Recently we dated at America's second-favorite mass-shooting locale, the movie theater, where we saw a lot of black people lose their back meat in "Twelve Years a Slave." Is it wrong to say Brad Pitt was looking good in his Canadian workman linen after saying "a lot of people lose their back meat"? In any case, it's what you'd expect from a slave narrative inspired by real live human beings -- lots of hate, lots of self-righteousness, lots of characters who probably run for Senate in later years.
And there was this scene where, in the dark of night, one of the masters enters the slave shack and quietly violates a young slave. There is no music. There is no dialogue. It's just this silent, awful scene, which carries on (as rape scenes tend to). Everyone in the fully white audience is already clenching their pasty butt cheeks together with a sort of unexplained shame when, at the end of my row of seats, someone's cellphone erupts with the ring that people who don't know how to use cellphones choose. And it's on the volume setting that people who don't know how to use cellphones choose. And, because of this, and because they have nowhere to go but into the vortex of empathetic embarrassment and non-empathetic hate, everyone's pasty white butt cheeks are now being sucked up inside of themselves -- it's like we're all starring in our very own drug-smuggling drama.
The cellphone offender plunged into her purse to smother the thing, but it was certainly too late. And all of a sudden we all want to tie this lady to a wooden pillar and whip the flesh off of her back like she's Jesus and hasn't picked enough cotton. And that's the moral, I think -- don't be all white like Jesus (and Megyn Kelly) if you're going to let your cellphone ring during the rape of a black slave.
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