Thomas Wictor

I haven’t seen Lone Survivor, the movie about former US Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell. But I read LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson’s review of it.

In her review, Nicholson says the following.

As the film portrays them, their attitudes to the incredibly complex War on Terror, fought hillside by bloody hillside in the Afghan frontier with both U.S. and Taliban forces contributing to an unconscionably high civilian body count, were simple: Brown people bad, American people good.

These are Nicholson’s words. They appear nowhere in the movie, nor are they even implied, since brown people saved Marcus Luttrell. This idiotic thought was conceived entirely by the ultra-white Amy Nicholson as she sat there and in real time blocked out images and dialogue that debunked her claim. She fantasized or hallucinated what didn’t exist.

Here she is doing her impression of an inebriated pirate-duck Holly Golightly.

Let’s forget the sheer stupidity of her statement that the war in Afghanistan has an “unconscionably high civilian body count.” About 20,000 civilians have been killed in thirteen years. That works out to about 1538 per year.

The leading cause of death in Afghanistan is…coronary disease. Every year four times as many Afghans die of heart disease as die from war. Is the Afghan diet responsible for an “unconscionably high civilian body count”?

In the first half of 2013, the Taliban caused 74 percent of civilian deaths, while pro-government forces were responsible for 9 percent. Nicholson draws a moral equivalence between US troops and the Taliban in terms of civilian casualties, but the numbers show that she’s an ignoramus who should stick to posing for pouty photos and not worry her pretty little head about the real world. And that 74 percent figure comes from the United Nations, an organization not known for its pro-American stance.

Finally, I’m betting that the lily-white, duck-lipped Amy Nicholson has no idea how many Afghan civilians the Soviets killed in a shorter period. Try 1.5 million. And that’s probably a low-ball figure.

Amy Nicholson is a dilettante. She likes to pretend that she’s knowledgeable and deeply concerned, but she’s just a pampered buffoon. She’s also a racist. Her review demonstrates white privilege in action.

“Brown people bad, American people good.”

Again, this statement originated in the mass of goo that passes for a brain inside Nicholson’s skull. She could’ve written, “Afghan people bad, American people good,” but she didn’t. Why? Because when she thinks of Americans, she pictures only people as white as she is. What Nicholson wrote is that brown people can’t be real Americans. She let the mask slip.

Here’s my mother CeeCee, born in La Puente, California, the United States of America.

Damn, that is one brown lady! She was brown because she was half-Mexican. And yet…she was American! Weird!

Here’s my maternal grandmother Carolina on the left, with her two sisters Elvira and Clara.

Even in a black-and-white photo, you can see that those are real Latinas, as brown as CeeCee. Yet they too were born in California, in the United States of America.

Here’s my family in 1970.

The brown kid in the back is my brother Paul, who inherited the Mexican genes, while the rest of us went German-Irish. According to Amy Nicholson, Paul isn’t a real American. He’s a brown person. His skin color separates him from the pinkish-whites who are his father, brothers, and sister.

Here’s my cousin Filbert, a US Marshal.

Wow, was he an Aztec or something? He’s so brown he should’ve just left the country! What about my brother-in-law Bobby Gonzales?

He served in the US Army, part of the umbrella organization that Nicholson says thinks brown people are bad. Wait: Bobby is brown and he served in the American armed forces. Is my brother-in-law therefore both bad and good? Were his white squad mates unsure whether to high-five him or kill him?

Isn’t it amazing that Amy Nicholson has a job? Well, I think she should resign immediately, in atonement for her racist demeaning of my family. Her white skin doesn’t make her more authentic than my brown-skinned mother, grandmother, brother, cousin, or brother-in-law.

White privilege, man. I didn’t invent the term, and until I read this extremely hurtful movie review, I thought it was just another slogan. But now I realize that whites like Amy Nicholson really do see themselves as superior to brown-skinned people.

She admitted it in her own words. And for that, the rule is that her life must be turned inside out. She must apologize to all brown-skinned people, then resign, then apologize again, then go on TV and sob, then make a huge donation to a charity that caters to only brown-skinned people, and finally she must commit herself to a psychiatric facility to be cleansed of her hateful microaggression.

I wonder what she thinks of people like me, who are a quarter brown? Am I mostly American? Actually, I know exactly what she thinks, because I heard it for ten years when I worked in the L.A. entertainment industry. The second she learned of my heritage, she’d automatically think of me with a word her ilk spewed all the time, because they didn’t know that my white skin hid my brown genes.

Beaner. That’s what Amy Nicholson would call me in her mind before she even knew it was going to happen. Like almost everyone in her industry, she only pays lip service to her stated ideals. In her case it’s drunk, duck-lip service.

I’m not very fond of Mexican music, so here’s some Venezuelan gaita for Amy instead.

Venezuelan, Mexican. Since they’re all brown, what’s the difference? Right, Amy?