SORRY, DOROTHY, WE’RE STILL IN KANSAS  

 

There’s a scene in a 1978 movie that for me epitomizes one major reason why everything—from 9/11 and the war in Iraq to the financial crisis and the economic meltdown—seems to have gone wrong for America lately.

 

The movie is The Deer Hunter.  A highly acclaimed movie--five Oscars (including Best Picture), 53rd in America’s 100 all-time best--it features steel workers in a Pennsylvania mill town who drive off for a day’s hunting.  A couple hours out from Clairton, there’s Mount Rainier.

 

When I first saw the movie, I couldn’t believe my eyes.  But apparently I was the only one shocked.  The only mention of that scene I’ve ever found is this, in Wikipedia: “The Washington Cascades fill in more than adequately for the Pennsylvania Allegheny mountains.”  As if mountains had had to audition for the part!

 

Well, you may say, movies don’t have to be realistic.  Right, not if they’re The Wizard of Oz--pure or even impure fantasy.  But in everything else this film opts for rigorous realism, down to even getting the local beer right (it’s Rolling Rock).  What jars in the Cascades scene isn’t even the mismatch between realism and unrealism.  It’s the confident assumption that there’s no mismatch, that it’s okay to make your own reality whenever convenient.

 

Only in America!  If a French director made a movie where workers from Roubaix reached the Alps in a morning’s drive, audiences would laugh it off the screen.

 

But after all, you may say, the Cascades are more photogenic than anything in the Keystone State.  Isn’t it absurd to hang a polemic on so petty a peg?

 

I don’t think so.  At the root of our troubles lies precisely this attempt to manipulate reality.  In the process, the line between reality and fantasy has become so blurred that we can’t make sensible judgments any more.  There’s always been a Pollyanna strain in American thinking.  But that strain was long kept in check by another—a tough skepticism, a belief that, if anything sounds too good to be true, it is.  Throughout pioneering days, natural selection culled ruthlessly those who couldn’t keep a firm grasp on how things really were.

 

Then America grew rich, life became comfortable and  the wall between reality and fantasy began to crumble.  Maybe the movies did start it all. In what other country could a B-movie actor have become one of its most revered presidents?  Where else could another actor, who never heard a shot fired in anger, become an icon of patriotic heroism? 

 

Finally came world power.  Surely for a nation that could harness the atom and put men on the moon, reality had become malleable; surely we had  reached the Land of Oz where wishes were law.  Iraqis would hail us as liberators, not an army of occupation.  The value of homes would soar endlessly.  We could eat all we wanted, yet never bloat.  We could send overseas our real jobs (including those of the steel-workers of Clairton) and live by “servicing” one another and financial jugglery--globalization would take care of everything.  Our nation could spend however much it wanted to without any evil consequences.

 

It wasn’t always thus.  Within living memory, many more states than Missouri were show-me states.  Grizzled warriors of the Greatest Generation (as my son learned, crossing the Pacific with a group bound for an Iwo Jima flag-raising anniversary) despised John Wayne as a draft-dodger, while insisting they themselves were no heroes--the only heroes were those who gave their lives.  Folk worked hard, scrimped, saved, set goals for themselves and met them, yet seldom complained.  Life was tough.  That was normal.  You lived with it.

 

We have to relearn that take on life.  The most humongous bailouts, the cleverest financial strategies will not save us if we can’t learn again to distinguish the reality we would love to have from the reality we have to live with.