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IN A fascinating essay inUnherd, Matthew Goodwin explains why, despite the seemingly interminable bungling, the endless hysteria and push-me-pull-you nature of Covid policy, the nannying fat taxes, the idiocies of HS2 and on and on and on, Boris Johnsons popularity remains sky high: it is values that lie at the root of it all.

Goodwin writes: What unites Boris Johnsons voters is not so much their economic experience as their values. They prioritise the nation and the national community . . . they cherish Britains history, heritage and collective memory and are more sensitive to attempts to deconstruct them.

Indeed, and it is his and the wider Tory failure to fight for those values that will one day see Johnsons electorate turn savagely against him.

Matthew Parris once explained superbly why some leaders seem to levitate above the day-to-day misfortunes and disasters of political office. Changes in public opinion, he wrote, are like tipping gravel into a swamp: for a long time, nothing registers on the surface, but all the time the swamp is getting shallower. One day that gravel will break the surface. So it is with swings in political popularity: it isnt that people are stupid and apathetic that explains the supposed Teflon-like qualities of leaders such as Tony Blair or Boris Johnson.Yes, both benefit from having charisma, but people alsounderstand change takes time and there are bound to be mistakes and disappointments along the way. Furthermore, given the strong overlap between the demographics who voted for Brexit and Johnsons values-based electorate, the governments seemingly hard-line Brexit negotiating position is no doubt a significant factor in its continued popularity. However, to many, I would argue, Brexit was not just about sovereignty or immigration but a springboard, a chance for a complete cultural reboot, and they still see in Johnson a jolly, charismatic, can-do figure who can deliver it.

Unfortunately, the Tories are psychologically ill-equipped to fight a culture war. Cultural change is much more difficult than economic change: it requires a holistic vision, coherent strategy, tenacity and endless reinforcement. You are also fighting on territory the Left has made its own for several decades. In contrast, the Tory Party is in its very nature cynical and opportunistic, geared to short-term pragmatism, tactical-level thinking and much happier implementing a settled agenda determined by thezeitgeistrather than leading from the front.

We saw this, of course, with Johnsons response to the Black Lives Matter movement: for days he hid in his bunker, and when he finally emerged it was only selectively to condemn the attacking of Winston Churchills statue and the Cenotaph, iconic monuments whose defence was uncontroversial. That is an absolute classic of Tory cynicism: Johnsons response was not to think of the long-term national interest but to minimise the potential loss of political capital; not for him the response of Frances President Macron who came out all guns blazing. By fighting on so narrow a front, Johnson left the field open for yet another significant Left-wing cultural victory. Our decadent institutions duly surrendered and the Left saw their chance, with hundreds of commissions and reviews now launched that will see our history swept away. Who can doubt that those areas controlled by Labour will now see widespread replacement of our history with more appropriate figures?As many of these areas are among the most culturally and ethnically diverse, what we may see is the cultural balkanisation of the country, with parallel histories rooted not just in the public space, but far more dangerously along ethnic lines.

Although it may not register in the polls yet, I am willing to bet that, to return to Parriss simile,substantial quantities of gravel have already been tipped into the swamp. After Brexit is delivered, Johnsons electorate will expect serious action when it comes to theKulturkampf.

They will not get it: tragically for this country, the Tories have already surrendered the battlefield.As the statues come down, ton after ton of Parriss gravel will be added.As popular as Johnson is today, one day it will stand like an alp above the political fray, and there will be no hiding place for the Bottler Blond.

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The Tories' surrender in the culture wars will bring them down - The Conservative Woman

Schools in King, Snohomish and Pierce counties were the first places affected by Gov. Jay Inslee's school shutdown order. Now, with Wednesday's news that Snohomish County officials are suggesting schools stay closed, it's possible that they could be the among the last to reopen their buildings.

With just over a month until most schools begin, health experts in the state's most populous counties cautioned against reopening school buildings, which means that nearly half of the Washington state's 1.1 million students could be learning online in the fall.

County health officials and researchers from the Bellevue-based Institute for Disease Modeling (IDM) all came to the same conclusion based on the data at hand: transmission rates are too high to safely bring students back to classrooms without risking the spread to the wider community, even with proper precautions such as masks, lower class sizes and social distancing.

Inslee announced Tuesday he's extending the pause on reopening Washington counties indefinitely, citing increasing COVID-19 cases.

King County, once considered the nationwide epicenter for COVID-19, was the first to receive a cautionary message from health officials about reopening schools. That warning, sent earlier this month, prompted an avalanche of remote learning-only announcements from the state's largest school districts, including Seattle, Bellevue and Lake Washington.

Pierce County health officers followed last week, and Snohomish County made the same call Wednesday.

"By making this recommendation now, I hope that provides our schools and their staff and families with as much time as possible to prepare for online learning," Dr. Chris Spitters, health officer for the Snohomish Health District, wrote in a news release.

In Snohomish County, "cases have continued to climb for more than a month and the rate is now at nearly 100 cases per 100,000 population. This is close to the rate Snohomish County experienced in March when schools first closed," county health officials said in a Wednesday news release.

The recommendations could change in any of these counties if the number of cases drop. But that will be up to each county's health officials.

A return to online school was a possibility that state educational officials told school districts to be prepared for, even as those officials encouraged districts to draft plans to bring students back into school buildings on alternating schedules.

Culture wars over reopening school buildings are raging across the country. Guidelines for doing so safely are changing by the week. But consensus has emerged around one thing: community transmission rates as a key indicator of safety. Opening before the surrounding area has the virus under tighter control could make the problem worse.

Young children are thought to be at a lower risk of transmitting the virus, though emerging research suggests that some older children who are symptomatic may transmit it as efficiently as adults. There are fears about adults and students in schools catching and spreading the virus outside the building.

Teacher's unions here and across the country have also pushed back on returning to in-person learning, citing risk to school employees, especially those who are older and in high-risk categories.

The American Federation of Teachers, the nation's second largest teacher's union, which represents 1.7 million school employees, issued a resolution this week saying it will support any local chapter that decides to strike over reopening plans. Most Washington state teachers are members of the National Education Association union, which has supported pushback to reopening schools, but it has not issued a resolution supporting strikes.

For schools to resume in King County, based on the IDM report, King County must test at least 2,000 to 3,000 people for the virus each day. Among the conditions: community activity -- which includes everything from shopping to going to church -- must stay below 70% of where it was before the coronavirus took hold in the Puget Sound region. Community activity was at 65% in mid-June, the report said.

Seattle Times staff reporter Hannah Furfaro contributed to this story.

___

(c)2020 The Seattle Times

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Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Half of Washington State Students Live in Counties Where Health Experts Warn Against Reopening School Buildings - Centralia Chronicle

Demonstrators participate in the March for Change protest led by Clemson University football players on June 13 in Clemson, South Carolina.Maddie Meyer/Getty Images This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.

As part of the ongoing Free Speech Project, Future Tense editorial director Andrs Martinez invited Robby Soave, senior editor at Reason; Pardis Mahdavi, dean of social sciences at Arizona State University; and Sabine Galvis, a 2020 graduate of ASU who served as the executive editor of the student newspaper the State Press, to talk on Slack about rising concerns (and rising pushback to those concerns) about eroding tolerance for free speech on college campuses across America, and throughout society.*

The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Andrs: Pardis, shortly after President Donald Trumps bizarre Fourth of July rant at Mount Rushmore against a new far-left fascism, you told me this was the latest sign of a moral panic around the question of a supposed erosion of free speech in this country. Soon after, a letter published in Harpers, signed by an eclectic, mostly liberal mix of public intellectuals (including Slates Dahlia Lithwick), also expressed concern over what they considered a restriction of debate on the left (while making it clear that Donald Trump is a bigger threat). How do you see things in this fraught year of 2020? Is this the golden age of free speech in the U.S., or do you worry about where were headed?

Pardis: I vacillate between worry and hope.

Across the country, debates about the campus culture wars have been mired in anxieties about free speech, academic freedom, and the perceived lack of resiliency of millennials characterized as the proliferation of snowflake culture. Indeed, institutions of higher education have been seen as the battleground for a determination of American values and Americanness. Students, like those Trump addressed at the Dream City Church in Phoenix recently, are seen as the foot soldiers.

These discursive trends reveal a modern-day moral panic about youth gone astray and are contributing to an identity crisis in higher education, rather than helping to alleviate it. Like other moral panics, the narrative around higher education in 2020 is based largely on assumptions. This is not unlike other moral panics that have preceded this onereefer madness in the 1930s, moral panics about sexuality during the sexual revolution. But rather than seeing protesting and engaged students on campuses today as morally astray, it is more useful to understand their actions in the context of a desire to reform higher education, address the identity crisis, and bringmoredialogue about values into the classroom and higher ed writ large.

Andrs: I know you have studied in great depth questions of inclusion and academic freedom on campuses across the country, but before we get into that, do you think there is a distinction between how free speech debates play out on campus versus the rest of society?

Pardis: I think that the debates are playing out on campus but they mirror what is happening in society today.

I do think that we need to be worried about free speech, but we need to be clearer about what our worries are. Students want more freedomtospeak and to experiment. Simply put, they want the freedom to be wrong sometimes, too. But they want more speech, rather than less. And the moral panic seems to be casting students as snowflakes who want to be freefromspeech.

Andrs: I do wonder if there isnt a generational shift, though, in how we think of disagreeable speech that makes us uncomfortable. In one of my journalism classes a couple of years back, most of my students said it would be reasonable to ban what they considered controversial speakers (such as Trump administration officials) from campus. The one student in class who felt strongly that any invited speaker should be heard was a Russian journalist here on a State Department exchange. It was pretty funny, as he was like, But this is America. So I wonder what you mean when you say students want the freedom to be wrong sometimes toobecause that seems to be what the folks in the moral panic school are saying too.

Pardis: So, I think that students want the space (which some derisively chide as safe spaces) to wrestle with these difficult issues. They want to be able to try out new words, frameworks, phrasing. But they want to feel safetodo that. They dont want to be called out for saying the wrong thing. So our job in higher ed is to create networks of belonging where students can feel like they belong and are being heard but where they can dig into the challenging issues.

Andrs: Robby, for much of our history, it was the left that worried about the right restricting debate and speech, and now there is this concern about political correctness on the left leading to an erosion of speech. Sitting at the libertarian citadel of Reason, do you feel there has been a shift in terms of where the threat lies, or do the threats to speech continue to come from all sides? What worries you most these days?

Robby: I think one of the difficulties in discussing these issues is scale. Certainly, there has been plenty of catastrophizing coming from people on the political right. We are told that the campus free speech problem is a crisis, political correctness is the worst its ever been, young people hate free speech, that sort of thing. There are enough examplesmany of them quite egregious!that, if youre looking to demonstrate that this is the case, there are things you can point to. Some promote this narrative while ignoring the very real threats to free speech posed by the government and specifically the Trump administration.

All that said, it does appear to me to be the case that culturally speaking, a climate of self-censorship has taken shape in many elite progressive social circles, college campuses being the first and most obvious.

It is not universal. There is still plenty of interesting dialogue happening. But some students, and indeed some professorsmany who are themselves on the political leftdo seem to run into trouble when they discuss certain topics, often relating to race or sex. And that trouble is usually caused by a small number of ideologically motivated students whose view of free speech is that they essentially have a right not to be offended.

Pardis: I dont disagree that people are self-censoringbut I think that folks on the right and left are frustrated with self-censorship.

Robby: That I would heartily agree with. I hear all the time from professors who represent the old left, ACLU types, and are increasingly frustrated by their studentsnot all of them, but the small number of unreasonable ones who demand a lot of attention and appeasement.

Andrs:Sabine, you just graduated from ASU, where you were the executive editor of the State Press newspaper. Congrats (and how you managed all that in a time of a pandemic is a separate question for another day). Whats your take on us older folks speculating on your generations views on free speech and your slowflakeiness?

Sabine: If anything, I think political correctness is generally asking for more thoughtful speech. While there are some egregious examples, as Robby said, of people who may take it to an extreme, I think that does not represent youth and students at large.

But what is being called snowflakeiness is really a push for public figures to be accountable for speech that members of the public (largely, but not exclusively, made up of Gen Z and millennials) see as being bigoted, harmful, or simply incorrect. There is a demand for accountability that can gain traction very quickly and organically.

In general, I think this kind of criticism can be seen as adding to the discourse, as a counterpoint to whatever offensive statements are made, which really affirms free speech. After all, free speech never called for freedom from criticism and consequences.

Pardis: I would agree with that, Sabine. I think that the phrase political correctness, though, has also been taken out of context and triggers moral panic.

Sabine: Its a catchphrase, like the term snowflake, thats made it easier at times to malign the intentions of youth and students.

Andrs: Were there speakers who came to campus in your years at ASU that you felt shouldnt have had the right/opportunity to speak?

Sabine: I think the most controversial speaker I can remember is Carl Goldberg, who was brought to campus by College Republicans United, a far-right political club at ASU. A number of groups, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, have criticized Goldberg for misrepresenting Islam and being Islamophobic, while the Southern Poverty Law Center described him as an anti-Islam lecturer. CRU set up the event as a discussion between Goldberg and the Muslim Students Association, who invited a local imam to provide a counterperspective. I dont think theres any need to give space to bigoted speech on campus, and the event created a false equivalency between the two speakers, given that Goldberg is heavily prejudiced against Islam and promotes Islamophobia. The interesting thing is that CRU said in an email at the time that Press is NOT welcome to attend the event, which is a hypocritical stance from a group that claims to love freedom.

Robby: I mean, its very difficult coming up with a precise term to describe the range of examples were usually talking aboutfrom, say, Ben Shapiro getting shouted down at a college campus to data guy David Shor being fired from his job. Cancel culture seems to be the term that is currently winning.

Andrs: Robby, youve done some great reporting on some of the more disconcerting episodes on campus, but as you also say, there is a question of scale and how prevalent these episodes really are. Columbia president and First Amendment scholar Lee Bollinger had a powerful essay in the Atlantic last year saying this is far less of an epidemic than is sometimes suggested.

To shift gears a bit: You are working on a book about content moderation on social media. Do you feel that what we see online is analogous to the campus debates, and are you worried about a decline of free speech online? (Seems like many people fret about the opposite.)

Robby: I think that social media has greatly expanded our capacity to engage in speech. It would be hard to argue otherwise. I mean, right now, we are using an online platform to hold a debate! Remarkable. We forget how much harder this would have been just 15 years ago. But more speech isnt always pleasant, and in fact, social media has permitted a lot of irritating people to make themselves known and to identify one another and group together. On the far right, this manifests itself in the form of some really awful racist and sexist peoplethe alt-right, for instanceengaged in campaigns of harassment that make the internet a much more miserable place. But you also have this problem where now everything people say is public record forever, and its trivially easy to go digging, find an unwise remark or joke from perhaps years ago, and get someone fired or dragged through the mud. And this happens to people on the right and the left.

Pardis: Totally agree.

Robby: Social media spaces act as public spaces, but they are privately owned and administered, so the rules here can be more flexible than what the First Amendment requires of, say, a public university. So there are a lot of interesting debates to be had about how much moderation there should be, and if it can be done in a nonbiased way.

Like, in a truly public space. I mean, the Westboro Baptist Church can shriek obscenities at peoples funerals. Thats literally what the Supreme Court has ruled! On Twitter and Facebook, they dont have to permit that. But they could.

But what results is people being censored on social media, and then they complain about it. And sometimes if you look, it does seem like the call was wrong, or unfair, or heres 80 examples where someone said the same thing and didnt get in trouble.

Andrs: I dont envy Mark Zuckerberg.The right accuses him of too much content moderation, the left of not doing enough.And yes, these are not First Amendment questions.He can set whatever rules he wants on his platform.

Robby: The platforms do get attacked either way, yes. Too much moderation, and Sen. Josh Hawley comes for you. Not enough, and its Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Andrs: How do each of you feel about political ads on Twitter and Facebook? The former said it wouldnt accept them anymore, FB still does. How do you all feel about tolerating a certain amount of what Colbert used to call truthiness from candidates on these platforms?

Pardis: I guess I think we need to be wary of censorship of any kind. Our job as educators is to help teach readers how to sift through information. Teaching critical thinking skills and looking for Truth (capital T intentional) is a key component of higher ed. So that is the role we play.

Robby: I prefer Facebooks approach. I think expecting Mark Zuckerberg to be the arbiter of whats true online would be foolish, and Zuckerberg was correct to realize this. Im intrigued by Facebooks new council that will adjudicate difficult speech questions; this could be a model for other platforms.

Andrs: Its also true that we can no longer pretend to be in some sealed-off Fortress America. As you noted in a recent article, Robby, two-thirds of Facebooks new Oversight Board are foreign experts, as befits a global platform. Increasingly, too, institutions like the NBA and even Hollywood studios have to be mindful of Chinese censors when exercising their own speech. Should we worry that our speech freedoms might be devalued by globalization (paradoxically?) regardless of our internal spats on the issue?

Pardis: The global angle is really important, and Im glad you brought that up. For me, being censored, arrested, and kicked out of Iran for my writings really informs my views on the topic. And it makes me appreciate the importance of academic freedom and free speech here in the U.S.

Andrs: I wondered about that, Pardis. You courageously gave a speech at the University of Tehran in 2007 on sexual politics, and within 14 minutes of getting started, you were hauled offstage by four soldiers whod barged in to put a stop to your talk. Subsequently you were detained and expelled from the country.How does that inform your views on speech?

Pardis: I think it makes me really attuned to the importance of freedomtospeak.

It makes it so that I dont take for granted the fact that I can write a book that may be critical of the government and then not be arrested.

But it also makes me committed even more to higher education, specifically that which a liberal arts education offers. Teaching students to question, to think, and to uphold the freedom to hold that space.

Andrs: Does your experience in Tehran make you empathize with controversial far-right speakers who get disinvited or shouted down on campuses?

Pardis: Thats an interesting question. Because I do want to go back to Sabines point about the call forthoughtfulspeech. My experiences in Tehran were so haunting because I was trying to be very thoughtful about how I presented my work, and it was data-driventhe result of a decade of research.

Andres: But whos to decide whats thoughtful?

Pardis: I wasnt speaking up to offend people, I was speaking up because peoples rights were being violated.

Sabine: Its also important to remember that censorship abroad centers around criticism of government and powerful officials. Here in the United States, I see people like those who signed the Harpers letter, claim that theyre being censored because there is public outcry against their speech and actions.

And so in assessing these cases, I think its important to take into consideration the power differential.

Andrs: The power differential between ?

Pardis: Between who is regulating and who is being regulated. A lot of this is also getting mixed up with the social pandemic of racism that rages in our country.

BIPOC individuals have been silenced for a long time. And they want to feel safe to speak up and speak back.

A big problem as I see it is that free speech is posited as the counterweight to efforts around diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And the two are not diametrically opposed forces. Not at all. But that is how its being framed.

Sabine: Public figures have larger platforms than the average individual who may criticize them online. I think criticism from youth, students, and BIPOC when they punch up can be considered as adding to freedom of speech, rather than censorship. Certainly, social media can amplify their power in a way that is unprecedented.

Robby: My issue with the power differential argument is that it often seems to assume that there are two groups, the marginalized and the powerful. But people can be marginalized in some situations and powerful in others. Obviously, if you belong to certain historically oppressed groups, that has an impact on you in many ways. At the same time, its been fairly easy for the supposedly powerless to drum up social media canceling campaigns (for lack of better terminology) against the supposedly powerful.

Andrs: I always think of poor Trotsky when I hear about cancel campaigns. He was canceled in so many ways!

Robby: I think the next phase of this conversation will move to the workplace. I recently wrote about a San Francisco museum curator who was forced to resign because he said, after noting the museums diversity efforts, that well, of course, there would still be paintings from white artists too. Was it clumsy phrasing? Sure. But it created a petition that branded him a white supremacist and demanded his immediate ouster. This is the kind of thing that worries me and probably worries a lot of other people. Was it properly a free speech issue? I guess not. Still seems bad and wrong.

Pardis: But this is why we need freedom to be wrong, and freedom to be clumsy, and freedom to talk about things, about pain points, about racism in safe ways.

Andrs: Slate alum Michelle Goldberg wrote in her New York Times column that she does worry about the left having a speech problem in a climate of punitive heretic-hunting (speaking of Trotsky), and she alluded to NYU professor Jonathan Haidts criticism of safetyism in these debates, when disagreements are quick to lead to calls for HR to get involved. She wrote that even sympathetic people will come to resent a left that refuses to make a distinction between deliberate slurs, awkward mistakes and legitimate disagreements.

Pardis: Thats why it keeps coming back to campuses. We need to be having the conversations that get us to better frameworks and phrasing so that those who want to push political correctness dont veer into extreme waters of moral panic, either.

Andrs: Robby, I wonder what advice youd give to universities after all youve reported on to not curb freedom of inquiry that we seek to preserve?

Robby: Fire a bunch of administrators!

Andrs: Whoa, careful! I think I technically may be one.

Robby: University administrations do too much policing of speech, often in the form of investigations. Lots and lots of investigations. I dont think professors should have to fear that a classroom discussion occasionally veering off topic is going to trigger a Title IX trial. We need to restore a presumption of good faith.

Andrs: Sabine, you get the last word. How do you think you will look back at this time, when you were in college during the Trump administration? Will you look back at this time of incivility and polarization as a precursor of better days, or are you wary that this will be the environment you will be working in for coming years?

Sabine: I hope that future generations feel empowered to help shape the society that they want to see. I do see these turbulent times as a path toward better days, but I dont think incivility is as much of a problem as it is being made out to be. Civility is a comfort for those whose identities are not at stake in the discourse. It shouldnt be prioritized over standing up for marginalized peoples, and sometimes its necessary to shake the table in order to make way for change.Saying something bigoted in a polite tone isnt respectful; its only a false veneer that protects those espousing harm. Tolerance doesnt need to extend to proponents of bigotry, because bigotry is inherently violent, and I dont think civility is always required in turn. More than anything, I think the current environment pushes us all to be better. Rather than looking at cancel culture as something to fear, I think we can look to it as a moment for growth and learning, which makes me optimistic.

Correction, July 31, 2020: This article originally misidentified Robby Soaves role at Reason. He is a senior editor, not an associate editor.

This piece has been updated to clarify the role of the signatories of the Harpers open letter on free speech.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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Is There a Moral Panic Over Campus Speech? - Slate

Peacock has taken wing, and NBCUniversals streaming service distinguishes itself from fellow newcomers Disney+ and HBO Max by offering 15,000 hours of film and TV for free, if viewers are willing to tolerate ad breaks. With enough entertainment to stretch to March 2022 without sleeping, where to begin? The Universal monsters, like the Mummy and the Wolf Man, are an obvious start. Other self-celebratory categories on the home page include movies starring S.N.L. alums and a salute to Alfred Hitchcock, who was loyal to the studio for 43 years.

Build your own double feature of the 1957 sci-fi movie The Incredible Shrinking Man and Lily Tomlins 1981 rejoinder, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, or pair two fast-paced flicks set amid the chaos of a daily newspaper: The Front Page (1974), starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, and Ron Howards The Paper (1994), in which Michael Keaton and Glenn Close battle for control of a story that could send two Black teenagers to jail. Eclectic to a fault, the service has a film for every mood. Here are nine of our favorites.

Stream it here.

When Fab 5 Freddy spray-painted soup cans on a subway train, it was an announcement that the guardians of fine art had to shove over for a generation of kids from Brooklyn and the South Bronx. The director Charlie Ahearn grabbed his camera to capture the scene, and his loose-limbed, ad-libbed feature would become hip-hops first (and arguably, best) film. Wild Style is as authentic in sound in one scene, Grandmaster Flash D.J.s in his own kitchen as it is in spirit. The climactic concert at the East River Park Amphitheater was shot without a permit, twice. As the star Lee Quiones, whose bright pieces are now in the Whitneys permanent collection, once scribbled, Graffiti is art and if art is a crime, please God, forgive me.

At the height of 90s heroin chic, Lisa Cholodenko wowed Sundance with this erotic drama about an ambitious young magazine editor named Syd (Radha Mitchell) and her neighbor, Lucy, a dissolute photographer (a phenomenal Ally Sheedy). Lucy is the grande dame of the upstairs drug den where her German girlfriend (Patricia Clarkson), hair in a slovenly Bardot bouffant, glowers at her love rival in a haze. Mesmerizing and intelligent, Cholodenkos debut is about the need to see and be seen, from Syds power struggle against her demeaning male boss to Lucys efforts to sober up and shoot her comeback cover story.

Stream it here.

Consider the screenwriters Billy Wilder and Charles Bracketts criminally underseen picture a hard-luck counterpart to Casablanca. While Bogey and Bergman cooled their heels in a swanky nightclub, other European war refugees assembled on the Mexican border, where Charles Boyers Romanian gigolo lucks into a room at the crowded Hotel Esperanza only because its occupant committed suicide that morning. When an immigration agent who misquotes the text on the Statue of Liberty predicts a five- to eight-year wait, the playboy schemes to marry an American. Once he slides a borrowed ring on the finger of an innocent tourist (Olivia de Havilland, luminous as ever), the callous groom is caught in his own squeeze. Can he cross legally into the States before the rings rightful owner, a showgirl played by Paulette Goddard, exposes his ruse?

Stream it here.

Sick of staring at the same walls? Find catharsis in the claustrophobic infatuation between a lonely hearts barmaid, Agnes (Ashley Judd), and the conspiracy theorist (Michael Shannon) who moves into her motel room and promptly plasters it in tinfoil. Bug has the lean energy of a debut feature. Yet the director William Friedkin, in his 70s at the time, and the screenwriter Tracy Letts, adapting his own play, had nothing to prove except the thrill of a small story viciously told. Shannon, who originated the role onstage, turns in a barnstorming performance.

The first-time filmmaker Bill Watterson scrounged 30,000 feet of cardboard to build this microbudget monument to practical effects. Over a lost weekend, the flighty artist Dave (Nick Thune) builds a living room play fort that, once entered by his girlfriend and a documentary crew, unfolds into a labyrinth complete with a deadly Minotaur. Here, sliced necks spurt red confetti, and when survivors crawl through hole-punched hexagonal tunnels that harken to 2001: A Space Odyssey and flee origami cranes in a homage to the trash compactor scene in Star Wars, the effect feels both recycled literally and ingenious.

Stream it here.

The culture wars were never fought with more cheer than in this 1982 musical in which a tinpot TV moralizer (Dom DeLuise) crusades to close down the Chicken Ranch, a brothel headed by Mona Stangley (Dolly Parton), a madam who makes entertaining the A&M football team seem as wholesome as pouring lemonade at the library. (Shes even dating the sheriff, played by Burt Reynolds.) DeLuise lampoons a now-familiar cable news type, a hypocrite who rages about liars and sinners in a phony Texan accent. At the same time, the lily-livered governor (Charles Durning, who scored an Oscar nomination for the part) is beholden only to polls. The director Colin Higginss take on the Broadway hit is a charm offensive perhaps offensively so for those doing a double-take at its ecstatically content prostitutes. Still, no one can resist Parton serenading Reynolds with her showstopping hit, I Will Always Love You.

Stream it here.

Six years after their clench in Morocco, the oil-and-vinegar combo of a slithery Marlene Dietrich and a straight-shooting Gary Cooper was revived for a fizzy caper flick about a scammer who slips purloined pearls into a strangers pocket and stalks him through Spain conniving how to swipe them back. The only film I need not be ashamed of is Desire, declared Dietrich, who slinks through the movie outlined in feathers and furs. As for Cooper, he speaks for her fans when he swoons, First you throw mud in my face, then you want me to kiss your hand. Continental.

Fans of Lee Danielss Southern-fried gothic are committed, in the sense that the gatekeepers of good taste might pinion them in a straitjacket. As pulpy as its title, The Paperboy is a sweathouse of pheromones set in the Florida swamps where the death-row convict Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack) has lured two reporters (Matthew McConaughey and David Oyelowo), one besotted pen pal (Nicole Kidman) and a college kid (Zac Efron) who lusts after Kidmans character while the camera drools over him. Little that follows is suitable for print, which is part of the fun. Kidmans bravura performance makes audiences feel like they pressed play on a fugue state and, afterward, cant quite believe certain scenes were real until someone else watches the film and confirms that, yes, Kidman did straddle Efron and bellow, If anyones going to pee on him, its going to be me! Tag, youre it.

Stream it here.

Its October 1962 in Key West and the brothers Gene and Dennis are scared of everything. The Cuban Missile Crisis is unfolding 90 miles away and, closer to home, the gleeful schlockmeister Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman) has rolled into town to promote his new chiller, Mant! The boys cant tell which is their more immediate threat: a classmate warning that duck and cover wont save them from the atomic bomb, or the local bully wearing a promotional rubber ant suit. It takes a lot more to scare people these days, sighs Woolsey. Too much competition. But when Woolsey traces his line of work back to the first cave man chased by a mammoth, this nostalgic comedy blooms into the director Joe Dantes love letter to the movies in all their mutations.

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John Schneider, aka Bo Duke from the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, recently asked his fans a question via YouTube: Was The Dukes of Hazzard a racially charged show? Was the intention of the paint scheme on the General Lee a white supremacist statement in any way? And if you think it was, I wanna know.

For the uninitiated, the General Lee was the Duke brothers 1969 Dodge Charger, which outperformed the cop cars of rural Georgia week after week from 1979 to 1985. Bo and Lukes car was named after a Confederate civil war hero; its horn played the opening bars of Dixie; and, as for its paint scheme, it sported a giant Confederate flag on its roof. It was basically the American south on wheels.

We all know why Schneider felt the need to ask, 35 years after the show ended. In response to the police killing of George Floyd and the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, Confederate monuments and symbols are being removed and reassessed, not least the flag. Last month Nascar banned Confederate flags from its race meetings and Mississippi became the final US state to remove the Confederate battle emblem from its state flag. And, earlier this month, the US defence department banned the Confederate flag and other divisive symbols from all military bases. Culture is also undergoing a reappraisal: Amazons streaming service is considering removing The Dukes of Hazzard from its catalogue.

And its not over yet. Dispute rages over what the Confederate flag really signifies. With his limitless desire to open another front in the culture wars, President Trump recently asserted that it represents freedom of speech, and criticised Nascar. Spike Lee, on the other hand, said the flag made him feel the same way my Jewish brothers and sisters feel about the swastika. Having once stood for one, unambiguous thing the Confederate army during the American Civil War the flag has now accumulated a multitude of meanings, many far removed from the original Confederate cause. Popular culture has been central to that process.

The responses to Schneiders question were an overwhelming No, even from commenters claiming to be black and Latino fans. On the face of it The Dukes of Hazzard was simple, good-natured fun. It barely ever broached matters of race, slavery or the civil war, although the erasure of non-white characters from the landscape made that easier. Sure, their car had a Confederate flag, but the Dukes were just good ol boys, never meanin no harm, as the theme tune had it.

The Confederate flag as we know it 13 white stars on a blue cross with a red background was designed in 1861 by William Porcher Miles, an avowed pro-slavery secessionist politician. After the civil war it became the prevailing way to represent the Confederacy, initially in the context of military history and memorials. It began to seep into popular culture in the 1940s, says John Coski, historian at the American Civil War Museum and author of The Confederate Battle Flag. It was adopted by southern fraternities, and soldiers from the south used it during the second World War. It entered postwar politics via the pro-segregation Dixiecrats. In the early 1950s the US developed a flag fad, and suddenly it was everywhere: on T-shirts, licence plates and mugs. It became an icon for an attitude, says Coski.

And that attitude was rebel. But, rather than military and political rebellion against the northern states in defence of a racist ideology, the flag came to represent more nebulous forms of rebellion. Lynyrd Skynyrds 1974 pro-southern anthem Sweet Home Alabama featured the flag on its cover, and the band used it liberally in their graphics, merch and stage act, as did such other southern rock acts as Tom Petty and the Allman Brothers Band. Petty would unfurl the flag on stage during the song Rebels, whose chorus begins: I was born a rebel down in Dixie. They all later renounced its use, though not Johnny Cash, who sang in front of it on The Muppet Show in 1980.

It wasnt just southern bands. Primal Scream put the flag on the cover of their 1994 album Give Out But Dont Give Up, but this was intended to signal their new southern-tinged sound, the album having been recorded in Memphis. The cover was actually a photograph by William Eggleston, celebrated chronicler of the southern American landscape, whose work often incorporates Confederate flags, overtly or covertly. Egglestons best-known image may be 1973s Greenwood, Mississippi, itself used as a cover for Big Stars 1974 album Radio City. It depicts a bare light bulb on a garish red ceiling, with white cables forming an X across it, like a subliminal Confederate flag.

On screen the flag came to represent another form of rebellion, that of the outlaw. It had often figured in movies in a historical context, as in Gone with the Wind, but a new trail was blazed by the car-chase caper Smokey and the Bandit, the USs highest-grossing movie of 1977 after Star Wars. It features many elements The Dukes of Hazzard would later adapt: a charming southern maverick (Burt Reynolds) evading inept cops in a fast car, with a Confederate flag on its licence plate.

In both cases the flag is associated with mild rebellion against the local law, more on the level of moonshine-running, in a virtually postracial south. Consciously or not, pop culture was now in step with the lost cause narrative, which had striven to dissociate the Confederacy from slavery and racism, aligning it instead with nobility and heroism.

The reality was quite different. For one thing General Lee wasnt some good soldier who happened to be on the losing side. When Robert E Lees army marched into Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863, says the historian Kevin Levin, it was with the intent of kidnapping upwards of 200 free blacks. That army was carrying the Confederate battle flag. That army was a slave-catching army. It was functioning as the military arm of a government that had one purpose: to protect the institution of slavery.

To African Americans especially, the Confederate flag represents a darker form of rebellion, one that targets their civil rights. The flag was adopted by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and was frequently brandished by counterprotesters at civil-rights marches. Even in 1982, when The Dukes of Hazzard was at its peak, John Hawkins, the first black cheerleader at the University of Mississippi, ignited a controversy by refusing to bear the flag at college football games, where it was a ubiquitous fixture. His fraternity was picketed by more than 1,000 white students waving Confederate flags. The local Ku Klux Klan held a protest.

What is the idea that this symbol is intended to convey? says Kyle Bowser, consultant to the Hollywood bureau of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP. The common denominators seem to be elements that are malicious, unproductive and certainly injurious to certain members of our society. In 2000 the NAACP and other groups began an economic boycott of South Carolina over its refusal to remove the Confederate flag from the state capitol, where it had flown since 1962.

Ironically, around the same time, the flag began to be appropriated by black musicians, who sought to redefine its meaning. Such rappers as Andr 3000, of Outkast, Lil Jon and Ludacris all wore the symbol. Ludacris caused a stir at the 2005 Vibe awards by performing draped head to toe in a Confederate-flag outfit. After the show, he said: This flag represents the oppression that we as African Americans have endured for years. This is a symbol of segregation and racism. At the end of the performance, I removed and stomped on the flag to reveal my version of the flag a flag comprised of black, red and green. Those are the colours of Africa.

In a less thought-out way, in 2013 Kanye West wore a jacket emblazoned with the flag and incorporated it into merchandise for his Yeezus tour. I took the Confederate flag and made it my flag, he said. Now what you gonna do?

All these attempts to untether the flag from its original associations were largely undone in 2015, when a mass shooting in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, left nine African Americans dead. The 21-year-old shooter, Dylann Roof, was avowedly motivated by white-supremacist beliefs, and his website featured images of himself waving the Confederate flag. Within weeks major retailers, including Wal-Mart, Amazon, Sears and eBay, pledged to stop selling Confederate-flag merchandise. The manufacture of toy replicas of the General Lee also ceased. And, in a victory for the NAACP, the flag was removed from the South Carolina state capitol. Mississippi was the last hold-out.

The recent wave of Black Lives Matter protests ought to have ended the idea of the Confederate flag as an innocuous symbol, but the battle continues. According to a Quinnipiac University poll this month, 56 per cent of Americans see the Confederate flag as a symbol of racism. In another poll, however, 70 per cent of Republicans saw the flag as a symbol of southern pride. Even as the US military and Nascar abandon the flag, other southern groups are resisting the erasure, encouraged by Donald Trump. On July 15th about 4,500 patriots drove in a 12km convoy through Ocala, Florida, in support of the flag, which, of course, appeared in abundance. Leading the convoy was a replica of The Dukes of Hazzards General Lee.

To its defenders, as the bumper sticker puts it, the flag represents heritage not hate. The NAACPs Kyle Bowser responds: I would press those who feel that connection to clearly articulate that heritage. Is it the food they ate? Is it a style of dress or art? I dont see what the connective tissue is between states that hoisted the Confederate flag, other than their commitment to the exploitation of black people.

John Coski points out that the people who were most opposed to the proliferation of the Confederate flag into the wider culture were Confederate groups themselves. The United Daughters of the Confederacy were responsible for airbrushing Confederate history and erecting monuments to the civil war in the 20th century. In the 1940s and 1950s they campaigned to pass laws restricting the use of the flag solely to historical and commemorative purposes.

Why make a point of trying to keep it out there, says Coski, where everyone has a right to interpret it however they wish? Isnt it in your interest to limit it to museums, where it has an unambiguous historical context, or to cemeteries where it has an unambiguous memorial context?

Should we also put The Dukes of Hazzard in a museum? Should we remove it from our screens, like Disney did with Song of the South (having accepted that the films cheery nostalgia for slavery and plantation life was grossly offensive); or provide historical context, as HBO Max recently did with Gone with the Wind? These are tricky questions. But, while the culture war grinds on, no creator of film, television, music or art is likely to use the Confederate flag unthinkingly ever again and most will choose not to use it at all.

As with the Confederacy itself, the fight to retain the flag in US public life is facing defeat. The only thing it now seems to symbolise is the United States inability to heal its divisions and reconcile with its past. Guardian

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From Dukes of Hazzard to Kanye West: The Confederate flag curse - The Irish Times