One of the three old movie channels, digital channels of local network affiliates, has an ad professing testimonials of people so happy "real" tv is back again, that they feel good about tv again and that they can let their children watch without being worried about what they'll be exposed to. These are the channels that play movies from the 30's to the 70's and many made later. They are cheap to replay and bring in advertising revenue with films owned by particular studios now boughtbout by the media conglomerates that own the networks. These are the movies with the most racist and sexist images, characterizations and narratives ever produced, with some of the widest distributions of their time, now getting even more distribution - and a free pass on their socially and politically retrograde storylines...they're "classics". It's troubling to think that those testimonials might be real, at least that they might reflect many other people's idea of what 'good', 'safe' television programming looks like.
And yes, I just watched a bug-eyed Willie Best react in his "classic" stepinfetchit role to the idea of a ghost in a haunted Puerto Rican swamp while ferrying yellow-faced Peter Lorre in 1939's "Mr. Moto in Danger Island". It just doesn't get any 'safer' than that. Westerns also figure voluminous on these channels, most old, but many newer, very few with any redeeming, non-settler-colonial, non-genocidal qualities. "Safe", they say. Isn't it strange that this sort of story, much created before the bare beginnings of social and televisual/cinematice reforms of the 60's and 70's, is what they say we think is "safe"?
Oh, and with regard to those ghosts in the swamp, the USAmerican colonials....yes, colonials as in colonialism...were discussing the people that hold such ideas about Spirit beings and Ancestors and such. They chided such claims of "ghosts" as "superstitions of a dangerously ignorant people". (long pause) "Dangerously ignorant". Those are indigenous people and African descendants in those swamps. Those are humans, children, women and men, freedom fighters in those swamps. And don't let it slip by you that these anti-indigenous, anti-African, anti-woman narratives assume the ascendancy and presumptuous superiority of a colonial culture that deified a particularly "holy" ghost, but maybe merely a ghost nonetheless, albeit tied to a he-god and a so-called savior-son whose adherents would prove much more globally and ignorantly dangerous than any culture known to revere and keep intimate relations with their Dead.
