Don’t PC my Childhood Joys

I made a huge mistake. I bought a movie so I could listen to the commentary track.

When I was a kid, Jeremiah Johnson was one of my favorite films. It was a sensational movie, full of violence and grossly exaggerated “mountain man” antics, such as a scene where a very old man deliberately leads a running bear into his own cabin as a joke. Jeremiah Johnson was full of Indians, and it made them sensational, too. They were scary people who committed atrocities.

I still like the movie. The other day, it popped up on Turner Classic Movies, and I watched it. It’s a bad film. No question about that. There is no story to speak of. There is very little dialogue. The characters are as thin as the fog on a bathroom mirror. But it’s entertaining to watch Robert Redford fight with Indians and wild animals, and there are a lot of funny lines. Also, who doesn’t love mountains?

I bought a Blu-Ray disk and started listening. Biggest problem: the commentary is supposed to feature remarks by Redford, but there is very little of that. I’m halfway through, and it seems like he disappeared 10 minutes in. The other commentators are director Sidney Pollack and writer John Milius. Who wants to hear from them? Not me. They’re boring. “I could only afford to show dailies twice a week.” “We had to use a split lens in this shot.” Wow. Edge-of-your-seat-stuff.

Here’s another issue: the things I’m learning are somewhat disappointing. This movie was made by far-left L.A. people fresh out of the Sixties, a swollen, malignant decade that mars our history like snot on a silk tie. They messed with the story in order to make Indians look better.

The film is based on the legend of Liver-Eating Johnston (with a “T”), a real human being who was born toward the end of the eighteenth century. I say “legend” because no one really knows how much of his story is true. He had some kind of beef with the Crow Indians, and he killed a bunch of them. They say he ate their livers because it was supposed to cause them problems in the afterlife. Something about their religion. A little silly, unless you think their religion is correct.

Film character Johnson SPOILER loses his pregnant Indian girlfriend (“wife,” if you respect 30-second coerced ceremonies) and his foster son to a Crow attack. His crime? He led an army expedition through a Crow burial ground so they could rescue some starving settlers.

What’s wrong here? Nothing, unless you know why the burial ground scenes were put in the film.

In the commentary, Pollack says it was very difficult to find a way to justify the Crow attack. Yes, “justify.” He was a coastal Sixties guy, so he was all about long hair, protesting, and picking on white people and Christians. He didn’t want to make Indians look bad.

Originally, there was no expedition to save starving settlers. It wasn’t in the script. The makers of the film came up with the expedition so they could say Johnson caused his family’s slaughter.

They didn’t want to show Crows swooping in and murdering the family for no reason.

As motivation, it’s pretty thin. If you went to my mother’s grave tomorrow and emptied a dumptruck full of horse manure on it, I wouldn’t even send you a nasty email. I would think you had a screw loose, and I would hope the sheriff would go after you and shut down your grave-vandalism operation, but that’s about it. Walking past a bunch of dead Indians suspended in trees doesn’t seem like grounds for murdering women and children.

It made Pollack happy, apparently, so he went with it. Isn’t this the soft racism of lowered expectations?

I’m not sure he realized he still made the Crows look bad. Oh, well.

Why do leftists love making excuses for Indians? They practiced slavery. They were incredibly violent. They invented scalping, regardless of what apologists say. They had tortures which lasted for days, making drawing and quartering seem tame. They used to cut people’s eyelids off and bury them up to the neck in the burning sun. They were big on human sacrifice.

To listen to leftists, you would think pre-Columbian America was like a liberal’s impression of Denmark. Everyone rode around in Smart cars wearing hemp clothing and carrying reusable shopping bags. They sat in their sustainable teepees on IKEA furniture, talking about yoga and the works of Robert Mapplethorpe. It was nothing like that. It was a place of conquest, sadism, and theft.

People like to say whites came here as illegal immigrants. Nonsense. First of all, there was no real government when whites arrived, so there was no such thing as a legal (or illegal) immigration process. There were scattered tribes here and there. Some claimed to own land. Some didn’t. Many welcomed whites. Many sold whites their land.

I was born in Kentucky. Kentucky was sold to whites a long time ago. Yes, sold. The British bought Kentucky. Look up the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals and the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. Manhattan was sold to whites, too. A deal is a deal, folks. You can’t sell me your land and then call me a squatter. No Indian or tribe has any claim on my dad’s former house or the houses and farms of my relatives. Sorry, folks. We have clear title.

The British have a better claim to Kentucky than the Indians. America didn’t pay the British.

I live in Florida now. The US bought Florida from Spain, but Spain got it through conquest. That sounds bad, but a lot of Indians from other areas forced their way in, too. If my title and resident status are suspect, so is theirs.

Another point: there were something like 10 million people in North America when whites arrived. Think about that. North America is bigger than the former USSR. There are more than 10 million people in New York City. You can’t seriously claim 10 million people with no central government owned the whole subcontinent.

Sure, whites took Indian land, but they also bought land and took land no one had claimed, and Indians took land from each other.

Let me point something else out: if you’ve been on a hospitable, fertile subcontinent for thousands of years and the population is still only 10 million, something is wrong. A society’s failure to increase in number is an indictment of its general competence. It means most babies die.

North American Indians weren’t sitting around in safe places filling in coloring books when whites showed up. They were killing, raping, stealing, enslaving, and torturing, just like every other race on the planet. The idea that Indians wouldn’t murder a woman and child without provocation is absurd.

In the end, the movie gives a very poor impression of Indians, regardless of what Pollack and the others hoped. When white characters encounter Indians, they act like urban yuppies who accidentally got off the Broadway Local in Harlem and ran into the Crips. They are terrified. They mumble about torture and mutilation. They patronize the Indians and lie to them to avoid become victims of atrocities. They’re thrilled when they get away. This is not a good look for Indians, regardless of what the filmmakers thought. If anything, it appears to justify their subjugation.

It’s funny; it reminds me of the way women and kids react to wife-beaters. “Let it go. Just say whatever he wants.”

The Indians in the movie are exactly the kind of people I thought of when I got my concealed carry permit. Sick bullies who enjoy sadism.

The reason Johnson agrees to marry is that he is told the alternative is to have himself, his friend, his foster son, and even his horses cut open from crotch to throat with a dull deer antler. That’s not very nice.

There are only two Indians in the movie who aren’t utter idiots: Johnson’s girlfriend and a condescending Crow named Paints his Shirt Red. The rest are gullible and/or violent.

Oddly, the movie reinforces the classic movie-western notion that white people are good and Indians are bad. All of the violent acts committed by whites are committed in retaliation or self defense. The Indians threaten, injure, and kill people, and steal their goods, just for kicks. As we all know, white people did all sorts of rotten things to Indians, with no justification whatsoever.

Maybe the movie is really about the way urban-kid moviemakers feel when they leave Bel Air and the Upper West Side. But aren’t a lot of movies like that, to some degree? Look at our other westerns. We see a lot of Jewish and gentile yankee cowboys, reading lines written by Jews, fighting Jewish and Puerto Rican Indians. A lot of TV and movie characters are really urban Jews in gentile-face.

Why not be realistic? Have bad white characters and bad Indian characters. Projecting L.A. and New York sensibilities onto nineteenth century wilderness dwellers can turn a western into a movie about Hollywood itself.

I’m halfway through the disk. I may quit watching. “When I finished typing the script, I used an orange binder and drove it to the studio in a Ford Maverick.” Ho hum. Not what I signed up for.