How to Reform the Police

Is it supposed to comfort us that "just" 1 in 4 is bad? And where are people of color?

And so it happens again. Change the victim. Change the place. Change the names of the murderers. Another black man killed by those sworn to uphold the law and protect all American citizens.

I have no words to add about the senseless death of George Floyd. His death is akin to those killed by gunmen with automatic weapons. We are horrified. We weep. We are angry. We bury our dead. Then we move on. Just more numbers for the data bank. Do we need more numbers to tell us that American society remains deeply racist? Or that police departments contain more than “just a few” bad actors?

Others have spoken more authoritatively and elegantly than I about race in America. This essay is about law enforcement—a topic I know from several perspectives. First, I worked in probation services for six years. Later I studied the sociology of crime. Then I taught college-level Crime in America for four years. As a citizen, I have witnessed the alarming militarization of police forces. I have informed views on what needs to happen to reduce police violence.

When Bill Clinton became president he pledged to appoint a Cabinet that “looks like America.” I will leave aside the many ways he managed to disappoint and assert that American police forces need to look like America. Nearly 80% of all police officers are non-Hispanic whites. Right away we have a problem; just 54% of the American population is Euro-white. Latinos make up 17% of the population, African Americans 16%, and Asians 7%. (The remaining 6% are a smorgasbord of Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and non-white immigrants.) The following can and should happen starting tomorrow.

·       An immediate end to all-white patrol squads. It should never be acceptable for a white officer to respond to a call without at least one person of color in the car.

·       An immediate freeze on hiring white police until racial and ethnic parity is achieved.

·       Immediate and mandatory racial and cultural diversity training. Officers who do not pass a post-training exam should be placed on leave until such time as they pass said test and remain on probation for 6 months after reinstatement.

Here’s another alarming statistic. Nearly 88% of all police officers are white males, though white men make up just 31% of the population. This underscores the need for:

·      A freeze on hiring white male police until parity is reached.

·      Sustained recruitment and hiring of women.

About one in five police officers has a military background. Speaking of things we have known for a long time but haven’t corrected, it’s well-established that the U.S. military has a distressing track record toward women and people of color. More ominously, one-third of those engaging in mass shootings are ex-servicemen. What to do?

·      End preferential hiring practices of veterans and …

·      Improve psychological screening of all candidates.

·      Tie the military budget to significant improvements in recruitment practices, personality profiling, diversity training, and psychological support for military personnel.  

This will upset “soft” liberals, but towns and cities should follow the European model and increase the use of security cameras on the streets. If you're worried about ICE raid, tapes can be erased daily if no crime or police conduct is image-captured in a 24-hour period. Some have argued cameras don’t decrease crime. That’s a debate for another day, but there are good reasons to turn on the cameras:

·      It should not have to be the job of Smart Phone-bearing citizens to risk their own safety to record the malfeasance of police.

·      It would actually help cops who aren’t jerks. Too many people bear animus toward police, have agendas, or do not see everything that occurs during an arrest. Good cops ought not be tossed into a he said/he said situation in which every perp cries police brutality, or someone with a grudge posts a misleading YouTube video.

Here are a set of no excuses, no forgiveness reforms.

·      The moment police are called to a scene, they should be required to activate vest cameras.

·      It should not be excusable for a police officer to claim the situation was too “hot” to turn on the camera. If cops have time to unholster a gun, they have time to turn on the camera. As noted, it should be done on the way to the scene.

·      Any police officer failing to have his/her camera running should immediately be suspended for a week without pay, unless…

·      A serious incident occurs, in which case officers in question should be immediately suspended. If a death occurs and there is no video, the officers should be fired.

These are not radical ideas. Nearly all could be funded by axing unneeded military-style hardware. Black lives matter. Moreover, if we don’t reform police procedures, we condemn ourselves to a society in which none matter if the white guy with the gun decides they don’t.

The Water Dancer an Impressive Debut

The Water Dancer (2019)

By Ta-Neshi Coates

★★★★

Conduction: The transfer of heat, energy, or acoustics within or through a substance due to a change in temperature and without moving materials. It’s what happens when we turn on a radiator, heat a tea kettle, or hold onto an ice cube as it melts. In Ta-Neshi Coates’ debut novel, it’s also linked to the various meanings of conductors, the kind that transfer or store energy, those who orchestrate, and a crew member on a railroad.

Hiram “Hi” Walker is the protagonist of The Water Dancer. He is a slave on a declining Virginia tobacco plantation, but occupies a semi-privileged position as the half-white son of widowed plantation owner Howell Walker, who (rightly) sees Hi as the more promising of his two sons. He educates him and hopes that his commonsense will rub off on his white heir, Maynard. Coates gives us a memorable look at life at Lockless Plantation and Freetown, the adjoining hamlet. It is a world divided into “the Quality,” the white elites; “the Tasked,” those held in bondage; and “the Low,” who are essentially poor white trash and all the more dangerous for their degraded status. It is they who make up Ryland’s Hounds, who round up runaways and jail them, after they’ve had their sport with them. Coates never specifies the date, but one can infer that the novel is set sometime in the 1850s due to its references to escaped slaves such as Box Brown, Jarm Logue, and Harriet Tubman, all of whose abolitionist works took place after 1849.

Hi grows up thinking he will have a role at Lockless, even though Thena warns him against it. She is the hardened and outwardly unaffectionate older woman who acts as his surrogate mother. (Hiram’s actual mother, Rose, disappeared when he was a toddler.) Thena proves correct. A carriage in which Hi and Maynard are riding plunges into the Goose River. Maynard drowns, but Hi makes it to the bank after having a vision of Rose dancing on the water. Howell is outwardly kind, but Hi learns the hard way that the Quality do not cross social color lines. The upside is that Hi is more than a little attracted to Sophia, the slave and sex partner of Howell’s brother Nathaniel. That too is a reminder that Quality and Tasked live in different worlds, as is the coldness Hi receives from Corrine Quinn, Maynard’s betrothed.

Hi and Sophia attempt an escape that goes very badly–­at least for Sophia. Through circumstances outlined in the novel, Hi’s tormentors and captors are actually members of the Underground Railroad testing his mettle. In Philadelphia, Hi experiences the sweetness of liberty for the first time and immerses himself in a free community. There are many surprises awaiting, though, not the least of which involve those who are other than whom they appear to be.

Coates wishes us to see abolitionism as a higher calling—literally so. This brings us back to conduction. Hi is singled out because others see him as having special abilities. He is like his guide, Harriet Tubman, who takes him on his first journey on the Underground by bending the fabric of time and space. It’s not exactly like a wormhole, but that’s the best I can do. In other words, this novel is shot through with magical realism. Coates skillfully mixes magic with the real—Chautauqua gatherings, the ways in which fear sustains slavery, the potential treachery of all whites, and the serial affectionate bonds of slaves, just to name a few. For Virginia slaves, being sold “down Natchez way” was the ultimate fear, it being a symbol of the Deep South where the Quality neither put on genteel airs nor spared the lash. Escape from Natchez was exceedingly difficult. Coates presents water dancing as a gift, but not a superpower. The Underground was valiant, but not always successful.

The Water Dancer is beautifully written. It is especially impressive as a first novel. Many know Coates as an award-winning journalist and social commentator, but non-fiction and fiction share only a homonym, not a skill set. As in all first novels, there are details that don’t add up. I was quite underwhelmed by an ending and resolution that defied logic, but not in a magical way. A deeper critique is that The Water Dancer bears a lot of resemblance to Colson Whitehead’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Underground Railroad. Plus, Coates’ magical realism strays very close to some of Octavia Butler’s science fiction devices.

Nonetheless, The Water Dancer is a terrific book. Even with its borrowed elements and homage it remains a rare original perspective on slavery. I don’t mean that as a cavalier remark. Like the Civil War, slavery is one of the topics that so dominate the output of historians that it is hard to put an original slant on it. Like a modern-day conductor, Ta-Nehisi Coates delivers us to unexpected places by transferring our gaze from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Rob Weir            

Me, Groucho, and Job Searches

I found it in a box of old things: a picture of a younger me brandishing a fake cigar and wearing a Groucho Marx nose, glasses, and mustache ensemble. Unusual? Not really. The plastic Groucho face remains a popular novelty item. I didn’t look a thing like Groucho, but if anyone had the right to wear it, it was I. Groucho, was and remains one of my idols.

What marked this decades-old fading black and white photo as significant was its purpose. It was my “official” portrait for a job application. I bet you’re wondering what sort of job required such a shot. Comedy club? Traveling circus? Sales promotion? Nope. It was for a high school teaching job I knew I didn’t want and, yes, I will explain. The following is a (mostly) true story.

You may have noticed that COVID-19 has left the economy in shambles. It’s going to get much worse, and this saddens me because I thought I had already lived through what would be the worst financial crisis of my lifetime. I mean the one in the 1970s, not the one from 2011-16 that gets mislabeled the “Great Recession.” Let me assure you, the 1970s downturn was bleaker. It started with the first OPEC oil boycott in 1973 and, though it had brief breaks, lasted well into the 1980s and didn’t really break until early 1992. (Ask me about Reaganomics and I’ll fill you in on why it’s a myth.)

I had the misfortune to graduate from college in the midst of the 1970s muck. I was lucky enough to ditch my retail job, but unlucky to get hired as a juvenile probation officer. What I wanted to do was teach students, not bust them. History jobs are hard to secure today; in the 1970s, you couldn’t buy one, though I tried to do exactly that. We’d like to believe that hard times bring out the best in human beings. Actually, they tend to encourage pirates. In my case, the scurvy dogs masqueraded as an employment agency that found openings and, if you secured one of their leads, you agreed to dump 10% of your salary for the first three years into their treasure chest. You also had to apply for each lead they sent you, or they would stop looking.  

I should have known better, but I dutifully tossed resumes into several rings already mounded knee-deep. Then came the one that sent me over the edge: an opening at a rightwing Christian academy. We’re talking mouth-breathers and fire-eaters, not gentlefolk and do-gooders. I no longer remember where it was. Tallahassee sticks in my brain, but so does Georgia. What to do? When reason fails, try sabotage.

Take the application. Please. It went (more or less) like this:

            Q: Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior?   A: I thought he was supposed to redeem all of humanity, not just me.

            Q: Do you drink?  A: Not much, but I’m open to suggestions.

            Q: Do you smoke? A: No, the cigar is made of rubber. (See attached photo)

            Q: Do you dance?  A: Not very well, I’m told.

            Q: Do you go to movies? A: Yes, but I’m rather picky about what I see.

            Q: What are your views on pornography? A: The same as Justice John Marshall Harlan. I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it.

            Q: Do you believe in original sin? A: No. It appears to me that people just keep committing the same ones over and over. I can’t recall seeing an original one.      

            Q: Do you believe in premarital intercourse? A: It totally depends on the young lady in question. (Had I really been honest, I might have made some reference to demand outstripping supply!)

There were some theological questions that allowed me to be more seriously argumentative, but the application ended with this: Attach a recent photograph of yourself. It didn’t occur to me until years later that they probably wanted to make sure I wasn’t black, but you know what I did. I wanted to make absolutely certain that I had a less than zero chance of being interviewed!

So I went back to the social work job I so desperately wished to leave. As most of you know, my tale has a happy ending. I got married, Emily and I moved to Vermont, and I got my first teaching gig at a place the pirates had never ventured. If you are one of my former students (at any level) and think I helped with your education, don’t thank me. Thank Groucho.

Rob Weir

Ruston Kelly, Emerson Hart, Common Jack, Drivin' and Cryin', Taylor Scott, Samantha Fish, Chelsea Williams and More

Rounder Records artist Ruston Kelly made a mess of his life before rehabbing in 2015. We can be glad he did. He stopped by Paste Studios for a few songs recently, including a powerful cover of Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” that’s better than the original, and that’s no dig at Swift. His voice gives the song more grit and urgency and he’s certainly a better guitarist. Kelly is often listed as a country artist­—perhaps because he’s married to Kacey Musgraves—but if you listen to “Dammit,” the song and vocal inflections evoke the introspective folk of Richard Shindell. It’s a breakup song: It’s alright to tell me what you think about me/I know you’re leaving, you must have your reason/The season is calling, your pictures are falling down… . If that’s not bitter enough for you, try the blues harp-laced “At Your Funeral.” Kelly makes pain sound so good.

Emerson Hart has a sweet tenor voice, but it’s also a powerful one. His “Island” is a lifeline, not a stranding place: I was wrecked and I was shattered/When I washed up on your shore. “32 Thousand Days” is more up-tempo and asks us, When I move from here to ghost/What’s gonna matter most? Need a dose of nostalgia? “Kids” recalls his youthful antics, back when, Nirvana was our Bible/When we needed to be saved. That one’s also about those got stuck in place. And don’t we all know people like that?

If you like more gravel and spit, check out Common Jack. “Skin and Bone” is a love song, but of the rocky variety in which what’s left unsung is tangled in the sheets. There’s a shuffle feel to “I Don’tMind,” your stoic’s guide to taking what comes along in good cheer. Common Jack likes to call things as they are. If you’re sick of the toothless excuses you hear every time another testosterone-poisoned  idiot pulls a trigger, check out his “One TooMany Days,” a song worth hearing if only for the line little boys can’t recognize that they’re a dying breed.

If you’re in the mood for some hard-driving Southern fried rock with a boot in the butt after-kick of country, try Georgia’s Drivin’ and Cryin’. They’ve been around since 1985 and draw inevitable comparisons to the Allman Brothers. However, when I listen to “Live the Love Beautiful,” the title track of their latest recording, Kevin Kinney’s voice reminds me of Neil Young and the arrangement of what Young did in his grunge phase. Perhaps the Allman Brothers comparison comes from jam band material such as “Step By Step,” or the fact that Kinney has played with Warren Haynes. Kinney isn’t a great singer, but he’s a serious rocker, even though he once (1990) made a folk-rock album with a few members of REM. Don’t expect anything like that on Live the Love Beautiful. It is rock n’ roll played loud and hard. Take a listen to their cover of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” It won’t make you forget the Stones, but it’s louder, slower, and has elements of lo-fi.

Here's another Warren Haynes connection, Denver-based Taylor Scott, who has played with Haynes. By his own admission, though, the Otis Taylor Band has been a bigger influence. Scott sports long hair that he twists into a Willie Nelson braid when it’s not in a man bun, but he’s more kick ass than honkytonk. Bust out your best cheeky dance moves for “Somebody Told Me,” which is a blend of blues and funk, with interludes of electric guitar that has bite and buzz. “Salted Watermelon” has more of an electric country blues feel. It’s muscular, though pulls its punches. It also has an excellent line: made my castles out of mud. Then try “Curiosity,” which is packed with verve and drive that builds like a traveling song.

By the way, if you don’t know the Otis Taylor Band, you should. Taylor is such a blues legend that he now often showcases the band rather than himself. Watch their 16-minute jam band tour de force of “Hey Joe.” It’s different from Jimi Hendrix’s famed version and Taylor doesn’t quite have Jimi’s pipes, but my goodness what he and his bandmates do with that song!

Let’s stay bluesy. Samantha Fish came out of Kansas City, inspired by folks like Bonnie Raitt, Tom Petty, and the immortal Stevie Ray Vaughan. If you watch the official video of “Dream Girl,” your first thought is that she’s playing for the country ballad/sweet lil’ thang crowd. Okay, but why is she dressed like Joan of Arc, carrying a sword, and singing as if maybe she’s just trying on a role that probably won’t fit? That’s Fish in a nutshell. Check her out on “Kill or Be Kind/Watch it Die.” There she is, with peroxide hair, fake lashes, and troweled on makeup, airing out her voice atop bass, horns, drums, and keyboards and letting loose on some wicked licks. Wicked lyrics too: Make up your mind, I can kill or be kind. If there’ any doubt you should dress in asbestos around her, watch her burn down the house by shredding an electrified cigar box guitar on “Bulletproof.”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZFxAQz_x6g You can’t make out the vocals on this clip, but do you need them?

Chelsea Williams has a new album that came out this month, so she has made tracks from 2017’s Boomerang available for pay-what-you-like download. If Williams had only been heard singing at the Brown Derby instead of the streets and beach at Santa Monica, she’s be a classic LA discovery story. Her music caught the attention of Sheryl Crow, Lee Ann Rimes, and others before she became an LA staple. Hers is a blend of pop, rock, country, and jazz that evokes Kat Edmonson. “Boomerang” is a piano-based song that’s pretty, heartfelt, and strong in one fell swoop. “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” is darker and moodier, a song for low lights and late nights, and “Fool’s Gold” has elements of layered production often associated with LA music. “Six Bottles of Wine,” though is a Williams pastiche–a bit of torch music, an acoustic blues vibe, and traces of skiffle.

Future Thieves is a great band name and I like front man Elliot Collett’s voice, but I was underwhelmed by this Nashville indie band. “Get Up” is monochromatic and it sounds an awful lot like “Out the Other Side.” They pick it up a bit with jazzy electric notes in “My Body,” but drop again into a generic mode on “Nightmare.” There is talent here, but Future Thieves need to steal some compositional and production tips from bands with more colors on their palettes. 

Apeirogon a Powerful (but flawed) Book

Apeirogon (2020)

By Colum McCann

HarperCollins, 480 pages.

★★★

A few weeks ago, I posted a review of American Dirt that opened with the observation that if you think you can imagine what it’s like to be a Mexican refugee trying to make it into the United States, you probably can’t. Let me draw from the same well in this review of Apeirogon: If you think you’re sure of where you stand on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, you’re probably short-sighted.

I admit that I had no idea of what an apeirogon was before I read this book. It is a polygon, but hold onto your brain. It’s a two-dimensional figure “with a countably infinite number of sides.” That’s pretty abstract, but the basic idea is that no matter how many sides you see or draw, more are possible. This is Irish writer Colum McCann’s working assumption for his new “novel.” I put novel in quotes, because Apeirogon could just as easily be called a literary biography or lightly fictionalized history.

At its center are two flesh-and-blood individuals: Rami Elhanan, a 7^th generation Israeli Jew, and Bassam Aramin, a native-born Palestinian. They are spearheads of Combatants for Peace, a real organization, and have become such good friends that they address each other as “brother.” Each must deal with the murder of a daughter. Rami’s 13-year-old Smadar perished in downtown Jerusalem when three suicide bombers detonated explosive vests; Bassam lost 10-year-old Abir to a rubber bullet fired by a young Israeli soldier.

McCann gives us looks at both the present and the circuitous route that led them to advocate for a peace currently scorned by a majority of their countrymen. Rami served in the military, fought in Israel’s wars, and has a father in law who was a “hero of Israel” turned peace activist. Bassam was one of the young men who used slingshots to fire stones at Israelis. At the age of 17, he tried to blow up jeeps with what turned out to be ineffective grenades and spent 7 years in prison for terrorism. This raises a potent question: How does one embrace another whose “side” caused your daughter’s death? This takes us back to the heart of the apeirogon metaphor. Why would you presume there are only two sides?

One of McCann’s major points is that both Israel and Palestine are damaged by war and occupation, which renders pointless attempts to measure relative damage. Apeirogon is often a book of parallel unsettling experiences. What does it feel like to leave the home of your best friend or a meeting of Combatants for Peace in neutral monastery and then ride your motorcycle across Palestine at night to your home in Israel? How does a Palestinian keep his cool as he sits at an Israeli checkpoint and knows, that on a good day, he’ll only be detained for a few hours?

Rami, Bassam, and their families are remarkable. Imagine an Israeli who thinks that both the occupation of Palestine and the building of West Bank settlements are illegal. Now conjure a Palestinian who goes to England and Ireland to pursue peace studies and makes the Holocaust the center of his studies. McCann explains these contradictions and coping mechanisms as, “Peace without reconciliation. To forgive but not excuse. To colonize the mind.” What drives both men and their Combatants for Peace allies is the deep belief that the status quo is an unacceptable dead end. Or, as they configure the hatred, “It’s not over until we talk.”

For a book whose title suggests an infinite number of sides, McCann dares suggest there really are but two: eternal war or peace. In this sense, the infinite number of sides references the myriad ways in which the status quo is defended and the indeterminate ways in which both sides of the conflict are damaged by it. This point is crucial. It is easy to take sides. If you are pro-Palestine, you can justify atrocities associated with the Intifada as legitimate actions of the oppressed against a repressive state; if you are pro-Israel, you argue that actions require reaction. Palestinians are terrorists whose provocations must be countered with force. Either view leaves two innocent girls dead.

Apeirogon is a powerful book, though not always a great one. McCann employs several devices; some work, some do not. The book is 480 pages long, but it could have been half as long and equally effective. There is repetition, which could be seen as reinforcement or (my view) simply redundant. McCann is a gifted writer, but I don’t think he trusts his audience to connect the dots. The danger is that the book’s length might discourage readers who most need to adjust their views.

McCann also intersperses sections on birds with the biographical narratives. We grasp early one that birds neither know about nor respect borders. They are “free” in ways that Israelis and Palestinians are not. Got that. Check. The rest of the ornithological detail is superfluous.

Still another device–perhaps inspired by the Qu’ran–is writing short bursts of text that are numbered sequentially. McCann doesn’t follow this (if I might) religiously, but he does reverse course at some point and begin to count down instead of up. It’s not clear why, which makes said exercise appear mechanistic.

Finally, I wonder if McCann grew too enamored with the very idea of the apeirogon. How may “sides” do we need to grasp the notion that they are infinite in number? I began to feel the way I fell about calculating increasing numbers of decimal points when squaring pi. Enough already!

I have read that neither Rami nor Bassam have yet managed to finish the book. Each has praised it, but have found it too “painful” to continue to the end. And isn’t pain the point? After all, “It isn’t over until we talk.”

Rob Weir

Three Classic Movies about Greed

 There are those who treat the COVID virus as a threat and counsel caution to reduce its deadly toll, and those motivated by self-interest that see it an annoyance and would use our lives as chips to wager as they spin the Profits Wheel. That’s my hook for taking a look at three movies in which protagonists seek sudden riches. All three are considered classics.

The Gold Rush (1925)

Directed, written, produced, and starring Charlie Chaplin

United Artists, 95 (or 72) minutes, Unrated

Many have trudged into foreboding places in search of gold. In most cases, those who went to mine the miners—hoteliers, furnishing agents, con artists, gamblers—are the ones who made the money. The Gold Rush, a silent film classic considered one of Charlie Chaplin’s best, took its cues from Canada’s Klondike Gold Rush (1896-99), with a few nods to the infamous Donner Party incident (1846-47) in which snowbound settlers headed for California resorted to eating leather and each other.

Chaplin, one of the greatest physical comedians of all time, plays things for laughs, not history lessons. We open to a scene lifted from Eric Hegg’s famed photos of lines of prospectors making or failing to make their way through the Chilkoot Pass. Then we cut to Chaplin as the Lone Prospector improbably dressed in his threadbare Little Tramp costume.  He negotiates numerous hazards but is starving, freezing, and lost in a raging blizzard.

The Lone Prospector happens upon the cabin of notorious outlaw Black Larsen (Tom Murray). They are soon joined by Big Jim McKay (Mark Swain), who has found gold. Larsen’s attempt to evict both men fails, but they are out of food and Larsen draws the short straw and must go out to find some. The plot is thin, but involves a double cross, near-starvation, and stumbling into a town—likely modeled after Dawson City, Yukon—where Chaplin falls for a dance hall girl named Georgia (Georgia Hale) who, at first, uses the bedraggled and poverty-stricken Lone Prospector as amusement.  Big Jim’s reappearance changes the Lone Prospector’s fortunes (literally!). Toward the end of the film, Chaplin is on a boat with his new business partner and spies Georgia before she sees him. He changes back into his rags to see if she really cares. Happy ending.

The Gold Rush is listed as # 58 on the American Film Institute’s list of Greatest American Films. There are several heralded sequences, including Chaplin’s gourmet preparation of his right shoe, Larsen’s starved hallucination that Chaplin is a giant chicken, and a cabin about to be blown over a cliff. Pathos, revelation, and romance are staples of most Chaplin films. If you want to get technical about things, Georgia and her comely friends probably would have been prostitutes in the actual Klondike Gold Rush, but why go there? If you’ve never seen a silent film, this is a good place to start. The original 1925 film was 95 minutes long. It was re-released in 1942 and trimmed to 72 minutes. Not much was lost in the shorter version.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Directed by John Huston

Warner Brothers, 101 minutes, Unrated

Let’s move up to # 31 on AFI’s top 100 list. The Maltese Falcon has it all: Bogart as tough-guy P.I. Sam Spade, John Huston as director, a script adapted from Dashiell Hammett, a legend, and a beautiful woman (Mary Astor) who has a secret.

In the 16^th century, the Knights Templar, a Catholic military order, sent a statue of a jewel-encrusted golden falcon on its way to the King of Spain. Pirates boarded the ship, carried off the falcon, and it was lost to history. In Hammett’s story, several international treasure hunters are following leads that the falcon, now covered in lacquer and painted black, has resurfaced. Spade knows nothing about this when a woman calling herself Ruth Wonderly (Astor) hires him to find her sister, who has taken up with a reprobate. Spade isn’t convinced by her story, so he dispatches his partner Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) to tail Wonderly. Archer is murdered that very night.

Thus begins a tale of ruthless intrigue whose plot thickens from the moment that Ruth “comes clean” and admits her name is actually Brigid O’Shaughnessy. The Maltese Falcon shines because Bogart was born to play a hardboiled character like Spade, because Astor is letter-prefect in her allure and treachery, and because the film is chockfull with other rogues, including Detective Tom Polhaus (Ward Bond), who wouldn’t mind sending Spade to the cooler; obsequious and androgynous fortune-seeker Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre); and “The Fat Man,” Kasper Gutman (Sidney Greenstreet), who has chased the Maltese falcon across the globe and will use any method—cajolery, blackmail, bargaining, murder—to lay hands on it. Greenstreet almost steals the movie from Bogie.

The film is a classic for many reasons, including its poignant ending. Or should I say endings plural? Many consider Dashiell Hammett the dean of detective novels. There are reasons aplenty for that as well. No cinema education is complete without at least one Maltese Falcon viewing.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

Directed by John Huston

Warner Brothers, 126 minutes, Unrated.

Although The Treasure of the Sierra Madre doesn’t enjoy the same fame as The Maltese Falcon, it’s just as good. It won six Oscars—three for John Huston and one for his father Walter—and is also on AFI’s top 100 movies list. This time we get a sort of late Western. The year is (ironically) 1925, and two unemployed drifters, Fred C. Dobbs (Bogart) and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt) are footloose in Tampico, Mexico, bumming for meal money. Instead, they are offered jobs as “roughnecks” to build oil rigs for a contracting agent. But the lure of gold and a windfall for gear sends them into the hills to sluice for gold. They do well, thanks to Howard (Walter Huston), an old man who knows the ropes.

There are no secrets in the hills and they are soon joined by a fourth, Cody (Bruce Bennett), and the mountains are crawling with banditos and Federales. What begins as a partnership of three degenerates into four-way suspicion in which the only person on the level is the one no one trusts. Bogart didn’t win a Best Acting Oscar, but perhaps he should have. His is a chilling portrait of a man so poisoned by golden dreams that we watch him degenerate into a toothy simian-like beast.

One of the film’s morals is quit while you’re ahead. You never know when Gold Hat (Antonia Bedoya) and his banditos will come calling, nor do you know how others define “treasure.” Treasure of the Sierra Madre hurtles to a conclusion that is several parts tragedy and one big dollop of comedic hubris. To my mind, its final scene is an incredibly poignant moment that forces us to consider what matters and what doesn’t.

Rob Weir

American Dirt Will Shatter You

American Dirt (2020)

By Jeanine Cummins

Flatiron Books, 400 pages

★★★★★

You think you can imagine what it’s like to live in a place where drug cartels dominate. You probably can’t. Perhaps you’ve read about a single parent who risks life and limb to get a child to safety and think that you’d do that too. You have no idea what that entails. Maybe you believe that illegal immigrants should be the responsibility of the nations from which they flee. You are clueless.

American Dirt is a shattering novel that will open your eyes and break your heart. It opens in Acapulco, where Lydia Quixano is enjoying a backyard quinceañera party for her niece Yénifer. She and her 8-year-old son Luca have just gone inside when they hears menacing voices and the pop-pop-pop of gunfire. She grabs Luca and they silently cower behind a shower wall while one of the gunmen urinates in a toilet several feet away. Only when all noise ends does she dare venture out, though she knows what she will find. Sixteen family members lie in puddles of blood, including her mother and her husband. Lydia knows this was a ritual slaughter by Los Jardineros (The Gardeners) occasioned by an exposé written by her husband/ reporter Sebastién detailing how the cartel took over the entire state of Guerrero. She knows also that she and Luca must flee immediately, though there is no guaranteed sanctuary in all of Mexico.This begins a 2,540-mile flight to el norte.

Call it the new Grapes of Wrath, complete with a few interstitial chapters that give us needed background. We learn that Lydia knows who ordered the hit: cartel head Javier Crespo Fuentes, who was her friend before he was her pursuer. Lydia owns a bookstore in Acapulco where a well-dressed older man dropped in to buy and discuss books. He seemed a lonely intellectual who cared only for his daughter at college. Javier even shared his poetry with Lydia before she learned he was La Lechuza, “The Owl,” who runs Los Jardineros­. (His nickname comes from his heavy black-framed glasses, a detail several nitpicking readers missed.)

This would be the time to say that only desperate people climb aboard moving freight trains or leap from overpasses onto the tops of them. Hitching a ride on La Bestia (The Beast) is just one of many ways one can die on the way to el norte. You can also be killed by cartel spies whose reach extends to the U.S. border, or be turned in to the police or the military by nervous citizens, which amounts to the same thing as scores of them are cartel moles. Fellow travelers can be equally dangerous. Lydia is warned that everyone will be robbed or extorted at least once and that she can expect to be raped. Plus, she needs food, water, and appropriate clothing for herself and her son. Luca is a precocious geography whiz, but he’s still an 8-year-old.

Cummins leavens despair with snapshots of those whose humanity is greater than fear for their own safety: helpful villagers who assist emigres, nurses and doctors, immigrant rights activists, and nuns, priests, and missionaries. And some travelers are kind. Lydia’s journey is long, but she and Luca meet two teenage Guatemalan girls who have traveled even further. Survive the trip to the border with Nogales, Arizona, and you can peer through a fence at America, but you can’t cross without documentation. You need to find a coyote to smuggle you across in places where you have the best chance of avoiding INS officials and MAGA vigilantes on a mission to make sure Mexicans don’t sneak in. Getting to the relative safety of a Tucson-bound van involves several days of hiking though the desert and avoiding all the things that can kill you there, including dehydration, rattlesnakes, flash floods, injuries, and cold nighttime temperatures. Keep up, or be left behind. A dozen will venture forth, but not all will make it.  

Some books are page-turners whose pleasures you wish to unveil. Proceed with caution with American Dirt. It is unrelenting in forcing you into the decision-making shoes of everyone in the book. At times it feels like the lifeboat moral dilemma in which hard decisions must be made as to who lives and who dies. What is the titular American “dirt?” Is it the literal soil? Partly, but a better question is, “Who is American dirt?” A good follow-up is, “Who decides the worth of any individual?”

Perhaps you’ve heard the novel is controversial. Some have accused Cummins of writing in brown face because apparently someone with an Irish-sounding surname can’t write about Latinos. Although Cummins has a Puerto Rican grandmother, she has been charged with both cultural appropriation and stereotyping. Still others have dismissed the book as trivial just because it was one of Oprah Winfrey’s book club selections. All of this is utter nonsense. First of all, a fiction writer is free to draw upon any materials she wishes; second, it is political correctness run amok to insist that no outsider can possibly understand the plight of others. It’s called empathy; look it up. I don’t give a damn if Cummins got a few things wrong. American Dirt is a powerful book that’s aimed at your soul, not your inner documentarian.

Rob Weir