If you've been wondering what's behind the scenes in the ridiculous fight that Spike Lee started with Clint Eastwood, don't miss Roger L. Simon's analysis. He thinks the motivation is simple jealousy, cloaked in the form of Lee's bitter identity politics:

....for more than a decade Spike has barely made a film any of us can remember. Compare that to Eastwood, who, although some twenty-seven years Lee's senior, is at the top of his career, having scored big in 2003-2004 with Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby.

No wonder Spike's jealous. So what does he do? He reaches back to an era when he was more successful. He plays the old identity/race card. Now we could all laugh and say this is just another case of an (prematurely) aging artist grasping for attention, but these times are more complex than that. We don't know which way we are going - toward a post-racial future or back to a racist past.

I have been rooting very hard for the former so it was with some wistfulness I read that Barack and Michelle Obama's first date was to see Lee's Do the Right Thing. I very much liked the film at the time (1989), but somehow I wish the Obamas had gotten together over, say, a college production of Aeschylus or perhaps a reading of Pushkin. I don't want to think of their marriage emanating from the stew pot of American racial despair.

We have to get over all that and the time for getting over it is now.

Bearing in mind that the black Marines at Iwo Jima served in segregated units, from a purely artistic standpoint, including them in a film about the raising of the flag would have been a distraction, as it introduces a very different, although otherwise legitimate theme. Films like this -- like any form of art -- simply cannot depict everything, and I dislike demands that art be altered for "inclusionary" political purposes.

And how far does this go? Who else might have been excluded? What if there were closeted gay soldiers oppressed by the then-universal climate of civilian and military homophobia? Do they too have to be in every war film? Why? Because the Spike Lees of the world want to be unelected Commissars of Identity Politics?

Let me admit my personal bias. I like Clint Eastwood's films, and I don't like Spike Lee's films. But films should stand or fall on their own merit, based on their popularity with the public, not based on politicized demands of competing directors.

(Fortunately, the government is not producing these films and no one is forced to watch them.)