One Bright Shining Moment

We’ve seen a lot of documentaries so far this year; such as
The Yes Men, Outfoxed, Bush’s Brain, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train,
American Blackout, and This Film Is Not Yet Rated.

A good documentary gives me something not commonly known, so I didn’t care for
Shirley Chisholm ’72: Unbought & Unbossed, and I thoroughly enjoyed
One Bright Shining Moment about the McGovern usurpation of the Democratic machine in 1972.

Right up front they acknowledge the landslide loss to Nixon in ’72, then the movie looks at how George McGovern won the nomination in a convention that reflected the American public more than any convention before or since — and how beating the Democratic machine undermined the campaign in the general election.

With numerous incisive interviews from people who were there, it’s both insightful about present politics and a slice of Americana. Gore Vidal describes America’s government as a plutocracy, and at one point talks about his familiarity with those who govern us:

“You know, I was brought up in the ruling class. They hate the people. The Bush family, if you gave them sodium pentothal and asked them ‘what do you think about the American people?’ You’ll hear such profanity as you’ve never heard before. ‘The American people are an obstacle. The Constitution stuck us with all these elections.”

I think he’s right, it is a plutocracy, and a very cleverly run one, at that.

Here is the degree to which the plutocrats rule: They have convinced middle-class America that they are the preservers of their way of life. While the liberals espoused civil rights for all, women, blacks, and gays, working at making the country live up to the ideals and promises it espoused, the conservatives shrewdly convinced America that they were the ones who stood up for traditional virtues: the flag, mom, and apple pie.

No matter that liberals were the ones helping moms and like flags and apple pie as much as anyone else. Much of Middle America bought the conservative deceit. (By middle I do not mean the midwest, I mean the middle class, from New Hampshire to Florida to Orange county to the loggers in the northwest, sporting toy stuffed spotted owls in nooses.) The plutocrats have convinced middle America that those darn liberals want to take away their very way of life.

I know a guy who goes duck hunting and relishes talking about how he is going to go “murder ducks.” He hopes to provoke a reaction.

Another friend who returned to western Pennsylvannia makes a point of talking about deerhunting. (It seems tied in to the movie The Deer Hunter for him.) He wanted me to see how many shops and stores sport signs offering venision during the fall.

It was his way of saying these are our traditions and our way of life — which you liberals want to take away from us with all your laws and regulations.

Never mind that there is a sheer numbers game involved. When the American population expands from 76 million in 1900 to 146 million after World War II to over 300 million today, and the habitat for wildlife is shrinking and the numbers of ducks are diminishing and the deer have to move to suburbia, husbanding the resources becomes imperative.

Never mind that — at a gut level, those darn liberals are out to destroy traditional American life. And that’s what the conservatives exploit. The plutocrats are calculatingly effective at manipulating the fears of middle America. I work with a woman whose parents in Cincinnati are convinced the only thing keeping Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Taliban from marching on southern Ohio is George W. Bush.

Say what? Think of how successful a piece of propaganda that has been.

I mean, first of all, the sheer logistics of it: the ships and tanks and planes needed to mount an assault on mainland America.

Does the Taliban have any troop transport ships? Paratroopers? Troop transport vehicles or tanks or the supply lines to mount such an invasion?

How successful a fearmongering campaign is that, that so many Americans have been kept afraid of a cowardly outfit without the guts to even come in out of the shadows?

This nation once faced an immense problem here throughout our country, and FDR said of the Depression during his 1933 inauguration, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

To see One Bright Shining Moment is to see a movie about a brilliant and decent man who once presented us with the opportunity of proactive, unfearful governance. The Republicans effectively convinced the average Americans that the blacks were storming out of the cities, the students storming out of the campuses, the Jews ran the banks and the media, and they were all going to turn the country communist courtesy of a McGovern administration. And it was all a huge lie.

Nixon and his operatives ended up disgraced, with many of them doing hard time in prison; McGovern’s campaigners still get together with pride for what they accomplished and attempted.

Until the left figures out a way to show the American people how the fearmongers are manipulating them, and how they will live better if they face whatever problems they have with less fear and more rational proactivity, more guts, the fearmongering and the plutocracy will continue. Because it works so well. Time after time after time.