Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

The willow is too close to the house.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Let there be snark.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Annals of Post-Racial America

Annals of Post-Racial America

by | 137 Comments

This post is in: ,

ETA: As someone in the borked comments pointed out and I hadn’t caught — this story is a couple of years old. Well, that’s a long time to sit in my open tabs, ain’t it?

I stand by everything said below, and note that this bolsters my view that Trump is a symptom, not a cause, of the deep pathology in which our nation finds itself. That he’s making it worse is true, but he’s only there in the first place because one of our political parties thought that power was worth race baiting for decades before he ever emerged from his first bankruptcy.

I’m still drowning in grading and book revisions, so I’m blogging even less than usual. But we need more thread, and I’ve some hate-opened browser tabs to clear, so I thought a dyspeptic proof-of-life post might be the thing.

Today’s 2016’s offering comes from the great state of Minnesota, where a restaurant operator had an interesting concept of an appetite-whetting joke:

According to the Minneapolis NAACP, Tyrone Williams and Chauntyll Allen were preparing to dine at Joe’s Crab Shack in Roseville on Wednesday night when they noticed a photo embedded inside the table.

It appeared to show a large group of white people watching a public execution of at least one black person. On the bottom of the picture, it reads: “Hanging at Groesbeck, Texas, on April 12th, 1895.” At the top, the caption reads, “All I said was that I didn’t like the gumbo.”

For some reason — who can imagine why? — when Williams and Allen registered what they were actually seeing, they were…how to put this?…unamused:

“Although the manager was apologetic about the lynching depiction, that does not change the fact that this sickening image of black men being lynched was intentionally embedded inside of a table,” Williams said. “This type of blatant racism should not be tolerated in this country, or in our local and national eating establishments. I have felt sick tomy stomach and stressed out since seeing that image on the table where I was planning to eat my food.”

Allen said she could not believe the image was used so casually.

“Seeing a picture of two black men being lynched was the last thing that I expected to see at what was supposed to be a family-friendly restaurant,” Allen said.

One would expect better — but despite Chief Justice Roberts’ certainty that the United States have gotten past racism, that was never true, and is even less so with the Racist in Chief infesting the Oval Office.

The photo was removed from the Roseville franchise — no word on whether it can be found elsewhere — and the COO of the chain’s parent company apologized, sort of:

We sincerely apologize to our guests who were disturbed by the image and we look forward to continuing to serve the Roseville community,” Catalano said in a statement.

Perhaps I’m too much of a stickler, but I think that telling a joke about a murder of two black men for the crime of being black is a universal problem, and not merely one in the context of those who were angered by the image.  I’m more worried about those who weren’t, who accepted the normalizing of race violence and an ill remembered and hence still present past.  That’s what’s wrong here: that this seemed funny to anyone, to the point that someone made the choice to put this on public display.

Feh.  The GOP has pursued a race-baiting strategy with success since Nixon. Trump’s the most egregious symptom of that tendency, but he’s hardly the driver of such hatefulness.  The ubiquity of casual racism and the constant threat of violence is the product of fifty years of a cynical, evil political choice to play on race to win power. It is certainly true that the Democratic Party is far from perfect on all of this, but this is not a both-sides situation. It isn’t going to get better until the GOP is a smoking crater on the political landscape.

And with that….talk among yourselves.

Image: Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942.

Reader Interactions

137Comments

  1. 1.

    Yutsano

    You’re interrupting the Walpole scandal for us jackals? I’m touched.

    Also: I’m buying your book as a gift for the folks who originally made that video that first turned me on to the South Sea Bubble. I’m sure they’ll appreciate it. And two others for both myself and my dad.

  4. 4.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    I know there has been a lot of this but can you imagine if a porn star came out and said she had sex with Obama a month or so after Malia or Sasha had been born, and then paid off said porn star to cover it up a week before the election? The republicans would have started impeachment proceedings before the inauguration had even taken place. Fox News would be calling for his fucking head. With Trump its absolutely crickets.

  8. 8.

    Tom Levenson

    @Yutsano: Thanks! And it’s back to Walpole for me. I’m just done with the boom spring months of the Bubble Year, and Walpole’s just tiptoed back into the ministry. Next chapter is about the last month of blissful, booming ignorance and then I get to the true fun stuff: woe, misery, suicide, disaster and the wreck of the hopes of paper millionaires by the bushel-load!

  9. 9.

    Yutsano

    @Litlebritdifrnt: It’s IOKIYAR on steroids. I’m waiting for Dolt45 to actually kill a person on 5th Avenue just so Paulie Boy and Yertle can cluck their lips and say nothing can be done.

    @Tom Levenson: Oh but that’s not the end of the story. I’m eagerly awaiting your take on the Robert Young KNIGHT!!! (Pay attention you idiot!) shenanigans.

  10. 10.

    Ruckus

    @Tom Levenson:
    They did that kind of stuff all the time. I think it was better TV than a lot of it because they took risks with a normal group of people that weren’t outlandish (much or most of the time). Even if you had never been in most of the situations, you could see yourself or someone you knew in them. Most of the gags and skits worked, some fell sort of flat but probably hit the bell for someone. Very interesting character study.

  11. 11.

    Mnemosyne

    @Ruckus:

    For a minute, I was worried that you were talking about the lynching photo, not “Nighthawks.” ?

    It’s been owned by the Art Institute of Chicago since 1942.

  15. 15.

    Ruckus

    What the hell happened to the blog?
    All the comments now are grey print on a black background and the formatting is borked.

  19. 19.

    Kathleen

    My background is black just for the comments on this thread. Oh, and thank you, Tom, for the excellent post.

  20. 20.

    The Moar You Know

    We sincerely apologize to our guests who were disturbed by the image and we look forward to continuing to serve the Roseville community,” Catalano said in a statement.

    Let’s remove six words:

    “We sincerely apologize to our guests, and we look forward to continuing to serve the Roseville community”

    Fuck, guys, THAT WAS NOT HARD. Don’t qualify an apology, ever.

  21. 21.

    Yutsano

    @Mnemosyne: @Ruckus: To make it weirder: IT’S JUST THIS THREAD. Go back to Betty’s thread and it looks normal. Wonder if Alain is monkeying around with something.

  25. 25.

    Ruckus

    @Yutsano:
    Like minds etc.
    I noticed that the printing on the end of Tom’s original post was borked but now it’s not so I wonder if it was a link or something in the original post.

  28. 28.

    different-church-lady

    Odd how, for me (Safari) it only goes wonky at and below the social media icons — the post itself is fine.

    Another reason to jail Zuckerberg, in my opinion…

  31. 31.

    ruemara

    Is anyone else seeing this post’s formatting as borked to hell?

    I can vaguely make out some of the text, so majority rules yes.

  32. 32.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Kathleen: Same here! I thought something awful had happened to my phone.

    Seems to be just this thread. Weird. Hope someone can fix it soon!

  34. 34.

    Mnemosyne

    @The Moar You Know:

    Well, c’mon, only oversensitive SJW weenies would be upset about a joke that revolves white supremacist murders.

    Next up, they’ll insert a joke about the Birmingham church bombing. Because nothing’s funnier than dead children killed by the KKK, amirite?

  38. 38.

    SC54HI

    Re: news out of MN. Currently reading Sundown Towns, by James Loewen, so, sadly, this is not that shocking.

    Re: borked formatting. Using Chrome on Mac OSX desktop, and it’s screwy — dark grey background with light grey text. [Old person here CURSING a dark background of any kind.]

  44. 44.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Ruckus: ah, I see, it’s on the desktop site. I was just responding to people who said they didn’t notice a change—and if Alain is actively troubleshooting, you won’t see the fix until you’ve cleared it either.

  45. 45.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    We sincerely apologize to our guests who were disturbed by the image [. . .].

    Ah, the old non-apology apology. Or maybe it’s a semi-apology. “We’re sorry if you were offended. Everybody else, carry on.”

    Can’t these fuckers just admit that they did something wrong and apologize for doing it? Rhetorical question.

    ETA: Damn, Levenson, you’ve got me wasting precious vitriol on out-of-date atrocities. Up your game!

  54. 54.

    efgoldman

    @Yutsano:

    Is it just me or did the format on this thread just go all wonky?

    Not just you. Betty’s thread is fine, this one goes grey in the comment section.
    Thought it was just me.

    ETA: posted this comment and it appears to have fixed it

  56. 56.

    Kathleen

    @SiubhanDuinne: Order has been restored! When stuff like this happens I automatically kick into “Terrified Technophobe” mode, convinced that demons have taken over my computer and it will cost thousands to fix it.

  57. 57.

    Kathleen

    @Mnemosyne:
    “Because nothing’s funnier than dead children killed by the KKK, amirite?”

    The Republican Party would probably agree with that statement.

  62. 62.

    Aleta

    Dr. Eugene Gu @eugenegu
    As an Asian-American who was racially and physically assaulted at Vanderbilt hospital in Tennessee, I was placed under arrest after calling the police for help. Michael Bennett is just the latest victim of systemic racism and institutional white supremacy.

    This is Dr. Gu’s article at the Toronto Globe and Mail (Dec 2017). He’s a surgeon who marched in LA and is one of the doctors who responded to Santorum yesterday on twitter.

  63. 63.

    Mary G

    Woah. Nevada Rep. Mark Amodei said today that Paul Ryan may soon resign as Speaker of the House. https://t.co/OVoJCJv0rd— Caroline O. (@RVAwonk) March 26, 2018

    Fingers crossed! I guess Cathy Myers, the Iron Stache, and the high school kids marching 50 miles from Madison to Janesville for gun control have him running scared.

    “[The march] is directed at Paul Ryan for his lead role in blocking and burying any chance of gun reform again and again.” the organization’s website reads. “We are ready to keep the pressure on our nation’s top leaders until gun reform is a priority for Republicans and Democrats. We are not afraid.” (ABC News).

    ETA: They are doing it on their spring break. So impressed and heartened by all these young people!

  65. 65.

    Kathleen

    I just saw an email in my spam folder which promises me 1.5 million dollars if I contact a “Mr. John”. What makes me suspicious is that “Mr. John” doesn’t sound like a name a Nigerian Prince would use, so I’m thinking this might be a scam. Thoughts?////

  67. 67.

    efgoldman

    @Kathleen:

    I’m so glad I’m not alone.

    mrs efg is convinced there’s an evil wizard, like a cartoon Merlin, inside every electronic device.

  68. 68.

    Ruckus

    @Jay:
    On my android phone I have a place to change to the desktop or mobil depending but that makes it harder to read.
    On this desktop there is no mobil button/whatever to click. mac/safari, latest update.

  70. 70.

    Mary G

    Paul Ryan resigning as speaker rumor comes from Jon Ralston reporting what Rep. Mark Amodei said at a Nevada Newsmakers event. Evidently Steve Scalise is to take over.

  71. 71.

    Kathleen

    @efgoldman: I suspect evening entertainment at a Koch “retreat” consists of DVD’s showing “America’s Funniest Poor People”, hosted by Dennis Miller.

  72. 72.

    efgoldman

    @Mary G:

    Paul Ryan may soon resign as Speaker

    Speaker only or his seat?
    His replacement will be worse. Whoever it is can’t legislate worth shit.

  75. 75.

    bystander

    Edward Hopper Tourist Tip: There is a woman in Wellfleet, Mass. who takes people on a tour of that area of the Cape to show buildings and settings that Hopper painted. Many are tucked away and she includes a collection of graphic material so you can compare the sites with the paintings. Interesting to see how Hopper changed reality in his painting.

    ETA Highly recommended for Hopper/Cape fans.

  76. 76.

    Ruckus

    Tom
    On your update at the head of the post, I think that this reply to noname on taxes is appropriate here, so I’ve copied it. The punchline is in italics.

    Figured as much. I feel the same way. Old people with no kids in school have made the same argument. People who don’t use public transportation make the same argument. We don’t get to choose the what, we are supposed to choose who does make that decision and throw them out when they don’t do it right. But all of those things are what make the government and therefore us live and work together, not just the bits and pieces that we don’t need/want/like. You don’t like drumpf? Neither do millions of your fellow citizens, even some of those who voted for him. Let’s do the right thing and kick his ass to the curb, by voting out the republicans in congress in Nov and if nothing else drumpf in 2020. If possible we might get lucky and he will be gone well before then. But that won’t fix the issues that allowed/got him in the first place. Maybe we aren’t the ones that failed here but we as a country have failed in a lot of ways over the last 40 yrs, by not recognizing how deep and how bad the rot is that is the republican party. That’s what a democracy is, the people have to make those decisions and have to live with the bad ones until they can change them, properly.

  77. 77.

    justawriter

    I hang about in a forum where a large number of the participants are rightwing snowflakes who need a safe place to bitch how they can’t be racist and sexist IRL. Anyway, for some reason the photo story came up this week and they were chortling over how the libs were upset. One person discovered that the original print was of a “legal hanging”, not a lynching, and they all bellared (my dad’s favorite expression was “quit bellaring (bellowing) like a sick calf”) that “proved” nobody should be upset about it. Like it makes a bleeping difference.

  78. 78.

    piratedan

    @Mary G: I’m thinking he’s on the list of those to be indicted for campaign finance law violations and in working with the Russians to subvert the elections and to cover up what they did afterwards. Not sure how else you can explain the actions (or inaction) post the revelations during the ongoing investigations.

  80. 80.

    lamh36

    We’ve come a long way, but it’s still not quite equal….but we owe how far we’ve come to people like Ms. Linda Brown! R.I.Power!!!

    BREAKING: Linda Brown, who as a little girl was at the center of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that ended school segregation in the United States, has died at age 76. Details:
    https://twitter.com/timhrenchir/status/978372006390521856

  81. 81.

    Mary G

    @schrodingers_cat: @efgoldman: Don’t know if just as speaker or his seat, but the caucus will be worse because Ryan pretends to be a moderate whereas Scalise is a full metal wingnut. He’s the one who got shot at the baseball game, but still cheerleads for the NRA. I’ve read that they don’t expect to do any more significant legislation before the midterms, so I guess their stratergy is to try to rile up the base for turnout, and defend their voter suppression and gerrymandering to the max.

    ETA: @lamh36: RIP indeed, that case was a landmark.

  86. 86.

    mart

    @efgoldman: My company computer shit its hard drive a week ago. My loaner would not start today. I tried throwing it. Seems to have temporarily knocked out the evil wizard and it started…

  88. 88.

    Aleta

    From Dallas News

    The University of North Texas lecture series that featured Donald Trump Jr. expects to net at least $183,000, money that school officials say will help support student scholarships.
    Almost all of that — $180,000 — equals the amount pledged by two prominent Republican donors, including the school’s top regent, Brint Ryan.

    New financial records obtained by The Dallas Morning News show that Ryan, through the tax advisory firm he runs, has pledged a total of $160,000 toward the lecture series, more than previously reported.
    An additional $20,000 came from Doug Deason, a Dallas investor who has said he and his father raised millions for President Donald Trump’s campaign.

    Harvard Crimson, 10/2017 : Former white nationalist activist R. D. Black and Kennedy School Professor Khalil G. Muhammad discussed how white nationalists have become more confident under President T, at an Institute of Politics panel on Wednesday.
    (Derek is the son of the wht supre. who runs the site stor m && fro nt. He attended a liberal college, arrived a committed racist. Eventually he began speaking publicly against the nazi/white movement and against T.)

  89. 89.

    Mnemosyne

    @Kathleen:

    A romance novel I’m in the middle of reading starts with that premise (weird emails promising that she’s secretly an African princess), but it turns out to be real.

    You can try the heroine’s response of “FUCK!!! OFF!!!” and see if it brings a handsome prince to your doorstep like it does for her. ?

    (The book is A Princess in Theory by Alyssa Cole. I’m on chapter 10 and really enjoying it.)

  91. 91.

    Mnemosyne

    @Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady):

    I have a mystery-within-a-mystery that I’m trying to dole out in my book, so I’ve been trying to remember per Hitchcock that readers prefer suspense to surprise. Nobody wants the killer to turn out to be a character so minor that you don’t remember who it was when you get to the big reveal.

  93. 93.

    Tazj

    @Litlebritdifrnt: What I hear from conservatives is “What about Clinton?” and “So what this was long before he became president!” They completely ignore the fact that Trump paid her off just before the election. We all know they made everything Obama did into a “scandal” and Trump is an embarrassment as president.

  100. 100.

    Mnemosyne

    @Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady):

    The tricky thing in my book is that the heroine knows quite a bit about what’s going on, so if I try to have too much of a surprise, the readers are just going to get mad that the character was lying to them.

    I did at least figure out who the long-ago villain was who sent the hero’s parents on the run and (mostly accidentally) set up the present-day mystery. Now I have to weave the two together, while still keeping the romance as the primary story since it’s a romance novel. Argh!

  101. 101.

    efgoldman

    @Mary G:

    Either a country without an extradition treaty, or K Street

    My kid the journo works on K street. It sounds very weird to say. She’s anything but a lobbyist.

  102. 102.

    justawriter

    @efgoldman: No arguments from me about that, but I’m afraid they would take as another sign of how “oppressed” they are.

  105. 105.

    Miss Bianca

    @Mnemosyne: i saw the other night that you had mentioned that book, and it sounds like something i am definitely interested in reading!

  106. 106.

    germy

    NBC News:

    Stormy Daniels filed an amended lawsuit Monday that alleges Donald Trump’s personal lawyer defamed her and violated campaign finance law by brokering a “hush agreement” just before the 2016 election.

    The new filing in federal court in Los Angeles comes less than 24 hours after a television interview in which Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, said she had unprotected sex with Trump in 2006 and was later threatened for telling her story.

  107. 107.

    Ruckus

    @Cheryl Rofer:
    Economy back on track.
    They must mean the economic track that is stealing everything not bolted down and everything that is before they get caught and hung.
    I wonder if they are complicit in the Russian part of this because they are active also in the snatch and grab and money laundering business.

  110. 110.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Ruckus: I suspect it’s the Russian stuff but don’t see an obvious connection yet. Dallas Morning News had a couple of articles six months or so ago that showed the Republicans accepted Russian money. And there’s the question about the NRA as conduit.

  111. 111.

    Cacti

    Speaking of post-racial America…

    Another iconic name of civil rights has left the world.

    Linda Brown of Brown v. Board of Education has passed away at age 76. :-(

  112. 112.

    James E. Powell

    @Mary G:

    Ryan resigning as speaker but staying in congress makes no sense. Has any speaker gone back to being just plain congressperson? Is he thinking governor or senator? Is that possible?

    The Republicans will lose because the Beltway Courtiers and the rest of the press/media have stuck with their “Ryan is the wonkiest of policy wonks who, in good faith, is only concerned about the debt” narrative. They have no one else like that who could their party would choose as speaker.

  114. 114.

    germy

    The decision to expel Russian diplomats from the U.S. makes clear that we stand with our allies and that there will be consequences for Russia’s recklessness. We must continue to lead international efforts to isolate Russia so that it understands its behavior won't be tolerated. pic.twitter.com/oMmLlPJrow— Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) March 26, 2018

  117. 117.

    germy

    @Mary G: I want him as far away from government as possible, before he can tear apart every last piece of the social safety net.

  120. 120.

    Jay

    @Cheryl Rofer:

    Some Economists estimate that the Russian State Organs alone, “leak” $20 billion dollars a year into The West.

    The Airoflot Case in London’s quite interesting. ( 1/4 of all Airoflot Staff are/were GRU, were double dipping, ( paid by both), Airoflot profits were “administered” by a Swiss Bank and the money was under the direct control of the GRU.

    Add in Russian Corporations, Russian Ogliarches, Russian Mobsters, and that’s a lot of dirty money heading West, not all of which is going to be laundered, or stashed, some will be used to buy influence and keep the cash flowing.

  121. 121.

    PJ

    @Mnemosyne: Hitchcock noted that suspense causes the audience to be more invested in the action, particularly banal action, which is often preferable for a storyteller. But suspense is not always preferable to surprise: Hitchcock qualified, “The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.” Surprise can be an effective emotional device, particularly when sufficient groundwork has been laid for the observant audience member to pick up on things, because it puts the audience in the unknowing/oblivious frame of mind of the characters, so that the shock comes to the audience as much as to the characters. Surprise can be overused (e.g., it’s become something of a cliche in George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire) but it emphasizes how little people actually know or are in control of, particularly when they think the opposite.

  122. 122.

    Gravenstone

    @efgoldman: So he’s the one responsible for releasing the magic smoke when an electronic device shuffles off its mortal coil?

  123. 123.

    Gravenstone

    @Mary G: Shame Scalise didn’t learn anything from his close encounter of the ballistic kind. He’s actually worse than Ryan as it relates to gun legislation.

  124. 124.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Tom, you’re spot on that Trump is simply the logical result of 50 years of GOP racist policy, betraying the very notion of the “Party of Lincoln”. The last decent Republican Presidential candidate was Dwight Eisenhower. Every one of them since has been playing the dog whistles and appealing to racism.

  126. 126.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @James E. Powell:

    the Beltway Courtiers and the rest of the press/media have stuck with their “Ryan is the wonkiest of policy wonks who, in good faith, is only concerned about the debt” narrative

    The vermin of the Village.

    Wipe them out. All of them.

  127. 127.

    Roger Moore

    @PJ:
    Surprise also has less value on repeat watching/reading. A twist ending is great when it surprises you the first time, and it can be fun when you look for all the subtle hints the second time, but that’s usually about it. Suspense can still do its job even when you know the outcome.

  128. 128.

    Mnemosyne

    @PJ:

    I think the problem comes in when writers think that surprise and suspense are the same thing, or that they’re interchangeable. But you usually need some amount of suspense to pull off a good surprise.

    We ended up re-watching a big chunk of The Sixth Sense recently and I realized why the surprise works so well — because it’s not a surprise to Cole (Haley Joel Osment). When the big reveal happens, we realize that Cole had his own viewpoint on the plot events the whole time. He was essentially in a different movie than we, the audience, was. That’s why the film is still so watchable — once you know the secret, you can see how Osment plays his role to reveal what his character knows.

  131. 131.

    PJ

    @Roger Moore: I think surprises/twists can also be effective on repeat viewings, because knowing what is going to happen, and dreading it, turns it into a kind of suspense. Oedipus still gets me, every time.

  132. 132.

    PJ

    @Mnemosyne: It’s funny that you mention that movie, because before I had seen it, someone told me that there was a twist in it, but not what it was. Not knowing anything else about it, I paid attention, and figured out what was going on by half way through. And then the rest of the movie was much less interesting (because aside from the twist, it just wasn’t very good, though it was light years ahead of Shyalaman’s later movies.) For me, Shyalaman is a textbook example of someone who over-relies on surprise. If that’s all you’ve got, you haven’t got much.

  133. 133.

    Mnemosyne

    @PJ:

    (because aside from the twist, it just wasn’t very good, though it was light years ahead of Shyalaman’s later movies.)

    Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree on it not being a very good movie. It’s definitely the best of his films by far, because IMO it doesn’t actually depend on the twist. To me, it’s still interesting to see Cole’s evolution from being afraid of his gift to embracing it even if you know that the child psychologist is himself a ghost. The sneaky screenwriting trick is that Bruce Willis is the star, but Cole is the protagonist — that’s part of the film’s misdirection.

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