Were I a foreign correspondent, with America as my beat, these would be the salad days. I’m flying later this week, and keep thinking about the time, in June, when I checked my bags behind a group of happy-sounding British reporters shipping their gear to Portland. They’ve got a better story now, and closer to home.
Living here, and not covering unrest, the military occupation is mostly just a drag - a drag that we hope is necessary. I slunk away from it tonight by watching “John Lewis: Good Trouble,” a mostly hagiographic documentary about the Civil Rights icon who became a kind of American saint even before he died.
The “almost” is key. There’s one moment near the end of the film when the 1986 House race between Lewis and Julian Bond gets recapped, and we learn that Lewis, in a successful pre-election gambit, took a drug test; the implication being that Bond wouldn’t. It’s noted, in Bond’s own words, that he romped with Black voters in Atlanta while Lewis won on the strength of landslide White support. Smart thing to keep in the documentary, but there’s not enough like it - the most we get to learn about Lewis’s legislative record is in a montage that mostly highlights what he co-sponsored.
There’s also an accidental joke throughout the movie. Most of the fresh footage comes from 2018 and 2019, when Lewis was a sought-after surrogate for Democrats, then was their icon for getting a new Voting Rights Act passed. We see lots of Stacey Abrams and Beto O’Rourke, mentioned by name onscreen. We also, frequently, see Rev. Raphael Warnock - but the documentary never names or quotes or lingers on the successor to Martin Luther King, Jr. who would, months after Lewis died, become the first Black senator from Georgia on skyrocketing Black turnout.