The Anti-Manichaeist

This is…Minnesota.

I saw “Good Night, and Good Luck.” with my grandfather tonight. As I mentioned before, it is set in 1953 and about how Ed Murrow and a group of newsmen ended Joseph McCarthy’s Anti-Communism witch-hunts. I love Ed Murrow’s line,

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof. We will not walk in fear one of another. This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. “

I got into the film a little late, in part because my grandpa broke his leg last spring and now can only walk with a walker. He’s also blind and so I had to narrate what was going on on the screen for him. My grandfather was living in Canada in 1953. He’s from Alberta originally, the son of a Swedish migrant who turned away from becoming a wealthy farmer to become a pastor and a church-planter after he becamed saved shortly after migrating to Canada. My grandfather followed in his father’s footsteps and was the one who first encouraged me to go to seminary. His career was mainly with rural parishes in MN, WI and Canada, where you got paid as a pastor about the same amount as the poorest person in your congregation. Him and my uncles always had to cut firewood to help make ends meet and my grandma actually made more money than he did as an elementary school teacher, which made for an interesting marriage. My mom went to High School in the boonies of Ontario across the border from int’l falls. That and the extent we vacationed in Canada and how I went to visit my grandparents nearly every day after school when I was in jr high combined to make me a very much Canadian-influence Minnesotan who ends a good deal of his statements with an aye. And so it’s no wonder I’m such a Pinko, aye?

But I liked the film a lot. I love more historical films that engage the mind. I agree with Jürgen Fauth that,

Dramatically, “Good Night, And Good Luck” falls somewhat short, simply because it aspires to the same objective ethics as its hero. The movie is too high-minded to feed the audience cheap reversals and triumphant climaxes. Morrow’s televised civics lectures, invariably delivered with a lit cigarette dangling from his fingers, are the very definition of sober and rational; the courage on display is almost intoxicating. Clooney, it is clear, doesn’t think of his target audience as consumers: this is a film for engaged citizens.

But it really does engage you as a film. Unfortunately, it may not sell terribly well. There were hardly anyone in the theater for the screening my grandfather and I caught. And it was mainly older people like him.

Afterwards, My grandfather and I didn’t talk about the film. My grandfather, God bless his soul, gets too much of his “news” from Limbaugh. On the way to the theater, we discussed some of the current events and he thought that the whole thing with Rove, Libby and DeLay was just politics. Though, when pressed he could admit that it might not be just politics as Clinton had proven that politicians could lie and presumably one can lie about more than receiving sexual favors while in the WH. And so the discussion ended with a well let’s wait and see what happens. Then, on the way back, we got talking about gas prices and he was pretty sanguine about oil and mentioned how he had heard that there was some new car that drives on water. It all kind of made me feel sad about the way the entertainment-oriented talk-radio spreads so many mistruths about what’s going on with people like him who’ve come to distrust the Mainstream Media(MSM).

But, on the positive side, he did like the film, or said so when I dropped him off, and I did get to share with him more about myself. On the way over, I got to tell him some about what I’d been writing recently about John Perkins and then on the way back, as we enjoyed a meal at Hardees, I shared some about what I’d been studying about the politics of Jesus. And when I dropped him off with my grandmother, I told her that, while the movie didn’t quote any Bible verses, it did speak of the importance of telling the truth and loving our enemies, or those we disagree very much with.

And I think that, while I agree with Harold Evans that the movie is “an indictment of what network television in America has become… deserting the civic values of its greatest broadcaster,” the real issue is one of values. And the real question is about how will we bring about cultural renewal in the US. Murrow reminds us that, “if we dig deep into our own history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular.”

But the danger is not just that we will be scared back into an age of “Unreason”, no the existence of a human tendency for a manicheistic herd mentality made cowering in the wake of a raging bull like McCarthy quite reasonable, just as CBS-exec William Paley’s concern for the bottom-line and financial stability made it quite reasonable to replace “See it Now” with the infamous cash-cow “$64,000 Challenge” and there really isn’t any practical need for most folks to know even who Ed Murrow and Joseph McCarthy are, they can remain rationally ignorant and enjoy popcorn flicks like Doom. And the danger is not religion, per se, as we find when we dig deep into our history that the problem has not been our religiosity, but rather our hypocripsy and how frequently “absolute morality” has been wielded to reify the status quo and to justify the use of force.

I think George Clooney captures in his interview with PBS the quasi-religious tension inherent in the film; for him, it really is a personal film. He also feels like he is laying his career on the line by critiquing the way things are. Clooney grew up in the local news radio business, back when stations didn’t make much money but they did have more autonomy than as of late. For him, Murrow’s stand against McCarthy along with Cronkite talking about how Vietnam doesn’t work are high points of journalism when American policy was changed. But when you think about it, they’re both negative actions where “wrong behavior” was stopped short. They don’t really point to what ought to be done, what more than our own entertainment and ego gratification we should strive for in our lives. Clooney wants to make movies of lasting value, not just block-busters that sell well, due to the hefty Hollywood advertising budgets behind it. He’s “terrified of waking up at 65 years old, which is getting closer, and to wake up and say I didn’t do the things that I was supposed to do,” which raises the obvious question of what sorts of things are you s’posed to do? The answer for Clooney being:to be a good citizen and help bring focus to stuff people should care about and try to stay informed about what on earth those two things are supposed to be about and making indie movies that get in the face of our popular culture like Good Night, and Good Luck or Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

And I guess I hear that and it saddens me that we fall so easily on a weak-wristed form of public civic religion that unfortunately didn’t sink very deep-roots in the past and has been unravelling in the past thirty-some years. But I guess have also endorsed a version of it that I learned when I was in grad-school when I was a prof in Mexico at a private secular university. I called it moral realism, the idea that there are relatively absolute absolutes that do conflict in the here-n-now ethical dilemmas we face and that ultimately underly our cultural values. There is realism in these moral values in that they precede and therein transcend us, with their precise origin and nature being a matter of legitimate dispute and not being something that it is essential for us to come to complete on, for us to be able to dialogue/reason together about what ought to be done.

I also think that it’s a tragedy that Paley didn’t go the other direction and make Murrow and his crew out into heroes and petition that their show be given the public support that it needed to continue in its prominent time-slot position. We need folks that are willing to stir things up some to promote change or provide the political cover needed for others to promote changes. This ain’t the best of all possible worlds and we fallen humans do tend to act in our self-interest in much of our actions in life, often in a rear-guard defensiveness, and so we must be open to the need for changes and accepting that they will inevitably be controversial and maybe even “not-so-great” for the bottom-line, at least in the short-term.

so Good Night, and God Bless!
dlw