"The Room"

Even though I saw "The Disaster Artist" in 2017, a comedy about the making of Tommy Wiseau's 2003 "The Room," I had never actually seen the movie until last night at the Tower Theater. 

There were about thirty people in the audience, all ready to see, by popular agreement, one of the worst movies ever made, but for that very reason, something of a modern masterpiece. There was a Rocky Horror ambiance about it. Everyone seemed to have plastic spoons to toss at critical times. Interludes that featured San Francisco Bay were met with chants of "water, water!" Views of Golden Gate traffic were met with chants of "go, go!" Views of the city were met with "meanwhile in San Francisco!" And, of course, the classic meme, "Oh, hi Mark!"

 

Could We See a Revival of the Klan?

The recent texts to Blacks and Hispanics telling them to report for cotton-picking duty caught my attention. It struck me as an update to old-fashioned Ku Klux Klan terror tactics. 

Perhaps we are going to see a revival of the Klan, perhaps the fourth surge in its history, or if not the Klan, some organization like it. The second revival of the Klan came after WW1 and was driven by anti-immigration and pro-Prohibition sentiment; similar to today's border frenzy and stricter abortion laws. 

I think it's unlikely that any mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, or mass crackdowns on young women, will succeed, in part, because local police will be required. Many agencies won't cooperate, because they are already busy enough. Still, militant, engaged civilians could step in where the police won't:

From the beginning, Prohibition was tied up with anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic biases. Many of its advocates were white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants who thought only people like them could be “real Americans.” They believed the country was under siege by Catholic immigrants from countries like Italy, and that these people threatened the U.S. with their foreign drinking habits and saloons. 

“It was really a battle for cultural supremacy in a country that was changing,” says Thomas R. Pegram, a history professor at Loyola University Maryland and the author of One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. “Prohibition became a way in which that could be enforced in local communities.”