Falling Down
I’ve linked a Youtube video review of the movie, “Falling Down” - The Great American Lie.
The analysis of the themes contained in this 1993 movie is often spot on. The reviewer has a Scottish accent which I suspect gives him an outsiders view of The American Dream. I’ve often joked and I know others that have as well, that we can relate to Bill Foster, the protagonist in this film. I guess my question is why do we relate to, or understand this character. The reviewer calls Foster an everyman and yes, in many aspects he certainly is. He was content with the 9 - 5, the commute, the job, the pension, the wife, kids and a dog, that his job affords him the mortgage on the house in the suburbs, pizza on Friday’s, a movie matinee on Saturday, you know, the promise of if we put our heads down, work hard, and obey the rules, we all can have a piece of that American Dream. But can we?
Many seem to agree this nation is going to Hell in a handbasket. We lament that the way things are today are not the way we remember them being as we were growing up and learning how to carve out our piece of the dream. It’s easy to give example after example of what has changed and there’s a righteous sense of anger in watching American Culture undermined, abused, denied, and perverted, sometimes so rapidly and in the most offensive ways it’s hard to imagine it’s really happening. We almost seem to be driven by forces beyond our control to some descent into madness, much like what Bill Foster experiences in the film. We’re asked to deny the reality of our own experience and any opposition to those compelling these affronts will get you canceled, shadow banned, you can lose your job, called ists and phobes of things no one could have really imagined 30 years ago when this movie was released. What would Foster’s reaction be if he’d had to pick up his young daughter and walked in on drag queen story time? If he was confronted by BLM, or Antifa? Or lost his job not to corporate downsizing, but to DEI mandates because of his melanin count and not the merit of, was he qualified for his job?
So many things have changed and it’s hard to describe just what it is we think we’re mourning, or hoping to return our national consciousness to. The world I inherited from my father was far different than the one he inherited from my grandfather. my grandfather’s America was unrecognizable to his Grandfather who served in the war between the states. What is it that keeps us relating to and many desiring to emulate the reactions of Bill Foster? To put it bluntly, can enough Bill Fosters return some semblance of nostalgic normalcy to America, or is our fall all but guaranteed? Here’s something our reviewer with the brogue failed to include. The United States of America is unique in all the world and human history. Our Constitution, coupled with the Declaration of Independence, put in motion an experiment in self governance that even a civil war could not eliminate. Over half a million died in the conflict to determine which course that self determination would take, to ensure a ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’
This nation has never gotten it 100% right, but that never diminished the progress we made toward attaining the goals our founding documents laid out. I’m certain my grandfather’s grandfather would be appalled by every circumstance of today’s American way of life. It would be unrecognizable to him. Not just in a technological means, but the normal everyday things we take for granted. Women in the workplace. Children being treated as equals or better. (see that one I’ve got issues with too, but for many, that’s normal) The manner in which people speak to each other. The lack of participation in churches. So many things that were normal in the mid 1800’s are considered quaint or old fashioned, even oppressive today. Would he pine for the good old days? What is it we’re in fear of losing? The American Way of Life is constantly evolving, though in the last couple of decades, that change does not seem healthy or even compatible in many cases to our stated national ideal. Will America ever be perfect? No. See that was easy. Let’s move on to what we’re trying to protect.
Contained within the Constitution are the first ten amendments, referred to as The Bill of Rights. Not once in these amendments is our government, the body most responsible for altering our way of life given permission to make the changes we find ourselves so vexed by. Not many of these changes make a lick of sense to those everymen most affected by these seemingly arbitrary and insane mandates. No, the very Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights, restrict government. It states clearly what they are NOT allowed to do. Yet those serving in government have either found ways around these restrictions, or blatantly ignore them knowing there will be little to no consequence when they squeeze the everyman until he pops. The erosion of our Constitution is continual. Our founders understood that any form of government tends to grow in size, strength, and power, until-
’When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.’
Just a little research and you can find many examples of how the Liberty we were given is to be maintained and protected. Not one mentions acquiescing our Liberty to an omnipotent government. It seems as if we’re rushing headlong toward a confrontation. The type where the everymen all across this nation will see themselves in Bill Foster. If those that abuse and push us toward that confrontation cannot amend their ways, they’ll find hordes of Bill Fosters, John Galts, Todd Beamers, Tianamen Tank Men, Spartacus’s, and on and on. They can be found in factories and on farms, the self employed and unemployed and come in every shape, size, color, and ability this land was meant to offer opportunity to. The Melting Pot. The American Dream. Self Determination. These are things worth defending and preserving.
How that gets done is for another day. There’s too much crammed in my head right now to record those thoughts coherently, but rest assured, I’ll get there.