Director Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, set during the Depression, was a divine counterfactual thought experiment designed to remind a suicidal George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) that his hometown, Bedford Falls, would have turned out to be a pretty miserable place called Pottersville without his seemingly ordinary presence.
Consider the Obama administration’s first six years as a prolonged counterfactual take on what the world might have been like for the last 70 years without a traditionally engaged American president dedicating our country to preserving the postwar Western-inspired global order.
The what-if dream seems to be working to show the vast alterations in a world that Westerners once took for granted. France, a perennial critic of America, is suddenly an unlikely international activist. For seven decades, the French harped about American hyperpuissance – on the implied assurance that such triangulating would be ignored by an easily caricatured, aw-shucks American George Bailey trying his best to keep things in the global community from falling apart.
But now the Johnny-on-the-spot American everyman is gone, and lots of things have filled the vacuum. An overwhelmed France nevertheless intervened in Mali to staunch Islamic extremism. It bombed Libya, and then discovered that the United States’ new policy of “lead from behind” meant that America was no more likely to clean up the ensuing post-Qaddafi mess than was France — especially given that the new Mogadishu-on-the-Mediterranean was not far from Marseilles, but an Atlantic Ocean away from New York and Washington.
[…]
The aim of Capra’s fable was to remind us that the easily ridiculed, so-so status quo often hides Herculean efforts by those whom we take for granted, and who, working in the shadows, guarantee civilization instead of chaos. In the movie, the guardian angel Clarence can make the dream go away and cure George Bailey of his suicidal melancholy, as normalcy returns with the old Bedford Falls. In our version, we will learn soon after November 2016 whether we awake from the temporary alternative universe of a new Pottersville or whether it proves to be a depressing and continuing reality.
Victor Davis Hanson, “The Global Pottersville”, National Review, 2015-06-02.
May 2, 2019
QotD: The Global Pottersville
Filed under: France, History, Media, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: BarackObama, Movies — Nicholas @ 01:00
Comments Off on QotD: The Global Pottersville
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
