“The Good Lord Bird” is a complicated work; it asks questions, refutes facile narratives and plays with contradictions, as much art does. But in 2020, it feels — to some perhaps more than others — that we are facing life and death, and people understandably have less tolerance for contradictions and questions. Where our families are dying, we would like answers, not questions. This is what made John Brown such a potent figure in his time, and so ripe to be resurrected in ours: There were very few questions, for him, regarding the morality of racism. He was touched, in his view divinely, by a simple and unrelenting call to address it head on, violently, without apprehension or compunction, as an immutable evil. It was not a complicated issue for him. It was either life or death, and it almost didn’t matter whose. “The crimes of this guilty land,” he is reported to have said in his final note before execution, “cannot be purged away but with blood. (more…)”