Nothing But A Man

Nothing But A Manⁱ seamlessly combines the permanent arch-theme of cuckoldry (or rather, boi->cuck transfigurationⁱⁱ) undergirthing all fiction attempts in our sad North American colonies with a stolid excursion in the squalid and the sordid of poverty. If you think such a dish appetizing... well, you're probably from around there, socially conditioned to get mentally aroused by this crap like Australians get rowdy at the mere scent of rank ewes or something. I see no other explanation conceivable, really.

The story trudges on, like thick bilious vomit down a half-pipe drain in the Winter, there's a whole horde of overgrown pickaninnies who never ever ever wash anythingⁱⁱⁱ bouncing off each other meaninglessly while the females among them try to find some pieces somewhere in the hot broken mess to pick up.

I suppose it has some kind of documentary value nevertheless ; though I don't believe it's anything anyone's well advised to document themselves in. Some things are best forgotten, and "the identity" of being poor and stupid always tops that list.

1. 1964, by Michael Roemer, with Ivan Dixon and some "actress" (slash singer, newswoman, activist etcetera) whose name history has not recorded, because nobody remembers little girls. We're too busy with adult women over here. [↩]
2. You know exactly what I'm talking about, "boi '''decides''' he doesn't wanna be like his dad, prefers being like his mom instead. [↩]
3. Excepting for a perfunctory attempt at a windshield once. Once! In one single solitary scene, and even that obviously intended to depict instead the incredibly overbearing nature of whitey. Imagine, he makes them poor idiots wash things!!!

   Otherwise there they sit, there they wallow, their problems entirely not similar to say the Irish during the Greatly Deserved Potato Famine, please believe, or the perennial romanians, please believe also. It's not them that's poor, it's anything else "poor-ing" them. Anyone, doesn't matter who. Anything, really, as long as it ain't their self-obvious and self-inflicted unadherence to urban life.

   It's whitey, it's "poverty", as if this poverty were some kinda gift from above, not a constructed state of fundamental disrepair. There's a god there, please believe, picking on "innocents" for "no reason", that's totally how this poverty business goes. Improvidence, laziness an' substantial inadequacy have utterly naught to do with it, the poor idiot's "just like you" and all that crap.

   

   No brother of mine, twerp. Go wash something.

   [↩]