Kyle Smith:
When HBO announced that the next series from its Game of Thrones showrunners will be Confederate, an alternate-reality saga that assumes the South won the Civil War and preserved slavery, the Left lost it and hit the culture-panic button. MSNBC correspondent Joy Reid huffed, “It plays to a rather concrete American fantasy: slavery that never ends, becoming a permanent state for black people. Repugnant.” If Reid were tweeting about 1984, she’d probably say it “promotes totalitarian fantasies about rewriting history and dominating people’s minds. Appalling.”
The New York Times op-ed page placed the following headline on a piece by writer Roxane Gay: “I don’t want to watch slavery fan fiction.” Are Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle “Nazi fan fiction” because they imagined what life would be like had Germany won World War II? Gay said in her piece, “Each time I see a reimagining of the Civil War that largely replicates what actually happened, I wonder why people are expending the energy to imagine that slavery continues to thrive when we are still dealing with the vestiges of slavery in very tangible ways.” Gay is being amazingly obtuse here, because the proposition that “we are still dealing with the vestiges of slavery in very tangible ways” is, as you might have guessed and as we have already learned, the central theme of the show. I’ll come back to that.
Reid also blasted Confederate for being “the brainchild of two white men,” David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, whose current hit Game of Thrones, which is set in a world modeling medieval England, “has few people of color to speak of.” Gay added, “I shudder to imagine the enslaved black body in their creative hands.” Actor David Harewood of Homeland and Supergirl tweeted, “Good luck finding black actors for this project,” as though playing a character is tantamount to an endorsement of that character’s behavior or the setting in which he exists.
Race these days is a kind of mental high-voltage power surge that is short-circuiting people’s minds. Do these writers really lack the imagination to see what creative direction Confederate is going to take? Every character, scene, and line of dialogue is going to be scrutinized, double-checked, and triple-checked to make sure it sends the message that white supremacy is evil. The primary creative risk for Confederate is not, as many commenters fear, that it will amount to alt-right white-supremacy porn but that it’ll be so focused on being the opposite of that it will keep pounding the same chords over and over. It’ll be so single-mindedly determined to prove it is on the morally correct side that it might be didactic and repetitive. A creative project that is principally concerned with selling the audience a political message (even one as unexceptionable as opposition to racism) risks being more of a sermon than a story.
HBO’s marquee Sunday-night shows don’t usually betray much of a political agenda, but lefties need not worry about its progressive bona fides. Ignoring the poor performance of documentaries in the marketplace, it has made a serious effort to make, acquire, and promote nonfiction films, most of which carry an unmistakable left-wing message. Do Confederate’s detractors really think HBO is about to take a leap into Klan territory? Do they imagine Weiss and Benioff are too dumb to know that racism is a sensitive subject? Are they alive in this country at this moment?
Sounds a lot like Harry Turtledove’s “Guns of the South”.
Liberals haven’t protested that yet. They don’t seem to like reading books. It requires imagination.
Its like with Disneys SONG OF THE SOUTH they have never released it on DVD all other this slavery poppycock all this P.C.(Political Correctness)which is just another form of Socialism and with the radical BLM,NBPP,Nation of Islam,plus Jessie Jackson and his RAINBOW/PUSH troublemakers Riot Instigator Al Sharpton and hollywood nerdowell and liberal leftists Director Spike Lee
If they really wanted to be “edgy” they could postulate an alternate universe where blacks were the masters and whites the slaves.Something along the lines of Heinlein’s “Farnham’s Freehold”.
@Jim S: Correct, why they might even want to include such unbelievable circumstances as white people actually capturing other white people and selling them as slaves. Why they might even try to make people think that they ‘had’ to do it, that the money was just too good to pass up.
why is America so upset with slavery? today, slavery it is one of the biggest money makers for trans national organized crime. yes, and this organized crime constitutes the major influx of counterfeit drugs into this country. recall that being politically correct is believing in your own bullshit and eating it every day. prior to and after the Revolutionary War whites were hunted and sold as slaves. the color of one’s skin means very little in the slave trade market then and today.