![]() ![]() The John Brown of “Good Lord Bird” is a sincere holy fool who also happens to be heavily armed. Instead it takes for granted the story’s mythic scale, as if this were an American Passion Play we all know the paces of, and riffs on it from an odd, often clarifying angle, creating its own pop-culture mythology along the way. Was Brown’s cause just? Undoubtedly, but his tactics? “The Good Lord Bird,” based on James McBride’s tricky, capering 2013 novel, is not about to settle that question. ![]() Both his animating cause, anti-slavery, and his method of action, gunfire, run straight to the heart of America’s most toxic contradictions. A story of the abolitionist John Brown-who seized the Virginia armory Harpers Ferry in 1859, an act of domestic terror that may have helped precipitate the Civil War-should never go down easy. Which is probably why the Showtime limited series “The Good Lord Bird,” for all its unexpected ebullience and knockabout comedy, sticks in the craw. Now is an uncomfortably apt time to be contemplating political violence in the United States, for reasons I hardly need to spell out. ![]()
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