Spreading The Wealth, American Style

As I look around America, the unhappiness, pain, grief, resentment and rage stagger me.

Though money worries plague Americans, the picture is dark, and the mood anguished, for far deeper reasons.

America is sadly devoid of the wise, wonderful spirit of Aloysious T. McKeever [Victor Moore] in the 1947 Christmas film It Happened On 5th Avenue.

In this magnificent story, the true wealth of America – the generosity of its people – is what’s spread around, voluntarily, to great effect.

At story outset, Aloysious T. McKeever, a middle-aged, long-homeless man, returns to squat for his third winter at the vacant Fifth Avenue mansion of Michael J. O’Connor [Charles Ruggles], America’s second-wealthiest man.

The next morning, while strolling with his dog in Central Park, Aloysious meets recently-discharged World War II veteran, Jim Bullock [Don DeFore] – who, ironically, is homeless due to Michael J. O’Connor’s  takeover of his apartment building.

Finding Jim sleeping on a Central Park bench, Aloysious invites him to stay at O’Connor’s mansion.

Soon, two families of veterans, unemployed, displaced war buddies of Jim, also move into O’Connor’s mansion.

Compounding the fun is O’Connor’s daughter Trudy [Gale Storm], who has run away from boarding school, and with great bemusement is living incognito amongst the squatters.

Desperately wanting her father to size up Jim, with whom she’s fallen madly in love, Trudy persuades O’Connor to ‘move in’ too – disguised as a homeless good-for-nothing!

As in many memorable movies, the Christmas season is approaching.

And miracles are fast occurring.

Rather than encouraging his down-and-out guests to seek government handouts, ‘master of the mansion’ Aloysious invests his all in identifying and nurturing their paths to financial independence. Through Aloysious’ classic American lens, he sees in each and every ‘guest’ her/his innate potential to become a self-sustaining person. He visions them ensconced in futures of authentic pride, not woeful dependency.

As Aloysious dispenses wondrous, huge doses of wisdom, guidance, and emotional support to his guests, their lives improve remarkably. By story end, each and every person is on his way to happy self-reliance.

And strengthened family relationships.

Far from being a film about coerced ‘spreading the wealth’, classic American generosity is at the core of this story.  The kind of generosity upon which our exceptional country has been built. Generosity that wondrously dispels unhappiness, pain, grief, resentment and rage – sentiments that for decades now plague more and more Americans.

It isn’t the mansion setting that elevates this film to the highest echelon. It’s the wise, generous spirit kindled in Aloysious, who stands as polar opposite to Ebenezer Scrooge.

And to many a ‘progressive’ American politician!

Aloysious saw what potential brims in ‘the least of us’. Lovingly, he advised his guests to be the best version of themselves. “It’s never too late,” he declared to Mary O’Connor [Ann Harding], Trudy’s mother, who, divorced from her father, is also living with the squatters, disguised as a homeless cook.

That was Christmas, 1946. How would a similar story fare, in America 2011?

Imagine: President Barack Obama steps on scene at the start of this movie. Swiftly, he punishes [by extracting additional taxes from] Michael J. O’Connor, and gives what’s left [after bureaucracy greedily gobbles as it pleases] to the homeless veterans to secure them housing. What would the storyline become? No one would have grown in spirit; the veterans [and their families] would be depressed and dependent, rather than happily on their way to self-sufficiency; the money would eventually run out; entrepreneur – and jobs creator – O’Connor would be angry and resentful; and the story would end in whole scale misery.

Rather than being a film of exquisite warmth and inspiration, It Happened On 5th Avenue would be a bleak docudrama of escalating human hopelessness and painful dependency, amidst escalating governmental coercion and control of American lives.

Now, imagine this! Aloysious T. McKeever is America’s President. What magnificent direction he would offer!  For Aloysious grasped what brilliant psychologist Erik Erikson discerned – the core psychological developmental tasks of every human being:  trust [v. mistrust]; autonomy [v. shame and doubt]; initiative [v. guilt]; industry [v. inferiority]; and identity [v/ role confusion].  All of which, to be mentally and emotionally healthy, we must master by age eighteen.

If we do not, mastering our remaining developmental tasks — intimacy [v. isolation], generativity [v. stagnation], and integrity [v. despair] becomes impossible.

No ‘Spread The Wealth’ Coercion Agenda could ever assist anyone with any of these tasks.

But maybe you already know this, Mr. Obama.

If we are to restore America to being America, what happened on 5th Avenue that 1946 Christmas must once again happen all over America, from Christmas 2011, forward.

Imagine! Unfortunates find authentic welcoming. Seekers find within them the means to be self-sustaining. America revives in itself that which has made America exceptional.

Aloysious T. McKeever, if ever you host Christmas again, please, I entreat you with all my heart: bless us all with invitations.

 

Writer’s Note:

 It Happened On 5th Avenue will be broadcast on Turner Classic Movies on December 18 at 8PM [EST] and on December 24 at 12:30PM [EST].  It is also available on DVD.

That’s Preposterous! How Could We Ever Go Back?

THE MOTION PICTURE PRODUCTION CODE OF 1930 

“No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it . . .

The sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.”

Several months ago, I shared with an intelligent, accomplished, long-time friend my belief that Hollywood needs to re-institute a Motion Picture Production Code. For a moment, stunned, he thought. And then he burst out: “That’s preposterous!”

“Why?” I asked.

He thought and thought. And you know what? He couldn’t say.

Ironically, he is the very same man who worries deeply about his two lovely coming-of-age daughters.

“We Are What We Watch,” quietly, I said.

Indeed. By the early 1950′s, Hollywood’s Motion Picture Production Code – set in place by 1920′s producers who recognized the dangers inherent in sin-filled media – had been repeatedly defied.  These rogue films, with their outlandish, ‘forbidden’ stories and scenes, were financially successful. Who could argue with ‘success’?  In servitude to money, most of Hollywood joined the craze. Film by film, the Code was smashed to pieces. By the late 1960′s, decency groups cold not stem the tsunami of indecent filmmaking.

In this very same timeframe, centuries of American social decency began to break down, too.

Think this is a coincidence?

It isn’t. We Are What We Watch.

As I sit here today, crafting this column, I think about my days in graduate school, when I was studying screenwriting. The winning script model, taught my Hollywood-savvy professor, was this: look at what was done successfully last year [translation: what films made the most money], up the ante and twist the story even more [translation: make the stakes higher and the characters 'sicker'] and pitch it as the next blockbuster.

Anyone who stops to think about this model has to realize that Hollywood has been on a dangerously downward spiral, when it comes to decency.

And why not? There’s no code to stop it. Money is what matters.

But there’s a problem with this model. A huge one. Hollywood decision-makers clearly aren’t asking themselves what their films are doing to human beings.

Box office attendance isn’t falling due to the economy. Fewer people are going, because when they do, more and more, they leave sickened by what they saw.  A perfect example: fans are so horrified at The Skin I Live In, they leave the theater: http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2011/05/20/fox-411-cannes-horrified-viewers-flee-antonio-banderas-new-flick-extreme-sex/?test=faces

But what about those who actually enjoy the violence? The perverse plotting?

Those who seek to discharge their emotional distress – their anger, their hurts, their feelings of rejection – by fantasies of acting out on others?

Those who seek out violent films in order to learn from them?

Next time my friend and I talk, I’ll ask him this:

Which film, when, will give an imbalanced young man the confidence to exact his rage upon women? That night, will this same young man happen to meet your daughter at a party, or a pub? Or perhaps they’ll meet at the beach, and on the cool sand huddle together under a moonlit sky. Think, dear friend. Will your daughter be able to grasp what evils dance in his mind?

Will she discern the ‘lessons’ her date took away from the film – including but not limited to how to stalk, threaten, torture, terrorize, rape, and/or kill a woman?  Will she be able to sense the pleasure he derives, fantasizing about acting out violence?

In the frenzy of rejection, or the chaos of lust, what scene will flash through his memory, offering him instant, proven methodology by which he can impose his will against the will of your unsuspecting daughter?

We Are What We Watch. And as long as we grant Hollywood limitless power to corrupt American minds, that’s how long we will continue to suffer the agonies of epidemic evil human behavior.

Until, of course, we all succumb.

Re-instituting a Motion Picture Production Code is in the best interest of all of us. With less education in evil, we’ll have the space to teach about good. Perhaps the instructors’ advice to budding screenwriters will become: take the last film that did well, up the challenges while upping the rewards for choosing good, and pitch it as the next blockbuster.

As for my friend, routinely, I join him in his worry about his daughters. In every conversation, I assure him: “Look. We can all work together, and begin to clean up the mess we’ve made of society. We can start by setting limits in Hollywood.”

“How could we ever go back?” last night, my friend, distracted, asks me. His mind isn’t all that focused; his heart is elsewhere. His younger daughter and forty of her friends are getting together for a drinking bash. The party is at the home of a girl whose parents are on vacation.

“Oh, sweet friend,” I want to say. “A Motion Picture Production Code is not going back. It’s taking what we’ve observed about life without a code, and righting the wrong.”  But I can’t say this to him. Not tonight. His poor frazzled heart can’t take it.

But to you, dear reader, I can. Enacting a production code is not ‘going back’. It’s simply a matter of climbing back aboard the trusty Band Wagon of a Motion Picture Production Code. No back-tracking necessary. No public declaration of our human foolishness required. Take hold of your senses. Assure your fluttering heart. Privately, quietly, with great relief and joy, hop on.

For the sake of civilization, it’s way past time.

Boehner’s Tears, His Ridiculers’ Fears

In The Quest To Feel Good, Professor Paul R. Rasmussen identifies contempt as a ‘psychological distancing emotion’ – an emotion that “emerge[s] to move us away from events and objects perceived as threatening”.

As I observe some in the MSM ridicule Speaker John Boehner’s honest display of honest emotions, I can’t help noticing the contempt on their faces.

Boehner has mental problems, snidely, they insist.  Or a drug problem. Or childhood trauma.  The ridiculing assessments go on and on.

Why, oh why, have Speaker Boehner’s tears become the target of such intense ridicule?

Are denigrating, triumphant pronouncements de rigueur?  Is their need for applause so  woeful, it’s sought at any cost? Does compulsion for destruction of political foes command and control their every assessment?

All of the above, while contributing factors, miss the core motivation.

In their ridicule, it is self-protection that the ridiculers seek.

Self-protection, yes, but from what?

Contempt is “associated with hurt, shame, embarrassment and other feelings” Professor Rasmussen explains.  Could it be that Boehner’s tears call up in those who ridicule him their own tears? Tears long stifled.  Tears – given their own public position – they dare not show?

What’s more, could it be that his tears activate their tears for the life they’ve never had the good fortune to live? A life of passionate American pride. A life of happy identification as an American.

A life of belonging.

A life like that of everyday American, Ohioan John Boehner.

Not that the ridiculers recognize this. They don’t.

What they do recognize is that Speaker Boehner’s Tears Of Joy at being American evoke in them great discomfort. And whether they recognize it or not, welling up within his ridiculers are dreadful childhood memories, riddled with feeling thoroughly un-American, living amidst throngs of others who felt quite opposite.

Though now, professionally, ‘Insiders’, the ridiculers seem to have never resolved their pain at being ‘Outsiders’.

Why can’t he control himself? with great agitation, they ask. What’s wrong with him?

Evidencing another sad Truth: they who ridicule the tears of Speaker Boehner have never experienced the wondrous flooding of Tears Of Joy.

Which, for Speaker Boehner, is pure, unadulterated joy at having grown up American.  His boundless festivity for The Fourth Of July.  His bursting with pride as The American Flag unfurls.  His starry-eyed faith in The American Dream.

Contempt, according to Professor Rasmussen, is a social distancing emotion. It states: “I am better than that, or better than those others.” Witnessing Boehner’s joy may well activate his ridiculers’ pain at early-on social experiences, when they themselves were ridiculed. Perhaps, each time he cries, they feel themselves eerily slipping back to the sidelines, once again lonely outsiders, once again sad onlookers, watching childhood peers immensely enjoying their lives as American citizens.

How can Speaker Boehner have had so [relatively] little, and be so happy, privately, they may dare wonder. How can he possibly think America is fair, or decent, or great?

He must be mentally ill, they conclude.

Openly, Speaker Boehner gulps with joy at being American. Within the deepest caverns of their consciousness, his ridiculers hide their awful truth: professionally accomplished though they be, they are thoroughly disconnected from America’s greatness. Padding the painful gap between what is for him, and what never was for them, is contempt – Professor Rasmussen’s ‘psychological [and social] distancing emotion’.  In their collective isolation, at this Symbol of American Belonging, the ridiculers laugh. Yet, as their laughter fades, and their glee subsides, sadly, one thing remains, unrelieved: the engulfing, inescapable pain of their lifelong unAmerican Existential Loneliness.

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Rasmussen, Paul R. [2010] The Quest To Feel Good. New York, NY:  Routledge [Taylor & Francis Group] P. 195-196

What If?

As I ponder the hysterical adamance of the ‘radical left’ that God be wrung out of America’s very fabric, illumination is setting in.

Beneath a veneer of snooty, cynical, unshakeable self-confidence, they are afraid.

Actually, they are terrified. What if?

What if the millennia of classic moral theology is accurate? What if, in their outrageous defiance of the rule of God, they are wrong?

What if God really will hold them accountable for the acts of their lives?

A clue lies in inspection of their attempts at joy. Do their efforts evoke smiles of authentic serenity, reflective of profound peace within their souls? Or, is their joy a raucous cackle of glee, attempting to discharge an ever-intensifying existential anxiety?

In this age of 1960s radicals and their disciples, America shakes with piteous fallout from lives long lived inappropriately. Lives that simply do not work. The evidence? Their endless search for authentic peace. Devouring new books, creating chronic social diversion, assuring each other that the erosive anxiety that is their constant companion is normal, and natural, and after all, given their childhood ‘moral brainwashing’, simply to be expected.

How prodigiously, how ineffectually they flail about, seeking sociopolitical order in the God-less Universe of their imagination!

And yet – could God be real? Is tradition correct? Were our parents right? Like phantoms, across their minds, these questions float, on sleepless nights, in the waiting rooms of doctors, as the aircraft they sit in lurches from violent storms.

What to do?  Abstain from immoral activities? Adhere to traditional moral principles? Surrender their will to that of God?

Admit the folly of their ways?

Oh, no, no way…….  Yet -

What if there is a God?  What if, at the moment of death, The Truth emerges?

What if God is not a God Of Mercy?

What if God does not ‘forgive and forget’?

What if?

God In Action: “Mr. Brown Goes To Washington”

For all who’ve been praying, pleading with God to grant a way that our great country not be forever lost: your prayers were answered Tuesday.

In Massachusetts, what is commonly referred to as a Miracle occured: Republican Scott Brown was elected to replace Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy.

Don’t be misled. This Miracle was not about Party. It wasn’t about who campaigned where. It certainly wasn’t about campaign funds, or numbers of activists, or sexism, as some have declared.

The Massachusetts Miracle was God In Action. God, acting through Scott Brown, who throughout his campaign, stood for decency.

Yes, decency.

He’s a man who stated, without flinching, without fear of ridicule: “That’s wrong.” He emphatically declared “That’s not right.” Best of all, he employed the word ‘shame’ where shame should be — for unprincipled campaign tactics.

Though clearly the underdog, Scott Brown refused to stoop to smears, or be seduced by media bait. He’s a candidate who chose the High Road, and stuck to it, regardless of whether he wound up losing.

A man whose political oratory, rather than being carefully crafted to manipulate voters — based on behavioral science — spoke honestly, ethically, and sincerely.

To any political pundit who’s perplexed why Scott Brown won, here is his secret: decency. Classic, moral decency — what America was founded upon, what Americans, in our shameful ‘culture of corruption’ [Malkin] hunger for.  What Americans have forever valued, yet what we now more than ever lack in our elected officials.

In what seemed like endless dark hours in 2009, for assurance, for comfort, over and over I listened to — and sang along with — Julia Ward Howe’s  The Battle Hymn Of The Republic.*  Penned in a rush of inspiration, in the pre-dawn darkness at the Civil War’s outset, Julia affirmed her faith in God, acting through Americans, as they fought the Civil War.

Americans, if you are looking to your elected officials for God In Action, study the campaign of United States Senator Scott Brown. Against him, hold up your candidate, and your elected official. If she or he pales, immediately, seek out another to represent you.

And please, join me as I pray that Senator Brown respects the sacred position he holds: to represent all that is good, and decent, and upright in America.

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* At Wikipedia, please click the player at the top right column for a wonderful, authentic recording [1908] of this timeless American classic.

As Bullies Celebrate, What Has America Come To?

When I was a child, in competitions there were rules. Even when we played, there were rules. In order to win, we had to play ‘fair and square’.  When someone won, that person won fairly, and we all knew it.

If, however, someone cheated, or lied, or bullied, and won — well. That was a far different winning indeed. Immediately, he or she who claimed victory was shamed. “You cheated!’ ‘You lied!” “You bullied!” would fill the air, as the indignant, outraged voices of children worked to deprive that unfair winner of his claims.

As bullies celebrate their so-called victory in Congress, the voices of my childhood rise again. ‘You cheated!’ “You lied!” “You bullied!” fill my heart, as do new indignations. “You intimidated!” “You threatened!” “You bribed!”

This sacred Christmas Day, to those who proclaim victory: shame on you.

Windows, Opening

Whenever God opens a precious window of time, and I can pause from incessant working, there, through that window lies a breathtakingly beautiful gift for my Spirit.

Today, as I momentarily step away from Christmas Eve preparations, my gift is in sharing this:

It is not what you have accomplished in heartfelt service to your fellow life-travelers that is your benchmark.

Your capacity for service — how you performed, given your potential — is what matters, when your life’s tally is taken.

This wondrous season, in your quiet moments, imagine what windows of grace surround you. To each sill, step forward. There, through glass that is open only onto you, into your Spirit draw the goodness, wonderment and bliss of the kindness you can effect.

Then, as often as you can, with your precious hands and heart enact a kindness. When you finish, step forward, toward your next kindness. Watch, as God opens breathtaking windows through which your Spirit can step into grace. In service, and in sharing, stand proudly — and blessedly — American.

How Can We Ask God To Bless America, When ….

As I witness America’s moral crumbling, I wonder how Americans who contribute to our decay feel entitled to ask God to bless us.

Within the moral universe in which I was raised, and which I work to support and uphold, this arrogance is unthinkable.

Our relationship with anyone and any thing, to be vibrant, healthy and wholesome, requires mutual respect. In our ultimate relationship — that with God — respect is a must.

And yet, disrespect of the day that Christians celebrate His birth seems not to cause distress.

Sabotage of the Christmas holiday by a political agenda that seeks to serve only its self is outrageous.  Demanding that elected officials, staffers and the staff at The Capitol work through 24 December means that for most people, spending Christmas Eve with their loved ones, and at Church, is an impossibility.

Christians, and people of all faiths, if you want God to continue to bless America, awaken. In your faith, stand proudly. Stand firm. Re-set the boundaries whereby your Sacred is not profaned.

In this reflective time of year, make it your solemn promise to do your best to halt America’s moral crumbling. Begin to rebuild an America grounded in critical, classic values. In your relationship with God, God expects no less.