A great movie, go see it.
While watching it, I had the most curious reaction. I found myself with a distinct longing to be in that world. A horrible, ridiculous feeling, but eventually I discovered its origin. What I longed for was a world in which there was at last the clarity to see that we were in a fight of liberty against fascism.
In the world we live in now, in the United States in 2007, it is still quite possible to believe that it is business as usual, that we can still do ordinary life, that the stock market will go up, if not now, then soon. We do have camps now, we do have militarization of civil life, we do have people made to disappear, but most of us ignore it and can ignore it. We have a president who has asserted the right to do whatever he wants, and most of us ignore it, or make fun of him, but no one is resisting him.
And I also longed for that: the resistance. There is no resistance to join, none. The political wing in congress is flaccid, the activist wing is obsessed with conspiracy theories, the religious wing is self-absorbed and the intellectual wing spends its time finding ways to expel those less pure than themselves. The people quietly withdraw their support from the regime, but we have no leaders. We don’t have leaders ahead of the people, and we don’t even have leaders following the people.
And for people with age and experience, the other times like now keep flashing back into our heads. We had this sort of president once before, at the tail end of the first war of imperialist quagmire, and at that time we first couldn’t believe a president would lie, and then we were outraged to discover he did. And then, his own party disowned him and he went.
Now, we have a similar president, as similar in imperialist purpose as he is different in his inadequate intelligence. Instead of a brilliantly evil consort to pull the strings we have shoes and a dress. Now we know this leader lies, expect him to lie and shrug when he does. We have insulated ourselves from outrage, from righteous indignation, from all feelings unconnected to the joy of purchasing and consuming. And like feeling, we are insulated from thoughts, insulated so we will not connect one fact to the next and see what is happening. Or, at any rate, most of us are like that, but some are not. Some, the receptacles of our unfelt feeling, have too much feeling. For the fanatics are on the rise, mirroring in their explicit rejection of reason the majority’s insulation from it. We see that fanaticism in the societies of our official enemies, but can’t see it in our own society, our own religion.
And so, you see, we didn’t bounce back from the first quagmire, we didn’t renounce anything, we didn’t learn, we didn’t say “never again”, we didn’t polish up the weak spots in the Constitution, we did nothing. This president will go, likely to be replaced by a different emptiness with a different marketing campaign, but not by anyone we need.
And those of us with years and history know that this movie, or some variation on it, is likely our future. We know societies crumble, we see societies around the world turning to barbarism and conflict and we feel ours turning away from the Enlightenment, turning away from reason, turning away from democracy, from civility, from hope. Suddenly, we feel connected to Germans in 1932, to ancestors in Europe when the lights went out at the beginning of the millennium of darkness.
Perhaps God will purge us, with rising temperatures and species out of control and plagues and flood and fire. Perhaps God will remove us with mutations that terminate us or the hope of children. Perhaps it will be something we can’t imagine, something we did, and permitted, and encouraged, and made money from, and then blamed on God. It’s most likely to take a long time.
In the movie, the pregnant mother finds no room, and no inn, and has the child without even a manger of straw. In the movie, the mother of the savior and the man who isn’t the father flee to a place more mythical than Egypt. And the man who has no biological connection protects and guides until he can do so no longer, and then departs from the story, a story to be continued in the child.
In the movie, you see, there was something worth dying for. A child that can make soldiers drop to their knees and remember the image of God within them. But we have nothing. And so, the life within the movie has its appeal.