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I dimly recall the French, during their revolution, fighting for “liberty, equality, fraternity.” Meanwhile, the American founding fathers insisted on “freedom of association.” But of course every citizen is free to waste their freedom…
I thought of folks I could associate with as I viewed this week, at the cheap theatre, the motion picture (1990) Goodfellas. The first time I saw it, I solved a mystery: How does a criminal find a good Italian Catholic girl to marry? A regular American woman, Jewish, marries into the mob and discovers that mafia wives beat their kids with broom handles. I think a child, if taught by abuse to be racist against nonItalians, could easily grow up to marry a criminal, easier than getting out and mingling, and then role modelling, from everyday people of healthy honest non-racism. In the movie, Ray Lotta and Robert Dinero cannot by made full gang members because they don’t have pure Italian blood.
For my second viewing, (2023) I am struck by the wife observing that, down the years, she and her husband kept socializing with the same few crime couples. Easier to socialize in a container with “their own kind” than to mingle with the great wide world of wholesome “straight Johns” like me.
I am reminded of the film Eastern Promises (2007, Viggo Mortensen) where the setting is literally London, but the Russian mafia figuratively live in a hermetically sealed underworld. Memory is dim, but I think every time an innocent noncriminal second generation Russian, played by Naomi Watts, visits to learn about a diary, she goes to a Russian community hall or big family supper or formal event: gatherings all but compulsory for the Russian crime associates—as if the crime leaders know that controlling people’s time means controlling their associations.
Back west, here on the prairie, also known as the Bible Belt, home of the movie Footloose (Kevin Bacon, John Lithgow, 1984) where the town was so against immorality that they wouldn’t even allow dancing… a self-described “honest Muslim wife” back here could nevertheless easily tell herself, and her family, that Westerners are terribly decadent and immoral, if she deliberately avoids mingling. (I’ve linked previously to a young daughter in a Scottish Muslim family, a racist family which wanted her to marry a stranger in Asia rather than so much as look at a fellow Scotsman)
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-48949483
If “travelling” down the block broadens the mind, so does reading. In Footloose folks try to avoid books, claiming they are protecting others, by burning them. I found it touching when the good reverend realizes burning is wrong. (Google Footloose plus book burning)
The book Don Quixote was read by my favourite essayist, George Orwell. Of course he empathized with the practical sidekick on the mule, a man who loved comfort as much as the rest of us. But Orwell also wore the shoes of Don Quixote. It was Orwell’s habitual “dual empathy” that gave him the power to predict the words of the genius Churchill, and the evil genius Hitler. Leaders know. Sometimes the people will forsake ‘bread and circuses” for idealism, for “nothing to offer but blood, sweat and tears,” or “guns before butter.” Orwell could make critical predictions about the British ruling class, predictions that eluded the woke social justice warriors of his day: The warriors didn’t mingle, didn’t read, and surely didn’t empathize… because apparently they would rather be oblivious. But why get out of bed, be woke, and then put on a blind fold?
Last year I made my own prediction. Folks were wondering whether the next British James Bond would, in the spirit of visible diversity, be a black man or a woman. Thinking of Orwell, while walking with my friend Christina Chan, I slipped from my woke shoes to try on my “regular Yankee” shoes and said, “I’m as racist as the next man, but I’d rather James Bond was a black man than a pretty blond.” Since then, it’s official: Bond won’t be a woman.
I admit I’m still more narrow-minded than I could be, but at least I’m not cutting myself off from people. Yesterday the radio had all-day programming to encourage listeners to walk in someone else’s moccasins for the Truth and Reconciliation holiday. Due to my “having a life,” I didn’t listen for the whole day… At least, unlike a certain prime minister, I didn’t escape to Tofino to surf.
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Sean Crawford
Alberta,
October
2023
Musical footnote: I am delighted by how a history teacher put that old French slogan, soaked in blood and tears, to music, a la Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance. Here are the lyrics, with a link, if you scroll down that far, to the catchy music video:
https://genius.com/History-teachers-the-french-revolution-lyrics
Movie review of Eastern Promises, the last line is pure poetry, by a reviewer who previously won the Pulitzer Prize:
