First and Third Acts

On two weeks of chaos, the idea that people are idiots, and an important new film from Tad Nakamura

Thereʻs a basic theory of messaging that many of us in this world that C. Wright Mills once called “the power elite” — and which my community organizing mentors once called “you pointy-head motherfuckers” (PHMFers) - believe in.

This theory can be summed up in three words: PEOPLE ARE IDIOTS.

Itʻs the core theory at work when Trump can open his presidency with shock and awe.

When he can arrest thousands in two weeks, and restart a prison camp at Gitmo to house them in the name of a nonexistent “national emergency.”

When that orange-face motherfucker (OFMFer) can shut down a trillion dollar national government, preventing millions from receiving their Medicaid, rent vouchers, school lunches, food stamps, and much more, and then even claim a plane crash because of the threat of DEI.

The lies are so obvious - Dr. Phil is deputized to interrogate undocumented immigrants about their supposed criminality. Sean Duffy stands next to Pete Hegseth next to that OFMFer talking about all those air traffic controllers denied jobs “because of the color of their skin” and about hiring only the “best and the brightest.”

Thatʻs what you call merit? These are the guys who know better than us?

(When asked how he knew diversity initiatives caused the plane crash, Trump said, “Because I have common sense, OK, and unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.”)

The consistency is astonishing. The stupidity is breathtaking.

Everything about these first two weeks of chaos—and remember that the shock-and-awe metaphor was popularized through a devastating forever war built on lies—just confirms for us PHMFers: PEOPLE ARE IDIOTS.

Itʻs the same theory deployed by the Democratic Party this past election. Kamalaʻs higher calls to narratives of freedom and unity—speaking to the best in us, to our creative and protective capacities—were mixed with “people are idiots” messaging that gaslit voters about their day-to-day problems.

We saw how that worked out — millions stayed home on Election Day. (Although this must be qualified by saying we have not yet seen any analysis of how anti-lower-case-d democratic attacks on the voting rights of poor, working, and BIPOC voters impacted turnout, especially in swing states.)

The daily parade of punditry also works the same way. I avoided reading a word of anything from the usual Opinion pages for a month after the election because most of the words spilled were a variation on the theme: you should have done this, you didnʻt do enough of that. What is a good PHMFer to do but answer in their defense that people are idiots?

Perhaps like many of you who may be reading this, I still live in this PHMF world maybe too large an amount of the time, and I wage a daily struggle against this idea.

So I felt the need to avoid many of my friends, too. I retreated. Many of us did.

Lots of opiners then opined The Resistance is dead because from their armchairs, they could see no one in the streets. (Which people verifiably have been, but is not the point.)

And anyway, the jaded PHMFer asks: Isnʻt protesting against power idiotic? How logical is it to put oneʻs body, oneʻs future on the line to change something that seems unalterable?

I knew that my community organizing mentors believed in the opposite — they believed in democracy and the power of the people. But what had that done for us, just three short years after the George Floyd protests that brought 25 million of us out into the streets?

In Human Acts, Han Kangʻs meditation on the impact of the brutal 1980 military massacre of anti-authoritarian protesters in Gwangju which left uncountable thousands dead, she wrote:

“Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered - is this the essential fate of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?”

I want to believe that life is more than an experience of cruelty, that we are not doomed to our fate at the hands of those who think they are smarter than us. History may sometimes tell us this is all we can be, but sometimes she tells us the exact opposite.

I want to believe that, even with all our spectacular failures to secure dignity and freedom, we might still be capable of moving from these moments of darkness toward each other and then toward something better.

Maybe we have to begin by believing that we are all not idiots. The answers may not be here, but they are within us to find together. Those pointy-head messengers can fuck off. We got this.

THIRD ACT

Films from the Sundance Festival went online today, and the one Iʻm most looking forward to is Tadashi Nakamuraʻs loving portrait of his father, Bob Nakamura, in Third Act.

Bobʻs influence has been incalculable. He was affiliated in the 1960s and 1970s with the L.A. Rebellion film collective that revolutionized Black film. From his pioneering feature film Hito Hata: Raise The Banner to his founding of Visual Communications, he built the foundations for the recent renaissance of filmmaking by Asian Americans.

Tad himself is one of the leading documentarian lights in that renaissance, having carefully built a corpus of powerful portraits of Asian America, from the Yellow Brotherhood, a gang that transformed into a self-help collective to last yearʻs joyous biography of Nobuko Miyamoto.

Now he turns his camera on the person he loves the most, and shows us how our commitments to art and justice survive even the darkest of moments.

Advance reviews have been strong. Donʻt miss it.

Purchase online tickets and watch it before midnight on February 2nd here.