to White anger, comes with a price. Alberta notes that Christianity, which once held primacy in American spirituality, is dwindling rapidly; if current trends continue, Christianity will be a minority religion in two generations. Even once-secure bastions of Evangelicalism, like Liberty University (to which Alberta returns), have become battlegrounds of American identity.

Tellingly, the leaders profiting from this arrangement don’t believe their own hokum. Jerry Falwell Jr.’s apostasy at Liberty has become almost legendary. But the leaders Alberta interviews reveal great personal doubt they don’t share with parishioners. Greg Locke admits he doesn’t believe his online nationalist paranoia, but it draws numbers. Robert Jeffress admits doubts about Trump that he daren’t speak aloud in public.

Evangelical Christianity, like America itself, teeters between extremes. Some leaders get rich and accrue large flocks by appealing to True Believers’ worst instincts. Others prefer hard work, honesty, and relative anonymity. The worst Christian examples are also the most readily visible, ensuring that the existing system preserves itself. But while the system leadership remains intact, ordinary believers, who can’t see the good work being done quietly, leave the fold altogether.

Alberta ends optimistically, suggesting the quieter Christians may be ultimately ascendent. But their triumph won’t come quickly. Things are likely to get markedly worse, and paranoia more widespread, before things get any better.

Those Who Pay the Price of War

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 118
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Although Germany performed the Holocaust, as we all know, iconic sites like Auschwitz and Sobibor are actually in Poland. Most victims of Hitler’s terror didn’t speak German. Most history students broadly know this, but seldom think about it. American historian Timothy Snyder made a connection that most Western scholars couldn’t have investigated before 1991: Germany conducted its purges on territory already softened by Stalin’s Great Terror.

Timothy Snyder specializes in Twentieth Century European history, focusing on the why strongman states like Germany and the Soviet Union turned into totalitarian dystopias. Commencing his career during the Soviet collapse, he had access to primary sources which prior historians never dreamed of. But he discovered something jarring: the worst Soviet and National Socialist excesses happened not at home, but in satellite states like Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine.

Because both the Great Terror and most of the Holocaust took place in the bumper states between Russia and Germany, a thorough history wasn’t possible for decades. Both the physical artifacts and the necessary documents resided in Warsaw Pact nations. Western historians had only limited access, while Soviet-bloc historians were censored from a through history. Therefore an unvarnished history languished, waiting for someone to tell it thoroughly.

Stalin believed a combination of state-sponsored propaganda and force could collectivize peasant farming in a matter of weeks. Therefore he generated “othering language,” creating the social class of “kulaks,” enemies of Soviet economics whose supposed resource hoarding made them social criminals. This served greater Soviet aims of attempting to abolish national identities, remaking everyone into transnational Soviet citizens.

Whatever the ideological motivations, the consequence was famine. In the early 1930s, rural Ukrainian and Belorussian civilians died in Biblical numbers, even as Stalinist functionaries stole their grain and resold it on export markets. Starvation happened amid perfectly robust harvests, because famine isn’t a product of shortage, but usually of policy. Stalinists were simply okay if the “lumpenproletariat” were so hungry, they were reduced to grave-robbing and cannibalism.

Timothy Snyder

Although Westerners have long known about Stalin’s “Great Terror” in general terms, lack of press freedom kept outsiders from discovering the details at the time, and censorship concealed the worst from history for decades. Stalin claimed victory over his hated kulaks after approximately two years and rescinded his cruelest policies. Indeed, he did succeed at his deepest goals: shattering farmers’ ties to land and community, and driving national minorities into industrialized cities.

In Snyder’s painfully detailed telling, the Great Terror provided the blueprints Hitler used to perpetrate the Holocaust. Snyder carefully states that the two aren’t interchangeable events in history. Stalin inflicted his Terror upon his own citizens during peacetime, for instance, while Hitler inflicted the Holocaust upon conquered nations during war. Also, Stalin at least nominally served an ideological goal, while Hitler ruled according to his strongman whimsy.

Despite the differences, in Snyder’s telling, the similarities are glaring. The punitive conditions Stalin created in his gulags, Hitler copied in his labor camps. But Hitler exceeded Stalin, because he wasn’t circumscribed by Marxist doctrine. Where Stalin simply didn’t care if “superfluous workers” simply died, Hitler skipped the middleman of chance, and started killing. And the peoples he killed were mostly Polish, Lithuanian, and citizens of occupied Soviet territories.

Snyder takes an approach he admits is academically risky and impolitic. The accepted Holocaust narrative of the first half-century after World War II, he claims, needs revision. Our accepted narrative was written by internees at National Socialist labor camps like Auschwitz, and the prisoners held there, Snyder writes, had a disproportionate likelihood to survive. The reality, which Snyder describes in heartrending detail, is considerably worse and more gruesome.

This isn’t casual reading. Besides his historically dense and painful subject, Snyder’s style requires a strong constitution. He writes in long chapters that, despite their physical heft, have no discernable flab; his storytelling is dense, and provides few clear places to pause and ruminate. We must simply keep moving, much like the terror victims his story describes. He also mostly eschews interpretation until his conclusion, preferring specific details over synoptic morality.

Despite this difficulty, Snyder’s writing is eye-opening and emotionally moving. He rejects the standard Holocaust historiography, which is frequently as abstracted as a medieval morality play. Instead, he places the Holocaust in a historical context of strongman leaders who considere themselves scientists, and therefore unbound by conventional morality. He presents Stalin and Hitler as allies turned rivals, and history as a movement of forces that divulge their lessons only slowly, painfully, and at great human cost.

Also by Timothy Snyder:
A Short Handbook for Confronting Dictators