Guest Post by Jim Kunstler
These are the long, dark hours when cis-hetero white patriarchs sit by the hearth chewing over their regrets for the fading year and expectations for the year waiting to be born. I confess, I like Christmas a lot, Hebrew that I am, perhaps the musical and sensual trappings more than the virgin birth business. Something in my mixed Teutonic blood stirs to the paganism of blazing Yule logs, fragrant fir trees, rousing carols, and snow on snow on snow. I hope we can keep these hearty ceremonies… that they are not banished to the same puritanical limbo where the Prairie Home Companion archives were sent to rot.
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One surviving old chestnut of the season is the 1946 movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, a movie so thick with gooey holiday sentiment, it’s like bathing in egg nog. It’s larded with messages of good-will-to-all-mankind, of course, but some of the less obvious themes — almost certainly unintended — tell the more interesting story about where America has come from in recent history and where it went. One thing for sure: every year that goes by, the America of It’s a Wonderful Life seems utterly unlike the sordid circus we live in now.
The movie takes place in a town, called Bedford Falls, like many in my corner of the country, upstate New York, or at least the way they used to be: alive, bustling with activity, with several layers of working, middle, and commercial classes employed at real productive work making things, and a thin candy shell of “the rich,” portrayed as unambiguously greedy and wicked — but overwhelmed in numbers by all the other good-hearted townspeople.
The movie depicts an American social structure that no longer exists. It’s both democratic and firmly hierarchical — owing probably to the lingering influence of army life in the recently concluded Second World War. Jimmy Stewart plays George Bailey, the head of an old-style family-owned Savings and Loan bank, a very modest institution dedicate to lending money for new homes. His competitor in town is the wicked old rich banker Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore), a swindler and thief, who wants to put George out of business.
Bedford Falls is a man’s world. The women in the movie are portrayed as taking care of the “home front” and supporting the male “troops” in the toils of small town commerce — another social holdover from the war years. This depiction of life would surely give a case of the vapors to any post-structuralist college professors who dare to watch the movie.
Now here’s one catch in the story: the main business of George Bailey’s bank is lending money to build the first post-war suburban housing development outside of town, a project called Bailey Park. One of the pivotal scenes concerns the Martini family, immigrants, moving into their new suburban home with great sentimental fanfare. So, what we’re witnessing in that incident is the beginning of the destructive force that will soon blight small town life (and big city life, too) all over the country. Moviegoers in 1946 probably had little intuition of the consequences.
Another catch in the story involves the plot twist in which George Bailey misplaces a large sum of money ($8,000, actually purloined by the wicked villain, Mr. Potter). With his bank facing ruin, George contemplates suicide. He’s saved by his guardian angel, who goes on to show George what Bedford Falls would be like if he had never been born. It would be called Pottersville. Its Main Street would be bustling with gin mills, the sidewalks full of suspiciously available young ladies, the whole scene a sordid nest of vice and wickedness.
The catch is that Pottersville would have been a much better outcome for American small towns like Bedford Falls than what actually happened. Today, the lovely landscape of upstate New York today is dotted with small towns and even small cities that have absolutely nothing going on in them anymore, and stand in such awful desolation that you’d think a long war was fought here. Much of that is due to the activities of good-hearted suburban developers like George Bailey.
The Americans of 1946 must have had no idea where all this was headed, nor of the coming de-industrialization of the country that had won World War Two, or the massive social changes in the divisions of labor, or the annihilation of several layers of the working and middle classes, or the much greater wickedness of the generations of bankers who followed Henry Potter. It’s a Wonderful Life presents an American scene poised to arc toward tragedy. It’s an excellent lesson in the ironies of history and especially the dangers of getting what you wished for.
Readers may agree: we’ve never seen our country in such a state of ugly division moral confusion, and intellectual disarray. A coherent consensus eludes us. Grievance, resentment, and bitterness boil and sputter everywhere. My Christmas wish is that we might put behind us some of the more idiotic and pointless debates of the past year and get on with tasks that really matter… that will allow us to remain civilized through the hardships to come. That’s how I roll this dark morning, here at the glowing hearth, while the Christmas day ahead, at least, offers some comforting stillness as the snow on snow on snow piles high. And so… to the presents waiting ominously under the twinkling tree.
Sordid•ough was just as Frisco then as it is now. And before then.
Naiveté, some say, is a wonderful life. Others put it ignorance is bliss. (&wisdom folly.)
There has been no degradation. Or improvement. Across the overall.
The net remains gross.
The gross remains static.
The static remains clingy.
The klingons remain “prideful ruthlessness and brutality. Totalitarian, and with a martial society relying on slave labor, they reflected analogies with both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.”
Who lies the past lies the future. Who controls & doles the present lies controls the past lies.
Presents under trees, so to speak. Nooses•entimentality, round necks, in actuality. Chokin’ on pablum.
Have some more egg nog. You’re still slightly coherent.
I don’t drink. But long hours in the cab will stiffen you up for sure. Maybe if you stiffen up some nog yourself, it might loosen you back up. Maybe even limber up your comprehension.
…..”that will allow us to remain civilized through the hardships to come……”
Not. Gonna. Happen.
One of the most defining thoughts I ever saw written about the Left, and I’m sorry I can’t attribute it, was that “one can’t be reasoned out of a position they were never reasoned into”. The Left is comprised chiefly of emotionally stunted adults; adults that never grew up. And their tantrums will lead to an inescapable violence. Count on it.
The question of how we remain civilized, we cannot if we chose the Madison Avenue concept that we can have it all. We worry about possessions, when we know these possessions will soon own us. Put your trust in what really counts, your family, your neighbors, and your community. Treat others as you would wish to be treated, give more than you get, and finally learn to forgive. Spirituality is not to be ignored or belittled, it is to be embraced. We are here not by our own choosing, that is the profundity of humankind. Earth is just a weigh station of the perpetual timeline of our existence. I will be around, not in physical presence, but of something else. I don’t know what this something else is, but I do know it is the mystery of the universe!
Sorry Jim but the destruction of the America that was with the America that is wasn’t inevitable it was the creation of wavy haired six nosers who thought social progress could be created by expanding government, credit finance and destroying the existing culture.
Was it done with malice aforethought, revenge or greed? You tell me because your kind did it and will live ( or die) with the consequences. You know, one day it will not be a philistine like Donald Trump in the White House with a Jewish son in law. It will be another Barack Obama with a Muslim son in law and when Iran or some Egyptian hothead leads another jihad against Israel the US will not stop the next holocaust.
One of the most pernicious lies ever told is the “that world never existed” trope.
There were two recent articles at Slate and Salon that attacked the Hallmark channel for being “too White” and for creating a fake world where small towns exist and people celebrate Christmas because that world never existed. You never see them attacking Star Wars for “not existing” or Blackish for not having enough White people.
It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. JHK has a real problem with any kind of explicit White identity- and he is free to- but he has to understand that all the things he seems to like are products of that world. And if it never existed, why does he write about it with such nostalgia? And to say “Pottersville would have been a much better outcome for Bedford Falls than what happened…” I mean seriously, WTF?
WTF indeed. I guess the successes of the goyim are viewed as competition to the non-goyim.
‘I confess, I like Christmas a lot, Hebrew that I am, perhaps the musical and sensual trappings more than the virgin birth business. ‘
Reminds me of Christmas in my youth. My dad’s best friend – for well over 50 years- was a Jew from Brooklyn; they had roomed together in graduate school. I’ll call him George; his wife I’ll call Frances.
My Mom and Dad always insisted that they have a big family gathering for Christmas, and we usually did – 12 -15 people, and they always invited George, Frances and their two kids. Now these conservative Jews from Brooklyn always came to our Christmas gatherings, They brought gifts for us children and we gave them gifts in return, and joined us for Christmas dinner, where Mom always had both a beef roast and a baked ham. They always ate the ham, which of course was not available to them at home. I well remember on occasion at the dinner table when Frances turned to her kids, maybe 6-7 at the time, and said to them. “Now when Grandma asks you what you had for supper, you tell her you ate chicken.” We all broke out laughing, even George and Frances.
We shared those Christmases together for more than 20 years. They’re all gone now, Mom, Dad, George, Frances, but I hope they still share their Christmases in that far off land of tomorrow where I know they reside.
nice story sionnach–