As I write these words, a black man is running for President of the United States. Not only running, but in fact, leading by several points in the polls; his opponent is an older white man firmly rooted in the Republican establishment. Somewhere, in one of the crustiest corners of Hell, the flames that constantly lick up around the feet of Lee Atwater are being extinguished by his copious tears.
Atwater was one of the founding members of the modern conservative movement. Perhaps best known for the Willie Horton attack ad, in which he implied that if Michael Dukakis were elected president, Negro criminals would roam the streets of America raping and stabbing good citizens of virtue true, he was one of the G.O.P.'s foremost dirty tricksters, and the mentor of an earnest young fellow named Karl Rove. He's also the subject of a fascinating new documentary called Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, described ably by the New York Times as "neither encomium nor hatchet job...a Gordian portrait of a man whose ability to do the splits exceeded the physical".
Boogie Man's director, Stefan Forbes -- who's been kicking around as an AD and a director of short films for some time -- recently spoke to NPR's "Talk of the Nation" about the film and its late subject. Forbes seems to have that attitude of awe, horror and grudging respect that is a common reaction to people of unsual evil, and he deftly discusses the many contradictions of the man (the film's title is drawn from Atwater's love of blues music, which many people found curious in a man whose only use for actual African-Americans was to use them as fright symbols to scare whites into voting Republican). The film is a bit heavy on psychological theorizing and a bit light on coherent narrative, but seeing the sins of the past dredged up so effectively is a bracing reminder of how we got to where we are today.
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