On my flight home from Morocco, the long leg, Casablanca to Montreal, I had a bulkhead seat and 370 movies to choose from. Bridget Jones’s Baby, Alien, Batman Returns, Back to the Future II and III, A Bug’s Life, Forrest Gump, Glory, Million Dollar Baby, The Green Mile, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery; they were all there, just waiting for me to point and press.
It’s a seven-hour flight and I read my novel as long as I could stand it and then I scrolled the movies. Besides the movies, there were 650 “shows;” that’s over 1000 ways of piloting yourself through the airplane noise and stink, your sore butt and cramped legs, and the silent wrestling match with the person in the seat beside you over armrest justice. I’d smile and brace my elbow when I passed him his coffee or his chicken taco and he’d smirk back, pressing my arm for advantage while I was off balance.
The movie Casablanca was an option; it’s my favorite movie. My favorite scene takes place in Rick’s Café: Yvonne, a young French woman with her heart beating for Rick, proprietor and our American hero, waltzes into the scene and allows German Soldiers to buy her drinks to court his jealousy. A German soldier sits at the piano and bangs the keys while his fellow countrymen, led by Major Strasse (the perfect evilist), thump the piano with their clenched fists and sing Die Wacht am Rhein. In response, hero and idealist, Victor stands in front of the band and commands they play La Marseillaise, the French national anthem. The scene becomes a North Africa battlefront, the Germans in their synchronized male voices and well-cut uniforms arrayed in a tight battle group against the trombone, trumpet, drums and guitar, the many mouths open wide in shared song, the suits and long dresses, the white police uniforms, led by the idealist in his white tuxedo, overwhelm the Germans in beauty, numbers, volume and passion. As the tears run down Yvonne’s cheeks, they run down mine. Viva la France!
The problem with Casablanca is that it is a celebration of a war-besieged 1942 America and was shot when the outcome was unclear. The main character, Rick, outcast and rejected lover, damaged but tough, represents an America of ideals and courage in the midst of war, an America that stares into the future confident and unafraid. It’s an America that doesn’t exist anymore; we’ve become instead the fist-pounders belting out our nationalism, bullying the world, and using the tools of state to shut down resistance (the next scene in the movie). I wish we liberals were playing the part of Yvonne, that we were the resistance. But we’re not. We don’t have her tears. We don’t have her courage. We don’t have her passion. We don’t have her voice. We certainly don’t have her acting ability. Nor are we the tough idealist that is Rick, the courageous Nazi antagonist that is Victor (who can’t contain his outrage over even a bar song), or even the cynical yet patriotic French policeman, Captain Renault with his bemused smile and peccadillos.
Instead, I watched American Graffiti. The actors, the cars, the street scenes, the dialog, it’s the safe, confident, pretty America I grew up in; it’s who we used to be. The questions the movie wrestles with are the questions of of an idyllic youth; what should we do tonight, who’s dating who, whose car is faster, college or no, where do we get some booze; all with Wolfman Jack as our narrator and conscience over a playlist that includes Only You, Party Doll, Peppermint Twist, At the Hop, The book of Love, Do You Want to Dance, Why do Fools Fall In Love, Goodnight, Well It’s Time to Go, and all the rest. The fights and wrecked cars, the money stolen from the pinball machines, the teenage stunt that wrecked a police car resolve themselves quickly and neatly and don’t derail the narrative; they are instead absorbed as the unremarkable antics of youth. It’s a movie about ideals, confidence and identity; the answers to the existential questions are obvious and go without saying. In 1962, American young people believed in America. I watched it again when I got home.
* * * *
Morocco is the most honest place I’ve ever been. Many years ago, it gave me a dozen stitches and a broken arm. There are few things more honest than a broken arm. I likely killed one of my assailants. That was honest, too. I think killing someone is probably as honest as you can be.
We liberals need to be honest about violence. The cliché that the mighty pen bests the sword is a lie repeated by people with big vocabularies just before tucking into a hearty dinner. They are people who lecture us with tired and unoriginal arguments that have kept them safe and comfortable and achieved nothing for the rest of us. Honesty is recognizing the value that violence has wrought. Wars, strikes, vandalism, fire bombs, riots, assault and broken windows cause change. Little else does. Certainly not clever hands on the keys; our liberal elite craft books, letters and stern editorials from their comfortable hearths and cause nothing, change nothing.
There is no joy in broken glass or burning buildings. There is no joy in stitches, fractured bones or death, but there is the satisfaction of having been honest, of being acknowledged, of causing people to think about you, your life, your wellbeing, of knowing that your hunger is not without recourse, not without purpose. Admittedly, there is a passion to violence, a physical and spiritual lust, the deep satisfaction that comes from settling a score, of showing people with power what true power is; the power of material destruction, the power of bodily injury, the power of death.
For a liberal to call for violence is out of character. The liberal credo is much like the Hippocratic oath; “First, do no harm.” Except that the Hippocratic oath doesn’t say that (ironically, the Hippocratic Oath does forbid abortion, but that’s not this conversation). Likewise, we liberals should look at our beliefs and our history and ask ourselves, why is violence off the table? We every day accept violence brought by the society around us, the violence of poverty, the violence of poor education, the violence of inaccessible health care, the violence of bigotry and stigma, the violence of a failing climate, the violence of law enforcement, the violence of unjust incarceration. Why is this state-sponsored violence, which has caused the misery and early deaths of so many for so long, so acceptable? And why is a violent response so taboo?
There is no power in stewing and chewing the gnawed bones discarded by the wealthy. The power’s in the taking, in the wresting of wellbeing from those who would not give it freely; the power’s in causing the wealthy to reflect on the thin and delicate branch of their perch. It’s in acknowledging that there is such a thing as wellbeing and that we are all due wellbeing; we are all due food, a roof, a bed, a doctor, a teacher, an opportunity to celebrate the fact of our being.
The pursuit of wealth beyond wellbeing is a fool’s errand. It’s a pursuit for people who don’t comprehend the marvel of life, nor its brevity, nor their unearned good fortune in living it. These are people without the intellectual capacity or sense of irony to recognize life for the remarkable moment that it is. These are people without empathy, people who mistake owning for success. That their eighty years of life, never to be repeated, will be best observed through the crap they surround themselves with; toys, mansions, sycophants and genuflecting politicians. They’re dupes and fools, the bunch of them. But the wealth they’re taking is yours and mine, it’s our wellbeing. We need them to stop. And they won’t stop by asking them nicely.
