Richard Linklater: Librul squish abetted by squish Lawrence Wright

The Nation casts a critical eye on Lawrence Wright's new HBO documentary series. And, quite rightly so. 

Some of the most critical eyeballing by Sam Russek is reserved for Richard Linklater. Side note: From what I've read about him, and some of his "briefs" work that I've seen, I'm not a big fan. He's a gonzo type person with not much "there" there on his work when you pop open the hood.

But, I digress. 

Let's go to Russek's pretty blistering takedown, to be followed by contrasting it with hagiography from the Texas Observer:

His preferred alternative to death row is life without parole, “because that’s the worst sentence that an individual can have.” 

This is the point of view Linklater adopts. “There are sentencing options like life without parole,” he submits, almost pleadingly, near the end of the episode. Within the structure of the documentary, the death penalty once appeared to be the cruelest part of an impossibly cruel institution. By the end, it has become the only part of the system that, at least for Linklater, could possibly be reformed—and even that isn’t guaranteed. It’s as if he’s already tempered his proposal, certain it will be shot down anyway. Taken on their own, the documentary’s images could argue beyond this rather tepid conclusion, and yet Linklater’s scope appears squeamishly limited. Considering the prison-industrial complex, he tells Wright, “I guess, on one hand, it’s a blessing—it’s the local economy, largely—but it is a bit of a curse.” 

This is putting it lightly. Even if we ended the death penalty tomorrow, Texas’s incarceration rate would still be among the highest in the world—never mind the “accidental” death toll in the state’s prisons. A 2014 report from the Prison Justice League, a prisoner-rights group in Austin, found that in one Huntsville-area prison, disabled prisoners suffered high rates of physical and sexual abuse inflicted by correction officers. Just last summer, at least 41 inmates in Texas died during a heat wave, including a few in Huntsville (more than two-thirds of our prisons have no air-conditioning in most living areas). 

While court-sanctioned murder may be the most outwardly abhorrent piece of our criminal-justice system here in Texas, to remove it while saying little about the many other indignities we visit disproportionately upon poor people behind bars is like smearing lipstick on a pig. History shows that the right will resist practically any “bleeding heart” change to the prison system (though it may be moved on fiscal grounds, provided the system itself remains intact) and is quick to roll back reforms if need be. To limit our political imagination—and thus, political will—based on the whims of the opposition is not only shortsighted but also self-defeating, and it shirks the desperate need to decide what Texas liberalism actually stands for. Is it merely tweaking the worst aspects of an abhorrent system, or something altogether different? Why isn’t it possible to demand more?

Contrast that to the Texas Observer's piece about Linklater's part in the same documentary. Walter C. Long devotes two thirds of his piece to Texas good old boy type name-checking of people he and Linklater both know. Then, re the death penalty itself, after first tying it to patriarchialism, Long says:

You say, “The death penalty takes one tragedy, a murder, and expands the pain and suffering to include so many others, all the people involved in the legal and criminal appeals process that get dragged slowly to the death chamber, all the obligatory witnesses, and all the people with various jobs in the system.” Then you lay bare the moral disengagement that leads to moral injury: “The Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution specifically prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, but what could be more cruel, certainly unusual, than to have to play a part in or witness another person’s murder, however state-sanctioned?”

And? That's it. (The rest of that penultimate graf, plus the ultimate one, talk more about what's wrong with the death penalty, but ... that's it.) Long nowhere mentions Linklater plumping for life without parole as an option. He nowhere mentions Linklater buying into the prison-industrial complex.

Another big old fail from the Observer. To riff on what The Nation doesn't fully grasp, it's also another big old example of the Texas librul version of Texas exceptionalism. Molly Ivins, back all the way to her Observer days, was a prime practitioner. And, the Observer is itself still a practitioner of Texas exceptionalism. This is not the only piece to show that.

That said, and speaking of that, without using the "Texas exceptionalism" phrase, the piece at The Nation does note how Texas librulz beyond Linklater are behind the times:

This is the smothering effect of political loss after loss, which continues to constrict thinking in the series’ next episode, “The Price of Oil.” Alex Stapleton, a biracial “Texan in exile,” returns to Pleasantville, a suburb of the Houston area that she grew up visiting on weekends. ... Today, chemical fires are common there, as are cancer, asthma, and other environmental harms. ... The heightened risk comes with few rewards for Pleasantville. 

And yet, toward the end of the episode, Stapleton chooses an odd point of critique: “Among the largest oil and gas companies in America, every CEO is white,” she says. “While other industries have been put on blast for their lack of diversity, the oil and gas industry has not had the same reckoning.” Stapleton does add later that her community needs “a seat at the table” as the country “entertains” a green transition, but the only specific action she suggests is increasing the diversity on corporate boards.

There you are. And, this isn't to mention that oil-induced climate change will affect, and is affecting, minorities in the US more in general than the White populace.

The Nation then indicts Wright himself:

Standing at the base of the San Jacinto monument, which memorializes the Texas Revolution, Stapleton and Wright talk with their hands on their hips, contemplating the region’s environmental situation. “America obviously needs an energy source, and this is what it looks like,” Wright says. “I think the more we talk about Texas, the more complicated it seems.” ... Complicated, yes, but can the Bard of Texas not say more? Can infotainment, as it were, not approach these issues with some creative liberty?

Again, there you are.

Side note again? I think Wright is kind of overrated. "Looming Tower" was 3.5 stars. "God Save Texas" was worse than it appears Russek appears to rate it, but for reasons exactly tied to what Russek says above. Namely, Wright's butt-kissing of Shrub Bush in his gubernatorial years.

Bottom line? This is yet one more reason to not give money to the Observer. It needs to repent of the sin of Texas exceptionalism.