The collective sense is lost.
It’s hard to believe today. “A little looking out for the other guy” is what Jimmy Stewart called it in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Seven years later, after flying and leading bombers through World War II, he reprised the attitude in It’s a Wonderful Life.
Capra’s message is that we choose to live for others as much as we live for ourselves. We serve others because we should, not because we’re compelled to. Let the Democrats deal with compulsion, Capra’s politics read. Leaders are those who get people to do the right thing willingly. That last is from Spencer Tracy in State of the Union , Capra’s Tracy-Hepburn movie from 1948, with Angela Lansbury as a proto-Murdoch villain.
Since then, we’ve lost any sense of collective good. Simple humanity is seen as weakness. (Joe Biden).
Maybe that’s why I went to the Netherlands, where people have, from necessity, cooperated for hundreds of years. Half of that country is reclaimed swamp. A collective sense seems more alive in China, even when we claim it’s compulsory. They’re now dominating the industries of the future, building a new world order where we don’t matter.
We’re the Baddies Now?
It wasn’t Trump who pounded this collective sense out of us. He just celebrates it like a modern-day Caligula. Jeff Bezos acts like an 18th century French aristocrats, Mark Zuckerberg demands sacrifice like a 19th century robber baron, and The Wall Street Journal former Mosaic browser lead Marc Andreessen wonders why the rabble won’t obey, looking and sounding more like Lex Luthor every day.
Yes. We’re the baddies now.
It seems that any thought of looking out for others has been isolated to the far left of our politics. Those who should be leading the helpers, our religious leaders, only send “thoughts and prayers” from their palatial estates. Democrats are seen as only supporting the deliberately marginalized and the “undeserving” poor who won’t help themselves.
It’s “those people,” most of us think, who are the problem, along with those who care about them.
Superman Inside
It’s into this despair that James Gunn placed his “Superman” movie.
Republicans hate it. What’s sad is the reluctance of liberals to embrace it. Or the wider culture. Rather than take its theme to heart, the idea that we’re all broken, that we can all be super when we stand together, we’re seeing it as another Spandex movie, a re-boot of a failing franchise.
Evil triumphs when good men do nothing, and for the last six months nothing has been what good men have been doing. The Democratic Party has blown apart, the vultures are feeding at America’s entrails, but ours is not the only country in this world, and Supermen can come from anywhere.
