Monday, November 04, 2013

Richard Cohen, Movie Critic: OMG It Was Terrible What They Did To You Black People! I Can See That Now!


Ugh. Jeez. It's been pretty quiet on the Richard Cohen front lately, but this one's a doozy.

Cohen, of course, came under fire recently for his clueless yet garish racism. Now, as if we all have to pay, we are treated to a transparent attempt by Cohen to express his love for his African brothers and to recoil from the awfulness of slavery as manifested in his local multiplex during a screening of the excellent 12 Years a Slave. I mean, this film is powerful enough to bowl over jaded intellectuals, so imagine the effect it must have on a flaccid, stupid mind, such as that possessed by Good Richard.

But... but... Blecccccccch. And he isn't exactly doing himself any favors with his muddled account of having to learn that slavery was not, in fact, "a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks." No! Intrepid student Richard eventually figured out, as the years passed, that slavery was actually totally awful! And then all these years later he just saw this movie that he heard about on NPR and, OMG, he found out all over again about the awfulness!

How awful, Richard Cohen, how awful.

4 comments:

Toriko said...

I had to click on the link, something I had never done for a Cohen article because I did not wish for him to get the traffic. I had trouble believing the quote about slavery was something he had typed. I simply could not believe that... no, that's the end of the sentence.

Genevieve said...

I made it to "There is nothing of “12 Years a Slave” in “Gone with the Wind.”

And then my brain exploded. Wow.

Anonymous said...

"but really, that many blacks were sort of content."

Oh really? They were content? F him.

-tasha

Cartophiliac said...

In what school on what fucking planet was he tought that slavery was "a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks."?