December 25, 2008
It’s a Wonderful Life, Or It Could Be
‘Tis the season for the cable television
networks to dust off the hoary old seasonal
chestnuts they’ve kept under lock and key
for the last 360-odd days and treat what’s
left of America to another round of
“heartwarming” and “affirmative” testaments
to innate American “virtue.”
Each year of vapidity, gluttony and greed
concludes with yet another Miracle On 34th
Street, another digitally colorized
absolution for the preceding year’s excess,
venality and waste. For a day or two, we all
pretend to buy into that humility, charity
and brotherhood of man crap until its time
to shovel our brats into the SUV and head
off to the after-Christmas clearance sales,
or scurry back to the office to preside over
the next round of downsizings and layoffs,
and the annual cycle begins again. AMC, TCM
and the others unite in a festive holiday
chorus to proclaim that See, we’re not so
bad; underneath our craven capitalist,
militarist exteriors lurk hearts of 14-carat
gold – even if it takes an electron
microscope to find them.
Imagine what the spectacle must look like to
the typical resident of Guinea, Swaziland or
Burkina-Faso, to choose three random
examples. Each year, the nation that
gluttonously sucks down the lion’s share of
global natural resources, the nation that
has most recently presided over the
extermination of roughly one million Iraqis
for no particular reason, settles itself in
for a merry succession of narcissistic,
self-worshipful holiday films as its
denizens ply one another with gifts of cheap
Chinese-made crap gadgetry while professing
adorations for a savior whose teachings on
charity, poverty, humility, compassion,
peace and tolerance not only play no part
whatever in their day-to-day conduct but are
dismissed as socialistic or subversive by
the majority of the populace.
Zany, huh?
Serious self-analysis has never been
America’s strong suit, and in the post-1930
era of universally accessible
corporate-controlled broadcast media, it has
proven impossible for all practical
purposes. Whatever impulse towards kindness,
decency, or conscience lurks within the
souls of individual American citizens, it
cannot hope to compete with the ubiquitous,
all-engulfing meta message extolling
consumption and militarism, which have
swirled around them unceasingly for the last
several generations.
There is nothing uniquely or innately evil,
blind or malignant about individual
Americans, any more than there is about
residents of any other corner of the world.
But like all human beings, we are subject to
external shaping and influence, and in the
history of humankind there has been no more
pervasive and effective molder of human
consciousness than the American
corporate/state/military mass communications
apparatus.
Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life
posited the possible consequences if certain
key elements – namely the existence of the
ever-virtuous George Bailey – were absent
from a community. Based on this premise, it
is worth asking what sort of people we would
be had the Mr. Potterish elements been
expunged from our midst. What if there had
never, ever been an ABC, NBC or CBS? What if
there simply had never been a ubiquitous
national mass communications network, let
alone one controlled by interests whose
agenda consisted solely of the sale of
products and ideologies?
What if, for the last 80 years, we had
continued to receive our formative news,
opinions and ideas from our neighbors over
the garden gate, rather than through a
controlled, constricted and programmed
electronic apparatus? What if the American
Community had consisted of ourselves
existing in relation to our immediate
friends, coworkers and neighbors, with the
same interdependencies that had formed the
substance of human societies since the
beginning of time up until that point? What
would we have become?
Would we really have evolved into a nation
of gluttonous, warmongering, mall-shopping,
Survivor-watching automata, or might
we have amounted to something more?
Force-fed a diet of 24-hour “news,” vapid
visual titillation and popular discourse in
which every single syllable is a lie, we
will never know.
©
2008 North Star Writers Group. May not
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