Rosie the Riveter, by Norman Rockwell
Snowed in behind 14.5 inches this holiday, I finally got a chance to watch It's a Wonderful Life (yeah, yeah, I know it's a traditional holiday classic). It is a masterpiece, with superb acting and a far deeper, darker story than its reputation suggests.
There's one scene in particular that's stuck with me. It's well known, rightly, and remains an eloquent defense of the working class:
Also a short, effective rebuttal to any Objectivist you may encounter
"this rabble you're talking about... they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community"
As I was thinking on this, word came that Geraldine Doyle, the cellist whose short factory stint inspired the iconic image Rosie the Riveter, had died at the age of 86.
The two are linked because Capra's masterwork and Rosie (Norman Rockwell too, while we're at it) represent a powerful strain of thought that's since faded.
Another Capra sequence strikes similar notes, as a montage tells of the various townspeople's deeds during World War II, with cab drivers parachuting into France. It's a revealing moment: when it comes down to it, it's "the rabble" that make greatness possible.
Like Rockwell — and unlike many now — Capra saw no contradiction between compassion and fighting spirit. By contrast, today mouthpieces on all sides seem intent to shove the places between the metropoli into stereotypes of unthinking xenophobia as quickly as possible (compare Bailey's welcoming of immigrants). That stereotype is then extolled or condemned accordingly.
Returning from visiting my family, I came back to my apartment, smack dab in the middle of the city. I love cities. I love the layers of history. I love being able to walk out of my door into a thousand things all going on at once. Cities fascinate me because, in a small way, I still feel like I see them with an alien's eyes. At the same time, I enjoy visiting my hometown because there's power and value in where I came from too.
The sudden change gave me a shock this time, and it brought back an old memory.
I was 17 and had just gotten my first car, a beaten-up '89 Toyota Tercel that would later die getting me through a blizzard. I would start driving around midnight and pull over in whichever set of fields caught my eye. The coastal plains in North Carolina are as flat as it gets, with everything stretching off to the horizon. In the distance, I could see the orange pulse of city lights, just under the stars.
It was an awesome sight, in the old, biblically unsettling sense of the word. The fields where I sat had a peaceful beauty, but it was there, far away, that "the world" was being shaped. Everything from the clothes on my back to the music on my radio to the politics in the paper; all of it designed and determined somewhere else.
Reams have been devoted to the hardship of the middle and working class, but in addition to departing jobs and economic unrest, there's other factors at work too. It is easy to forget that for many places "in between," dire scarcity is barely removed into the past, if removed at all. There is a deep-seated awareness that what is hard-won can be quickly lost. At its best, that inspires the spirit that gives Wonderful Life its triumphant ending. At its worst, there's a lot of fear there.
Past that there is what I saw under the stars: a sense that the future is being made elsewhere, in other hands, with you to have no part in it. It's not like this is entirely new — remember that George Bailey spends much of the movie trying to escape Bedford Falls — but it has acquired a far nastier edge in the ensuing decades.
For the harpies of the status quo, those in "flyover country" are a convenient crutch to hold up. For far too much of the would-be intelligentsia, they're something to be reviled.
As for the futurists, well, most of the time it doesn't even figure into the calculations. More important the newest toy that the already-well-off, the already-educated can use to make their life a little more convenient, before writing a book about how fucking fantastic it is to be them.
The FDR liberalism embodied by Capra and Rockwell's work missed many things in its credo, including divisions that would nearly rend the country apart in the times following. It was a dream, after all, and dreams miss things. But one reason it is remembered as America's finest hour was because it seemed the embodiment of a long promise: the world to come cannot be made without your strength. Help us.
What now? The desire for a simple home Capra extolled ended up warped into housing bubble sprawl. The industry's gone, the main streets half-abandoned and the real issues ignored, even on the rare occasions a politician comes stumping through for more than an afternoon.
In-between still sends its children off to war, but this time deeply unsure of what the hell it's for. Generations of fighting hardship have created a remarkable fortitude, but in a soil fed by all of the above shit, some nasty things are going to grow.
Why does this matter? Because this is a dynamic that leaves massive populations ignored, even though they still do the working and paying and living and dying. That cannot last.
Futurists can plan all they want, but in the end tomorrow will be determined by Capra's rabble. Let that be warning or promise.
P.S. - I focus on the area between metropoli here, but much the same dynamic applies to the vast, isolated swaths of urban poverty present in every city, and to many parts of the world besides America.
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