Mr. Crawford and Mr. Niles Go To Washington
(Full disclosure before I start: I have never seen the movie that got me started here in its entirety. With that in mind, there may be some irony in my using this quote in relation to this post, or some inside baseball that I’m not aware of, so bear with me on that, but damn it, the sentiment really struck me.)
“Just get up off the ground, that’s all I ask. Get up there with that lady that’s up on top of this Capitol dome, that lady that stands for liberty. Take a look at this country through her eyes if you really want to see something. And you won’t just see scenery; you’ll see the whole parade of what Man’s carved out for himself, after centuries of fighting. Fighting for something better than just jungle law, fighting so’s he can stand on his own two feet, free and decent, like he was created, no matter what his race, color, or creed. That’s what you’d see. There’s no place out there for graft, or greed, or lies, or compromise with human liberties. And, uh, if that’s what the grownups have done with this world that was given to them, then we’d better get those boys’ camps started fast and see what the kids can do. And it’s not too late, because this country is bigger than the Taylors, or you, or me, or anything else. Great principles don’t get lost once they come to light. They’re right here; you just have to see them again! ”
-Jefferson Smith, played by Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington”; directed by Frank Capra, written by Sidney Buchman, Lewis R. Foster and/or Myles Connolly (I wanted to make sure I credited anyone that might’ve had a thing to do with a word of this, if possible.)
Great quote, posted in its abridged version (I added the rest from IMDB) by Steve Niles just now.
Alas, by the time it was written, the fix was already in here in the States for the most part, but that doesn’t mean for a goddamn second that it can’t be true at some point in the future.
Yes, we were all fed the fucking pack of lies that our leaders actually stood for these things practically from birth in schools that amounted to not much more than re-education camps, designed by people who just wanted us to shut the fuck up and get back to the sweatshops. We were told this in school, we were told this in church, we were told this in Frank Capra’s and other folks’ movies which were supervised by greedy studio bosses and phony moral crusader assholes from Washington who threatened to shut Hollywood down if it didn’t tow the line, we were told this in super-hero comic books written by kids (literally) who were robbed of their rights by scumbag publishers, and we were even told this in the lyrics of pop songs, which were also written by people who rarely if ever were properly compensated for their labor, long before the rotten bastards who ripped people off could blame it all on mp3s.
The thing is, the people in power fucked up large when they tried to make us think they stood for these things. They actually let us talk about these great ideas, perhaps just to try and make us believe that the ideas were actually theirs in a half-assed attempt to get us on their side, but they fucked up and let the cat out of the bag. And, as we all know, they haven’t quite figured out a way to kill great ideas yet. Oh, they’re REAL hard at work on it, but no, we can still believe in great ideas and real decency (the “help your neighbor” kind), not just the kind of “decency” that passed through the censorship board after enough people got paid off and sucked off (which is more of the “Someone named Bronfman or Koch or Murdoch or Halliburton didn’t get paid, so it must be wrong!” variety). Great ideas are stronger than individual people, stronger than corporations, stronger than huge religious organizations and stronger than entire governments.
If believing this makes me not “grown up”, “crazy”, another person with no responsibilities or any of the other dismissive things that people say to make them feel better about themselves when their mortgages are killing their souls (and sadly, this part seems to be true of more than a few otherwise decent people who I do respect and want to continue to call friends), then so be it.
But I do believe.
And in whatever way I see as the most effective one (it seems to me that spreading great ideas and condemning shitty ones are my strong points, though others may have different opinions on this subject which I’m plenty open to hearing), I will continue to fight for what I believe, and for great ideas, for as long as the world lets me do so, just like Steve and Nina and Stephen and Kristin and so many others who I could spend all night naming, and feel guilty not naming individually (but I really do need to eat dinner) do.
And with that, I am off to dinner. As Checkers Drive-In bag once told my friend Dain and I, “You gotta eat.”
May you all eat well with the clearest conscience possible, and fight the good fight in support of great ideas and actual human decency rather than invented human decency.