"Selma"

Last night, I went to see "Selma". I was curious whether King's relationship with LBJ had been butchered as bad as has been rumored.

I had to leave the movie early (I started coughing uncontrollably) but my impression was the relationship was sacrificed as one of the necessary simplifications of making a movie. Ahistorical, of course, but in order for the real history to make sense you have to make a much longer and more complicated movie. In the movie, LBJ is presented as the head of a unitary government, but in fact there was an alternative Shadow Government of the J. Edgar Hoover's FBI that had created an entirely-false, paranoid, alternative reality about King, the degenerate Communist menace.

The key figure in all this was Stanley Levison, who had once been chief financier of the American Communist Party, but became a King advisor. News that Levison had completely severed ties with the Communist Party in 1957 was never conveyed to LBJ or Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, allowing the FBI to maintain its fiction that King was under Communist control in order to justify wiretaps. In fact, the Communist Party had become moribund by the late 1950's, so the FBI took control of directing funds from Moscow to what remained - to me, a huge surprise! I suppose, in order to end the Communist menace, the FBI could have arrested itself, but maintaining the fiction meant more.

There is a great movie to be made about when a governmental agency like the FBI, that is tasked with assuming the worst about everything, is allowed the freedom to create and maintain fantasies without effective correction from the real world. We live in a country whose government functions according to Dick Cheney's "One-Percent Doctrine", so, if anything, things are infinitely-worse today.