I am becoming a big believer in the value of movies, especially really good old movies, as teaching tools. “The Caine Mutiny” (1954) is an example. Captain Queeg ( Humphrey Bogart) is the captain of a beat-up minesweeper in World War II. He imposes discipline on the ship, but his behavior becomes increasingly strange, and morale sinks. His officers begin to think that he is crazy, and the First Officer starts to keep a log of Queeg’s strange actions. During a typhoon, it appears that the ship might sink. Captain Queeg freezes and gives orders that seem to further endanger it. He won’t listen to reason. At this moment, the First Officer takes control of the ship and orders the captain off the deck. The ship survives the storm.
The First Officer is court-martialed for mutiny. In the trial, his lawyer (played by the great Puerto Rican actor, Jose Ferrer) puts Captain Queeg on the stand and destroys him, demonstrating Queeg’s paranoia and mental instability. End of story, right? Wrong. The officers of the ship have a party to celebrate the acquittal, and the lawyer shows up drunk and angry. He asks them a simple question: when you saw that the Captain was having trouble coping, did any of you go to him to try to help? The answer is “no.” And, suddenly, the men see their great moral failing.
Just over a year ago, President Obama took office. The headline in “The Onion,” which bills itself as “America’s finest news source,” read “Black Man Given Worst Job in America.” They may have been right. When the President took office, the nation faced the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, a deep recession that showed no signs of having run its course, mass unemployment, two unpopular wars and a deeply divided nation. No president since Franklin Roosevelt had come into office in such daunting circumstances.
Which brings us to the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. CPAC is the annual meeting of the political right in the United States. It is many things to many people. For those on the far right, it is an opportunity to come together and rally the forces around themes such as “Saving freedom from the enemies of our values.” For television pundits, it is an enormous source of entertainment because there are so many extreme statements to choose from.
What you can be 100 percent assured of is that no one at CPAC asked the question: When we see the problems that our country faces, what can we do to help our government and the President? While the officers of the minesweeper saw Captain Queeg as a crazy man, the CPAC people see President Obama as something far worse: an enemy. And you don’t help your enemies. You destroy them.
CPAC was enemy-centric, almost all of the identified enemies being other Americans, with an occasional immigrant thrown in. The keynote speaker, Glenn Beck of Fox News, said that the country was being destroyed by liberals and progressives and used terms such as “cancer” and “extermination.” A constant sub-text was that we are at a “crossroads,” and that there were enormous threats to freedom, all of which had crystallized in the past year since the election of an illegitimate president.
Most people don’t take these events all that seriously. Partly this reflects the belief that everything in American life is entertainment and, therefore, doesn’t really signify much. After a couple of news cycles, CPAC was forgotten and will remain so until next year. After all, do these people really consider people like me a “cancer?” Would they really “exterminate” me and others like me? Do they really believe that health care reform will create a socialist America and wipe out freedom? Are they really arming themselves for some sort of showdown?
Then there is the belief that the United States is the exception to all of the rules, a nation apart. The “shining city on a hill” (except when the Democrats are in power.) This is the America that is always No. 1, the America of “USA!! USA!!” that has the freedoms and the system that everyone in the world wants to imitate. And anyone who questions it is a liberal traitor pessimist or worse.
And because we are the chosen nation, we don’t have to show the same moral vigilance as others. We don’t torture people, and, even if we do, they deserved it, and it was necessary. By always thinking we are the exceptions, we suffer from a chronic failure of imagination, an inability to draw lessons from the experiences of others. And a strong tendency to distort the lessons of our own past.
There is a growing awareness in the country that the path out of the current recession is going to be long and difficult. For many people, hard times are not going to be a short-term thing. The results of 30 years of misguided policies, arrogance, indebtedness and ever-increasing inequality are not going to be reversed overnight. It took a long time to get here, and it is going to take a long time to get out of this mess.
This is bad news because we know something from history. Societies, groups and individuals tend to become meaner and more intolerant in bad times. The Tea Party groups represent this hardening. And sometimes, the door is opened to truly horrible developments.
But we also know something else from exploring history. Whatever the national policies are, good or bad things happen because of decisions that “ordinary” people make in their own communities. In a climate of bitterness, intolerance or even hatred, there are always many exceptions. There are people who band together and say that we will not accept these attacks on decency and the mistreatment of the “other.” These people will be more and more important in what are likely to be the difficult years ahead. And they don’t really live in the “Virgin Islands,” but instead in Frederiksted, the North Side, Coral Bay or many other communities that dot the land.
For decades, those who accept the moral principles of peace, love, justice and inclusion have been on the defensive as the forces of political and religious reaction have reigned triumphant. Given our situation, it is important to challenge intolerance at the community level, regardless of what is happening in the United States Congress, or on talk radio and cable television news.
Living by these principles is particularly challenging in places like the Virgin Islands where the majority group has many grievances, and the minority has economic power. But in a fundamental way, “born here” and the discriminatory provisions of the proposed constitution are as destructive as the hatred of immigrants fanned by people like ex-Congressman Tancredo or the bigoted ranting of Rush Limbaugh.
It is not all entertainment. There are unpredictable consequences of intolerance because once the genie is out of the bottle, it is very difficult to put it back in. And in hard times, when many people are feeling victimized, intolerance and the search for scapegoats can easily become the default position.
This means that standing up for the right things and defending the “others” is hard work. But, in the end, it is what we will be judged on. No one can predict the future, but we know that false optimism and pessimism are equally destructive paths. There is an alternative, which is faith in doing the right things even when the outcomes are unpredictable.
