They lose touch with, among other things, the planet and their fellowmen.
While such a culture may not produce insanity, it surely provides a nourishing atmosphere for certain sorts of lunatics, who, after the fashion of guerrillas, are undetectable when mingling with the general population. And, like guerrillas, those lunatics may have keenly simplified notions of the meanings of all the lives around them—and, on the basis of those notions, they may have fatal enterprises in mind.
Murder can easily become the most reasonable thing in the world.
*
When I was a student of anthropology, it was made clear to me that one culture was roughly as rewarding as another, and that all cultures seemed riddled with absurdities when viewed by outsiders seeking easy laughs or reasons for condemnation. This left me in poor condition to criticize any culture, including my own. And I criticize my own now only because it has become so dangerous. It has somehow become uninterested in our survival. We are somehow rendered terribly unsafe by the things we have agreed to believe.
The movie itself opens with a recording session of a patriotic ballad whose refrain argues, with “Battle Hymn of the Republic” drumming behind it, “We must have been doing something right to last two hundred years.”
And everything goes wrong at the end of the movie. There is maximum ugliness and insanity and meaninglessness. And no great human being or idea or miracle appears to heal the horrified witnesses, a crowd revealed to be childlike in bewilderment and hope. We are not beasts, says Altman. The American people are made by the camera to appear innocent and beautiful.
And leaderless.
And idealess.
And all that can be given to them for comfort by our culture is an enchantingly catchy and heartbreakingly inane ditty played over the public-address system. Everyone is invited to sing along.
Its refrain is this one: “It don’t worry me.”
*
This movie is going to be a terrific hit, and so is its music. We will all be hearing and singing “It Don’t Worry Me” for a little while. The song is one of our sweetest new inventions.
Meanwhile, I think, it is perhaps time for us to invent some deeper things. That an American made this movie is surely evidence that we are capable of depth. And it should be noted that two of the most profound performances in it were turned in by Henry Gibson and Lily Tomlin, who were used to provoke the most empty sort of laughter on television’s Laugh-In not long ago.
We have perhaps dishonored ourselves too long with silly songs and empty laughter.
And we have surely dishonored ourselves with the manner in which we distribute admiration and power and wealth. For we commonly give those things, as do the people in this movie, to clever persons whose contribution to human dignity or to the survival of the society is negative, negligible, or nil.
The common people have noticed this, and, in order to weather within a harsh and unforgiving economy, they are necessarily becoming more and more skillful imitators of materially successful persons whose contribution to human dignity or survival of the society is negative, negligible, or nil.