Spike Lee and Agent Orange

In today's NY Times:

“It cannot be just a history lesson,” Mr. Lee said. “It has to be contemporary. So that was the hip thing that we did. Otherwise it’s a period piece. We had to connect David Duke to Agent Orange today.” 

This is the name Mr. Lee uses to refer to President Trump, whom he did not mention by name during our conversation. Mr. Lee happily credits the musician Busta Rhymes for the nickname Agent Orange, a toxic defoliant used by the American military during the Vietnam War: “Shoutout to Busta,” he said, laughing...

The intensity with which Mr. Lee spoke about Mr. Trump and Charlottesville finds a corollary in a section of “BlacKkKlansman” that incorporates some of the rally’s most agonizing images. These include the death of Heather D. Heyer, who had been part of an anti-racism counterprotest.

“I called up Heather’s mother, Susan Bro,” Mr. Lee said. “I was not going to put that in unless she gave me her blessing.” He gave her his sympathies and then said, “‘Mrs. Bro, I want to end ‘BlacKkKlansman’ with the murder of your daughter,’” Mr. Lee said after a silence, she told him: “Spike, put it in.” The film, he continued, opens in August, a year after Charlottesville. “That’s what this film is about,” he said. “It’s about today. Are we going to go forward or backward?”

Agent Orange