I usually watch Gene Autry, Cheyenne and Maverick on the Western Channel because I love to see Hollywood trying to make the towns people, ranchers and cowboys look civilized fighting over women and money in the saloon.
The Indians are the "savages" because they wear loincloth instead of cotton and haven't discovered toilet paper.
I need to be reminded regularly who the "hostiles and savages" were when the white-man givers manifested our destiny by slaughtering the American Indians so we could build cities and towns with indoor plumbing.
I haven't seen the Birdman movie since I was a kid.
There was no Internet in 1955 so it wasn't easy to find out Burt portraying the mild-mannered and humane, Robert "Birdman of Alcatraz" Stroud was mostly fiction.
The title should have been titled, "Birdman of Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas".
Burt wound up in solitary confinement when he killed a guard who refused to let him see his mother because she missed the scheduled visiting day.
The use of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons began in 1829, based on the early Quaker religious philosophy that solitary introspection would lead to penitence and reform.
"Over the course of Stroud's thirty years of imprisonment at Leavenworth, he developed a keen interest in canaries, after finding an injured bird in the recreation yard."
His work with bird diseases suggested he had human cures and he might have got out if Karl Malden, playing the warden, hadn't seen his defiance as a threat to society.
Karl Malden saw the murder as another reason the defiant Burt needed to be "rehabilitated" because he refused to cooperate and abide by the prison rules.
Picture living in a cage the size of your bathroom, with tiers of single cages above, below, and to either side. You remain in this cage nearly 24 hours a day, day in and day out, year in and year out.
Karl ran the pen by the book and made sure Burt had clean clothes, a bath on Saturday and a haircut every month.
He was proud his cage was so clean you could eat off the linoleum floor.
Our prisons aren't humane but they are civilized.
