Zora Neale Hurston told her story and they kicked her out of New York City

I saw William Wyler's The Little Foxes (1941) tonight at the Somerville Theatre. It was screening especially for the eve of the election, which sounds counterintuitive if you hear the story vaguely described as a turn-of-the-century Southern Gothic—adapted by Lillian Hellman from her Broadway play—but not if you listen to the words of the daughter finally making the decision to leave her rapacious, self-devouring family and their casually exploitative way of life:

You couldn't [make me stay], Mama. Because I don't want to stay with you. Because I'm beginning to understand about things. Addie said there were people who ate the earth and other people who stood around and watched them do it. And just now Uncle Ben said the same thing, really the same thing. Well, tell him from me, Mama, I'm not going to watch you do it. Tell him I'll be fighting as hard as he is—someplace where people don't just stand around and watch.

In isolationist 1941, I can see a lot of reasons a left-wing Jewish screenwriter and a Jewish director who had been trying since 1936 to get his relatives out of Germany might have wanted to make a movie suggesting that America should not just stand around and watch. In 2016, on the last night of a presidential campaign which has included some of the most public and unvarnished racist, misogynist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, the list goes on like laundry and it rarely even bothered with dogwhistles (international banks! global financial powers! If Trump had ever used the phrase "rootless cosmopolitans," I think we'd have had an anti-Semitic bingo) rhetoric I have heard from a mainstream political candidate in my lifetime, it's still pretty relevant. I'm not sure that refusing to stand around and watch ever goes out of style.

So, you know. Vote.