(I want to wait a few more days to see a clearer picture of where Rotten Tomatoes falls on Jeanne du Barry before I discuss the issue of if it is fair to question the motives of negative reviewers given the MSM's stance of the Depp/Heard case)
This was the way they used to deal with “uppity” Mexicans—or those who just seemed too “Mexican"—in places like Texas and Arizona:
People today are so hypocritical about telling Hispanics to “assimilate”:
Today this is expressed in more subtle (unless you are a "Karen") ways. It’s easier to “assimilate” if you are a Latina and join in with your “sisters” in the MeToo movement to "confirm" negative stereotypes of Hispanic males, as California Assemblyperson Cristina Garcia has done:
Note that she doesn’t look anything like that portrait. Under “WE THE PEOPLE” it says “DEFEND DIGNITY”; she could probably use some of that herself, as this report in Politico suggests:
The California Assembly, by the way, just recently passed a law banning “retaliatory” defamation lawsuits against “survivors” like Amber Heard and Evan Rachel Wood, whether their claims are false or not. You can join your radical feminist “friends” and “assimilate” into this “culture,” but if you are a Hispanic male you are out of luck if you want to join any "respectable" group. When you show up anywhere, its…
I wish I had magic powers, where I could wish that some person who “beeped” their car a half-dozen times to leave the message that he or she is Nazified racist scum sees their car's engine blow up, and it actually happens as they look on in confusion “Why did this happen?”…
...or while some store security guy gives you the sideways glance while you pay for that item, he doesn’t seem to know what do when suddenly everyone is running out of the store with items they didn’t pay for:
On television I have seen advertisements sponsored by the ADL denouncing anti-Semitism in this country, which people may or may not actually notice themselves. In one of these ads, a person who is a Holocaust-denier is “dared” to tell this to that Jewish man over there to his face. Of course he feels “ashamed.” But nobody feels “ashamed” when Hispanics are demonized and dehumanized in every way possible like the Jews in Germany once were, even in the hallowed halls of the U.S. Senate:
Of course if you want to "exterminate" them, you can do it "metaphorically" by just keeping all those who want to come in out, and throw out of the country as many as you can. Along with Laura Ingraham’s latest racist rant about how migrants will “kill untold numbers of Americans,” and white nationalists like former "birther" Balckburn, these "people" all know that they won't get any push back even from the lamestream liberal media (not "liberal" enough even to allow a representative of 17 percent of the population to present their own "voice") because of the strength of prejudice and paranoia against Hispanics, for which immigration has always been just a cover story. Even Texas Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales' call for a more humane approach even for legal immigration only got him censored by the state Republican committee.
Meanwhile, Florida's fascist governor Ron DeSantis just signed into law a bill making it even harder for farmers in the state to hire immigrant labor. Farm organizations are warning that this will lead to much higher food prices in the state if they don't have enough workers, or if food has to imported out of state or even country. But the majority of Floridians have yet to feel the consequences of DeSantis' fascist laws, and when they do, they will have only their own dark impulses to blame. By the way, inmates at Guantanamo Bay claimed that it was DeSantis who they personally encountered overseeing torture there when he was a JAG officer.
You just have to “look” like a “Mexican” and people’s minds will fill with all kinds of paranoid delusions. Sure, I may be "exaggerating" a bit, because most people are too self-involved most of the time; but then again, people are constantly fed a steady diet of negative impressions of Hispanics, and when people are "forced" to think about it, this is all that most people "know."
Take for instance what happened to this guy, who was “suspected” of being a “sex trafficker” by an American Airlines flight attendant out of Sea-Tac Airport last week. It didn't matter that the girl he was flying with was his 13-year-old daughter, who told the flight attendant that they were visiting her sister to celebrate her graduation from college:
An airline spokesperson claimed that the flight attendant was just following company policy to “identify” probable human and sex traffickers. Yeah, I’d like to read what those guidelines are; “ethnicity”—i.e. “Mexican”—is probably on top of the “suspicious” list.
In the 1950s, when Hollywood started to take social issues more seriously, prejudice against Hispanics was a go-to story line. Bigotry against Hispanics was the secondary plot line in Giant, and while people will debate the “ethnicity” of the Puerto Rican teenage accused in 12 Angry Men, in the 1955 film Trial it was clear enough: a Mexican-American boy is falsely accused of causing the death of a white girl who had a congenital heart condition; Glenn Ford’s defense attorney knows he is innocent, but Arthur Kennedy’s Communist Party activist wants him found guilty and sentenced to death and use the boy as a “martyr” for the “cause.” The boy is found guilty by a prejudiced jury and likely execution, but Ford convinces the black judge, and the prosecutor agrees, to sentence him to reform school, as he is a minor.
In Man From Del Rio, Anthony Quinn is a Mexican-American gunfighter who kills two outlaws who are terrorizing a town and who happen to be getting on his bad side with racist taunting. Quinn’s Dave Robles is named sheriff of the town but his efforts to “assimilate” is rejected by “respectable” folk, and the bad folk think he is just someone they can rely on to protect their dirty business. A Mexican-American woman (Katy Jurado) who works as an assistant to the doctor is “assimilated” and she wants nothing to do with Robles until she realizes he wants to be on the side of right and enforce the law. She knows that she is just a "token," and convinces him to leave this town with her, but not before intimidating the cowardly bad guy out of town first.
But what about just being a decent human being? That’s Jeff Chandler’s sheriff in Man in the Shadow. Here we see a migrant worker being beaten to death because the white ranch owner’s daughter talked to him:
A migrant worker who witnessed the murder reports this to the sheriff, who is uncertain if it is true or not, and his deputy says the man is lying, and besides, he’s just a Mexican:
But the sheriff has a job to do, and the he talks to the rancher, who claims he doesn’t know anything; the worker probably just ran off because he was illegal:
After the sheriff leaves, the rancher berates his foreman because he was just supposed to “rough up” the worker, not kill him:
The “respectable” townsfolk tell the sheriff not to stir up trouble, because the rancher might move his business elsewhere:
The sheriff insists that the law protects everyone, even migrant workers; they are human beings just like they are:
The sheriff gets a search warrant and finds a blood stain that was missed during the clean-up in the tool shed, but his car was sabotaged and he is nearly killed:
Then he learns that his no-good deputy got drunk and told the rancher’s thugs where to find the migrant worker who witnessed the killing:
The sheriff is then ambushed by the thugs and dragged into town:
Here’s what you can do with this stinkin’ badge, I’m going after those killers:
Things are not looking good for the sheriff, until the townsfolk find religion:
Yes, Orson, even bad guys who kill “untermensch” Mexicans sometimes get punished when human decency overcomes prejudice, at least in the movies anyways:
Well, that was the 1950s. You don’t see stories like this today; it seems like this country has regressed somewhat when it comes to treating “Mexicans”—or anyone who “looks” like one--with any human decency, hasn’t it? Sure looks like it to me. Instead of fixing a broken-down immigration system that actually tells other groups (like the Chinese) that they have to be in this country to apply for asylum (perfect cover for espionage), but if you are from some other group that people don’t like, then other rules apply to you to keep even legal channels closed to you; it’s like FedEx customer service: it’s there, but not for you.
This country is
sick. If something is wrong, just blame
it on the “Mexicans”—the white “Mexicans,” the black “Mexicans,” the Asian
“Mexicans”—their all “Mexicans” if it is something people want to scapegoat a
group for the country’s ills. Fentanyl is only the latest way “Mexicans” are
victimizing people in this country, even when it is the users own fault for
using a “medication” that was invented in the U.S. in 1959, and Mexico only
became the “middleman” in China’s efforts to undermine U.S. hegemony by causing
people in this country to stab each other in the backs. Besides, China has nuclear weapons, and Mexico doesn't.
We can see by the antics of Trump, his supporters and Republicans in Congress that simple human decency and civil behavior is something that is not respected in this country. But then again, even in “liberal" Seattle there is a culture of prejudice against Hispanics because you need some group to hate on; of course Hispanics are an "ethnicity," so you can't be called a racist (or so it is believed).
Things have only gotten worse here with "importation" of certain "privileged" immigrants from countries who bring with them their own set of "ethnic" and social heirarchies which they have not been told constitutes unlawful discrimination in this country. Even when it is clear that white "hegemony" in their "own" country is most "threatened" by other immigrant groups, it is still "safer" to blame the "Mexicans."
Of course this is what infuses Biden’s current immigration policy, now forcing asylum-seekers to appeal to third-party countries which are just as overrun with violence by U.S.-bred gangs or U.S.-fed cartels—and not even bothering to address why those countries have the problems they have in the first place, thanks to detrimental U.S. interference in those countries spanning decades if not centuries.
When the U.S.
ended the bracero program with the 1965 immigration law in the belief that "real Americans" were eager to work in the fields, that was the real
beginning of today’s “crisis” on the border. Sure, illegal immigration was a
“problem” back then, but nowhere what it is today. Subsequent immigration laws
and policies only worsened the issue by making legal routes into the country far more onerous,
even for temporary work stays. And I've already discussed the issue of the U.S.' biggest "export" to Central America: violence, first through the support of right-wing murder regimes, and then by U.S.-bred gangs.
Today, while other favored groups receive almost immediate legal status from asylum claims, if you are “Mexican” it will take eight years for an immigration court to even hear your case if you are even given asylum status. This country is so hypocritical that even asylum-seekers from Latin American countries on the U.S. shit-list—Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela—are just as “unwanted.”
And people have the nerve to wonder why there is a “crisis” on the border. They are trying to escape from, among other things, the violence that the U.S. “deported” to their countries. The U.S. doesn’t care about what it has done to these people; human decency doesn’t apply to people who are just “animals”:
Hell, these days dogs are treated more “human." Take it from me, I know; most people just see a drug-dealing car thief and child molester (I must look “young” enough to do these things to some people, or have "bred" some myself), not a college-educated vet ("VET" was always next to my name on the class lists, signifying my status as a "nontraditional student") who has has never shied away from work that other people would think "beneath" them, preferring to engage more "respectable" occupations, like collecting government checks or making money on the "street."
Kick a “dog” often enough, and its
going to bite back, but I sure wish I had those magic powers; it would make
life not only a whole hell of lot more tolerable and "fun,' but give that dog real "bite" since this country acts like the dog is just going to sit there and be kicked, like the Jews in Nazi Germany.
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