Medawar/GreatRecession/HomeoftheBrave

Today I read the next fifty pages of Mardi Oakley Medawar’s 1998 novel Death At Rainy Mountain. Although Medawar’s detective figure, Tay-bodal, is initially presented as a marginal figure in his tribe and Nation, that soon changes as the murder investigation proceeds. Not only is he taken into White Bear’s clan, but he also falls in love with Crying Wind, one of White Bear’s cousins. This might initially seem to compromise Tay-bodal’s objectivity, but he doesn’t see it that way. Instead, it gives him an even greater incentive to prove that The Cheyenne Robber, whose clansman he now is, is innocent of the murder of which he is accused. In this way, Medawar is able to show just what is at stake in the solution of this murder case. The murder has shaken this complex society to its core because all of its constituent parts are so closely interconnected. In fact, Medawar makes a case for the way in which murder is an especially devastating crime for this Native American community precisely because it violates so many communal bonds in one fell swoop.

I also finished The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television. In “Congress at the Kitchen Table: Religious Right Applications of Moral Home Economics to Federal Economic Policy,” Rebecca Barrett-Fox provides a fascinating analysis of the work of conservative Christian financial planner Dave Ramsey, emphasizing the ways in which his analyses blame victims of the Recession for their own poverty. Finally, Sarah Hamblin discusses Seth Tobocman’s graphic analysis of the Great Recession, Understanding the Crash, arguing that it represents a form of ‘graphic populism’ that enables progressive critiques of predatory capitalist practices.

I also watched Home of the Brave, a 2004 documentary by Paola di Florio that presents a moving account of the life and death of Viola Liuzzo, a white civil rights activist from Michigan who was murdered by Klansmen in Alabama in 1965. What I found most interesting about the film is the way that it begins as a standard eulogy for a civil rights martyr and then becomes something much more incoherent. Initially, it seems that the film can’t decide what it want to be: a testament to Viola Liuzzo’s courage, an exploration of the impact of her death on her family, a daughter’s attempt to reconnect with her mother’s memory before it’s too late, or an investigation into whether the FBI was involved in her murder. On some level, Home of the Brave is all of these things, without any thread predominating. Rather than incoherence, however, ultimately one realizes that this messy combination reflects the fact that the act of violence that is at the center of this film cannot be contained in one singular narrative. Like an explosion, its shock waves move outward with unpredictable force and consequences and this film does a powerful job of capturing that unpredictability.