What Goes Around Comes Around

In a Breitbart story posted July 25, it is lamented that poor Danny Glover can't get investors to pony up funding for his proposed movie about Haitian independence in 1804. It seems all the producers and money types he approached in the US, Great Britain, and Europe are of the opinion that there aren't enough white heroes in the movie for it to do well in Europe and Japan. Poor Prospects for ticket sales rationally mean poor prospects for funding.

Spike Lee went ballistic when Clint Eastwood didn't include black soldiers in "Flags of Our Fathers". That selfish, racist bastard apparently felt that the fact there were no actual black soldiers in the battles depicted was justification for excluding him from the movie.

I'm going to go way out on a limb here and suggest that rewriting the script to include a band of Anglos fighting side by side with their Haitian brethren to help create the Republic would be a bit of a non-starter. Creating sympathetic white characters to promote sales would be an affront to black pride around the planet, especially when it flies so completely in the face of historical fact.

And that's okay. The movie deserves to be made, and to succeed or fail on its own merits. History should never be rewritten to solicit an audience, nor should historical fact be changed or ignored to soothe the feelings of those who might not be comfortable with the past.

Adolf Hitler, The Crusades, the invasion of the Mongol Hordes, the Persian Empire, the White Man's Slaughter of the Indians - all of these are historical incidents. It would be difficult to find someone who would point with pride to any of these who would not be soundly derided by the majority of his or her peers.

History is not improved by giving it a fresh new coat of paint and slapping a few smiley face stickers on it. History simply is. And it only has value when it is examined in all of its stark, sometimes unpleasant, reality. Learning from mistakes and emulating successes should be the lessons that history teaches.

Not that the liberation of Haiti from French rule was a multicultural kumbaya moment.