At Long Last Sir …
by digby
have you no … oh forget it. Of course he doesn’t have any:
Beck’s been using the movie [It’s a Wonderful Life] to promote a visit he’s making to the economically hard-hit town of Wilmington, Ohio. He has said, inaccurately, that the town has taken no government money and that its residents’ economic plan is based on praying to God to provide. In that sense, he argues, Wilmington is trying to mimic Bedford Falls, the fictional town where It’s a Wonderful Life is set, as opposed to the movie’s fictional slum of Pottersville. Although the film is not devoid of religious and political themes, it has long been regarded as a classic treatment of small-town life and the power of the little guy to overcome the perfidy of greedy bigwigs. But truthfully, the movie’s broader universal themes are ones that transcend politics and religion. It’s a message that in the end, we are all our brothers’ keepers. (I hope the biblical reference doesn’t sound too socialist for Beck.) But Beck, in his zeal to appropriate the film for his own politically divisive purposes, claims that it demonstrates the evils of government intervention in business. Despite Beck’s apparent belief to the contrary, however, the villain in the movie wasn’t the government, but the corrupt banker Mr. Potter, played by Lionel Barrymore. In his radio broadcast last Wednesday, Beck read my post and dismissed the idea that there were progressive themes in the movie. (Either he or his show’s producer also called me “screwy” while doing a pretty darn good Jimmy Stewart impression.)
Who saved the Building & Loan in Bedford Falls? The people did. George did, with his own private funds. The government didn’t bail him out, and that’s the deal. You remember the bank was bailing everyone out … along with the government closing down the banks. The banks and the government were in collusion. … The local banks were the ones that didn’t have a problem. It’s the gigantic banks run by people like [Mr.] Potter that were just trying to get rich and didn’t care about people. The local banks are the George Baileys. That’s not progressive. Progressive is about going past the Constitution and having people at a government level babysit people because they’re all too stupid.
What Beck is saying, I believe—although it’s difficult to know for sure, because his logic is so hard to follow—is that the government was in bed with the big, evil banks, and that the good-guy local banks were successful because they were free from government regulation. This depiction matches his thesis about today’s economic problems: that too much government intervention in the form of bank bailouts is the inherent evil—as opposed to the absence of regulation that led to the banks’ implosion at the hands of, well, you know, greedy bigwigs. To Beck, the bank bailouts are evidence of socialism—the government controlling business—as opposed to the reality that the big banks got a free regulatory ride for so long, and that their political power is so vast, that the government had to bail them out to save the world economy from collapse, leaving the consumers ripped off and taxpayers footing the bill. Similarly, Beck asserts that Mr. Potter was evil, not because he was a greedy bigwig, but because he was in collusion with the government. Like his portrayal of our current economic woes, this is just more Beck demagoguery. What he conveniently dissmisses is that Pottersville, as depicted in It’s a Wonderful Life, was solely the making of the unregulated free market—the impact of Mr. Potter’s iron-fisted monopoly on the town. He also neglects to mention that Bedford Falls’ survival was due to competition from the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan, a communally owned organization.
For a man who called the first black president a racist and compares himself to Martin Luther King, this bizarroworld interpretation of an iconic American story shouldn’t be too shocking. But somehow, I’m shocked. Defiling It’s A Wonderful Life in service of his distorted and delusional worldview seems like sacrilege on a whole other level to me.
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