This is the time of year, as the leaves turn yellow and red, when I always promise to myself one thing: I am not going to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” this Christmas.
It is, as Frank Capra’s critics used to say, pure “Capra-corn.” The film is Capra’s sentimental ode to America after World War II. Like Capra’s other classic starring Jimmy Stewart, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” it’s about idealism and quiet heroism among ordinary Americans beset by swooping evil forces.
Reading Sam Wasson’s fascinating new biography, “Frank Capra: A Life,” I came across Capra’s own take on why audiences responded to his movies: “They’ll cheer for their fellow human being, cheer for the good guy, for the guy who’s got compassion, forgiveness in his heart. Cheer for that good Samaritan.”
Cornball, right?
But what a perfect moment to be corny about America. We saved ourselves and our democracy, in a stunning rejection of greed and corruption and meanness.
So now I have to watch the movie again because its depiction of American heaven and hell — the light and dark in the country and inside all of us — is spot on.
When our hero, George Bailey, is sabotaged by the town villain, the avaricious banker Mr. Potter, he contemplates throwing himself off a bridge. But his quirky guardian angel shows him that, without him, the cozy, warm Bedford Falls would fall prey to Mr. Potter and deteriorate into the gaudy, corrupt, vice-ridden, heartless slum of Pottersville.
Under Donald Trump’s gaudy, corrupt, vice-ridden, heartless rule, we have been living in Trumpsville. The demonic Trump conjured an American hell. (One post on X compared Mar-a-Lago to the “thin place” in Irish lore: “the closest this Earth realm gets to interpenetrating with Hell.”)
We have struggled under an oppressive darkness, an upside-down universe where American values were turned inside out.
Language has grown Orwellian: Trump calls the insurrectionists who sacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 “patriots.” He spreads lies with his “truths” on Truth Social. His “SAVE America Act” aims to restrict voting.
Our country — in the grip of a vengeful, Constitution-shredding president and his inner circle of sadistic stooges and rapacious tech allies — was becoming unrecognizable to us and to our former friends around the world.
Immigrants beloved in their communities, and those who defended them, were hunted and gunned down in the streets. Voting rights were eroded at the expense of Black Americans who had fought so hard for them. The Supreme Court, granting Trump near-total immunity and allowing his Ozymandias monuments to himself, has seemed rotten. Tech lords, taking A.I. as their new religion, lavished Crypto King Trump with lucre and received free rein, leading us toward a world especially pernicious to young people and vulnerable to rogue A.I. agents.
Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth saw themselves as the guardians of the white manosphere.
Hegseth, as he purged female and Black senior officers and paeans to minority achievements, even took down a web page devoted to Jackie Robinson’s service during World War II. Jackie Robinson! After backlash, it was reinstated.
And then America went to the polls. The Democratic trouncing of the Republicans and the propulsion of the revulsion against the Trump administration are remarkable — beyond anyone’s imagination.
As a blue Ted Cruz keened: “Texas is blue. That is a hard sentence to utter.”
Our newly elected officials include so many gender, race and religious firsts that there is not enough room to list them all here. Texas, Iowa and Ohio are now swing states with Democratic governors.
It was the Norma Desmond crash-out of all crash-outs for Trump. His narcissistic explosion led him to put ego above party, revenge above strategy, believing he could force voters to accept his designated puppets, no matter how clueless (Darline Graham) or mired in allegations of corruption (Ken Paxton). In a great imitation of a Capra villain, Elon Musk squandered nearly $500 million trying to prop up Paxton and other Republican candidates.
After making conciliatory noises about working with the new Democratic majority, Trump gave the Democrats — and America — a raspberry by naming the odious Stephen Miller as his chief of staff, replacing the not so Iron Maiden, Susie Wiles.
Watching his fanatically loyal MAGA base unravel, and Megyn Kelly denounce him for his grifting and broken promises — Republicans will need a “new, charismatic, honest, ethical leader,” she said — the humiliated president lashed out by elevating Miller, the hard-line, hate-mongering architect of the pitiless ICE strategy, to shape his last two years. It was a declaration of war.
Hakeem Jeffries welcomed the challenge, writing that “Stephen Miller is a dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist who has American blood on his hands.”
Certainly, Trump lost a lot of rural America with his mercurial, vindictive tariff policy. And he lost more voters appalled that another Republican president got drawn into an unnecessary, intractable and costly Middle East war.
Feeling squeezed on prices for food and gas, many Republicans began to gag at the constant blather about the expensive monuments to Trump’s ego — the arch and ballroom — and his family’s cavalier corruption.
Even people who had once enjoyed The Donald’s gilded, highflying billionaire ways, thinking maybe the gold dust would trickle down, turned bilious at the first family’s shameless penchant for self-enrichment and peddling of tacky products from Bibles to cologne.
Many were also turned off by Trump’s awful ally Bibi Netanyahu, the tormentor of Gaza who helped draw Trump into Iran.
Trump called female reporters “piggy,” “ugly” and “stupid.” Both Trump and Vance hurled bigoted insults at Abdul El-Sayed about his Muslim faith; Trump called him a “jihadist” and “Mohammed,” and Vance called him “very, very evil.” Hegseth offered a list of soldiers he doesn’t want, saying, “no fatties, no trannies.”
But the cruelty of the president and vice president reached a new nadir when they defended Vivek Ramaswamy for running an ad in the Ohio governor’s race, featuring the long-estranged mother of his opponent, Amy Acton, calling Amy a liar. That same mother had stayed with Amy’s stepfather after he was charged with raping her as a 12-year-old, causing her to be removed from her mother’s care.
After a decade of bloviations and delusions offered by the grifter, there was a refreshing strain of morality on the Democratic side, with the onetime seminarian James Talarico in Texas and the Christian pastor Adam Hamilton in Kansas openly talking about their faith. (The Democratic 2028 prospect Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, began all the chapters of his new memoir with biblical quotations.)
At long last, will some decency be restored to politics?
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