CONSERVATIVE TASTES: Slaves to Moral Self-Congratulation
Bowman, James
S SOON AS I SAW THE HEADLINE in the Sunday WashingtonPost,"NoI-told-you-sos"(subhead:"OpponentsoftheIraqWarVoicePain,NotVindication, At Predictions They Could Only Hope Would Be Wrong"--the...
...His sleeplessness...
...If moral self-congratulation has now become the norminpolitics,ithaslongbeensointhepopularculture, which can hardly be an unrelated fact...
...Neither is a great movie...
...The Hasty Heart (1949) is a British filmhemadewithRichardToddandPatriciaNealand is well worth watching, but Reagan's part in it is relatively minor...
...Spielberg'sfilm.It'senoughforanotherwhitedo-gooder,an emissary from the plantations, to show Wilberforce (IoanGryffudd)theshacklesandotherinstrumentsof C O N S E R V A T I V ET A S T E S Slaves to Moral Self-Congratulation 6 6 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R M A R C H 2 0 0 7 Aby James Bowman restraintemployedtokeeptheslavesinsubmissionto make a confirmed crusader out of him...
...This kind of thingisnotentirelyabsentfromthefilm,but it never falls back on the notion of "addiction...
...In The Winning Team, Reagan plays the great pitcher, Grover Cleveland Alexander, who came back from his own battle with illness and alcoholism to pitch the St...
...Will our hero become a clergyman or a politician...
...Louis Cardinals to victory over the mighty New York Yankees in the 1926 World Series...
...Yet both Storm Warning and The Winning Team provideinterestingcontrastswiththesimilarproducts oftoday'smovieindustry.Intheformer,Reaganplaysa crusading district attorney trying to take down the Ku Klux Klan in a small town that seems more Midwestern than Southern...
...The dramatic conflict here is particularly feeble...
...I would ratherhaveseenTheVoiceoftheTurtle(alsoknownasOne for the Book) or She's Working Her Way Through College,tonametwootherWarnerpicturesthatIhave seenandenjoyedbutthatarenotavailableonDVD...
...Likesomuchelseinthepopularculture,Amazing Grace seems to care about its material only for the sake of the occasion it affords to affirm its, and thus the audience's, own moral rectitude--along with that of its perfect, suffering, compassionate hero's...
...How does he get his inspiration for his anti-slavery crusade from the former slaver and author of the words to the hymn "Amazing Grace," John Newton (Albert Finney...
...Peopleclamordayinanddayout,inthatpolishedandpoliticwayof theWashingtonian,tobeprovedright.But,"sheadded, "on Iraq, the vindicated are pained...
...The import of the Iraq war part of Sen...
...Why, we may wonder, did it matter so much to them thus to affirm their own compassion and moral uprightness?Itwasasuperfluouseffortatrighteousoneupmanship,tobesure,buteversincethefirstaudience hissed as the villain tied the heroine to the railroad tracks, taking pleasure in one's own goodness by taking up the invitation to hate someone else's evil has been an accepted part of popular entertainment...
...TheentirepoliticaldiscussionofIraqinCongress, from many Republicans as well as Democrats, is now I-told-you-so...
...Inotherwords,heisnot"actingout"but"repressing" those ever-loving demons...
...The point of the proposed Senate resolution opposing the "surge" in Iraq--a resolution that could do nothing eithertoputastoptoortohelptheAmericanmilitary effort there--was the rush to put on record who was right (assuming the surge fails) and who was wrong about Iraq...
...Onthefaceofit,thiswouldseemtobeanother celebration of victimhood, an attempt to "humanize" a hero by dramatizing his battles with personal "demons...
...Itisthecultureofthistown--traffickinginrightness," wroteLynnDukeatthetopofthepiece...
...Every gloat these days begins: "It gives me no pleasure to have been right on this, but...
...Politicians are ever less sure of what they believe, politically, and correspondingly ever more sure of their personal virtues...
...As it happens, I have been reviewing a boxed set of DVDs from Warner Home Video of five films starring Ronald Reagan from the 1940s and 1950s...
...The poster advertisesthisfilmas"FromtheMakersofRay"--that is, not the director, writer, or producers but Bristol BayProductions--anditshareswithRayaninterestin thepersonallifeofitscentralfigure,rightdowntohis struggle to free himself from drug addiction, that is alwaystendingtocrowdoutwhatIbelieveisthemuch more interesting concern with the things that made him famous in the first place...
...The problem with such melodramatic scenarios is that theytendtodriveoutrealdramaticconflict--whichis not, normally, about good and evil, tout court, but greatergoodsandlesserevils--andsomakeanullityof the plot or story, which as Hitchcock said (stop me if you'veheardthisbefore)isthesoulofthecinema...
...Like Senator Webb, they may have no idea atall what to do about a problem--though doing things rather than striking attitudes is what was formerly thoughttobewhatpoliticswasfor--buttheyarefilled with passionate certainty about their own lack of responsibilityforit,orforanythingelse...
...You'lljusthavetotakemywordforitthatItoldyouso...
...Whatalaugh!Surelyitdoesn'ttakemuchinsight into human psychology to see that the pain--or the "pain"--is the gloating...
...Atthisdistanceoftime,it'shardtorememberthat Amistadwasacourtroomdrama,sincewhatlingersin the mind is the horrific images of the slave trade...
...S SOON AS I SAW THE HEADLINE in the Sunday WashingtonPost,"NoI-told-you-sos"(subhead:"OpponentsoftheIraqWarVoicePain,NotVindication, At Predictions They Could Only Hope Would Be Wrong"--the poor dears...
...It's part of a series that, so far, also includes sets of movies featuring James Stewart and GaryCooper.TheReaganfilmsarenotall the ones I would have chosen, although they do include the Gipper's greatest picture, King's Row (1941), as well as Knute Rockne:AllAmerican(1940),whichgavehimthenickname of Gipper...
...In fact, he is less a hero here than he is a celebrity...
...What is he going to do about his colitis...
...His recent book is Honor: A History (Encounter Books).J A M E SB O W M A N M A R C H 2 0 0 7 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 6 7 RonaldReagan: SignatureCollection...
...Not exactlygrippingstuff,Ithinkyou'llagree...
...This is the civilian versionoftheclicheofthetraumatizedwarriorthatIdiscussed in this space last month...
...Jim Webb's Democratic response to the President's State of the Union address was I-told-you-so...
...The conventional wisdom in Hollywood now is that heroes can only engage us with their "human" qualities, not their heroic ones...
...Infact,asfaraswecansee,Groveronly ties one on once and otherwise falls on hard times because he is keeping from his wife (DorisDayagain)thefullextentofhisillness...
...In fact, the only black people in it appear loitering around the bus station in one of the openingscenes.TheKlan'swrathisinsteaddirectedat a journalist who is threatening to expose their corrupt ways.ThoughReaganisclearlythegoodguy,thefocus is neither on his finer qualities nor his personal strugglesbutonthegenuinedramaticconflictcreatedwhen Ginger Rogers witnesses a murder and then finds herself called on to testify against her brother-in-law--a splendidly drawn thug played by Steve Cochran--and thefatherofthechildthathersweetlittlesister(Doris Day)hasjustexcitedlytoldhersheiscarrying.Though it all ends rather unbelievably, this scenario shows us themessinessandmoralconflictsofreallifeandhasno roomforself-congratulation...
...There is no gloating...
...IT HAS NOT ALWAYS BEEN SO...
...Miss Duke is at least rightinsayingthatthisisthelanguageofpoliticsinour time, if wrong about her proposed exception to the rule.Itisacorollaryofthescandalpoliticsthathasbecome the norm in America since Watergate...
...The other two, neither of which I had seen before, are Storm Warning (1951) and The Winning Team (1952...
...And how is he goingtobreaktheaddictiontolaudanumthathetakes for these conditions...
...I knew the article would be an I-told-you-so--as indeed it proved to be...
...Oh,andbytheway,boohoo...
...The new movie about the great English abolitionist WilliamWilberforce,AmazingGrace,doesn'tevenshowus the horrific imagery of human suffering of Mr...
...I told you so...
...Ten years ago, Steven Spielberg thought it worth putting on record that neither he nor any of the enlightened, liberal-minded folks who went to see Amistad were responsibleforslavery.Hadanyoneblamedthemforit...
...James BowmanisaresidentscholarattheEthicsand Public Policy Center and The American Spectator's movie and culture critic...
...Is he going to marry the girl his friends have set him up with...
...That it isthedevotionofMissDaywhichenableshim to do this is rather pat and sentimental, maybe,butI,forone,wouldratherbeencouraged inmyhopethatlovecanworkmiraclesthanflattered for my enlightened views, which have cost me nothing, on the slave trade...
Vol. 40 • March 2007 • No. 2
