Plain Talk and Common Sense (uncommon senses) was made in the midst
of the Reagan years, surrounded with the bluster of paranoiac rhetoric
about a monolithic Evil Empire, the Soviet Union, a rhetoric used to
prop up the political decision to go into a big-time subsidizing of
exactly those folks who complained about the quasi-socialist welfare-state
USA, huge and wealthy corporations busy, among other things, making
armaments. The underlying theory was we’d bankrupt the Russians
with the costs of a heightened arms race. To accomplish this though
required the construct of a foe deserving of such lavish outlays by
the US government, and in the wake of the loss of the Viet Nam war (though
this was officially not a loss, but a withdrawal, after a "decent
interval," even if the clumsy images of helicopters crammed with
people hovering over the US embassy in Saigon attested otherwise) it
wasn’t hard to install such thinking, especially with Margaret
Thatcher goading on from England. That the great Evil Empire was collapsing
all by itself escaped the very costly efforts of the CIA (I took a trip
there in 1985 and it was plain to any ordinary eye that here was a place
dysfunctioning in the most common of ways, and a place in which the
populace was clearly contemptuous of the ever more inept governing bodies
which supposedly ran it, exemplified by the embalmed-before-death leaders
it coughed up in its dying days). But this was of course brushed aside
by those eager to make a transfer of social wealth program, shifting
government coins from the pockets of the thriftless poor into the coffers
of large-scale corporations busy making high-tech war toys. The process
remains in full-tilt today, as the CIA contrives new dangerous threats
emanating from the likes of N. Korea, Iraq, Iran, Columbia etc., and
the corporate public handout goes on for the making of more hi-tech
killing toys.
It was in this context I spent the better part
of a year wandering and pondering on the State of the Union, mid-1980’s,
or perhaps more on its state of collective mind. I had a modest budget
from Channel Four, some $50,000, and more or less a creative blank check:
do what I wanted, no questions asked, as long as it was an essay about
America. My travels took me from New England to San Diego, Texas to
Seattle, zig-zags all between. They took time, heading through far-off-the-beaten-tracks
dirt roads in New Mexico or Idaho, odd little places in Alabama and
the Mississippi delta, the Nebraska sand hills, and the Carolina coast,
as well as major cities from East to West. Puttering along in a banged-up
VW van, camping out, I tried to pull this vast place together, and once
set down to edit I had to conclude to myself that it was all really
too vast, too confusing, too contradictory, and too complex, to make
some tidy summary, for pointing a concise ideologically driven finger
at some straw bogeyman.
So Plain Talk became a discourse on
just this, on the crazy-quilt of an America which likes to tell itself
of its coherency, but is in truth highly regionalized, diverse and internally
contradictory; an America which schizophrenically really probably believes
in its Manifest Destiny, and with often good intentions blinks not at
the distortions of riding roughshod over odd foreigners here and there,
all surely for their own benefit, even if it takes killing them to drive
the point home. It is a country where snake oils of all sorts have traditionally
been hot-sellers, and in the mid-80’s the Reaganite brand was
doing well. We spent ourselves into a monster deficit, but along the
way the foundations for the high-tech miracle that would kick in for
Clinton was put in place, and all with Big Government money put on the
table by a jelly-bean eating President who declaimed at any opportunity
the evils of Big Government. The country went smilingly along, pleased
to be hoodwinked, as the buyers of snake oils always are. No better
delusion than self-delusion.
Plain Talk and Common Sense, as with
its companion piece Speaking Directly, draws deeply on America’s
sources, from its opening visual reference to Whitman's Leaves of
Grass, and arrives at much the same conclusion as its predecessor,
albeit by rather different routes. However chaotic and confusing the
large social and political world - as shown in a grouping of very different
sequences, clearly labeled and separated in the work shown - for the
individual it finally distills down not into the machinations of some
"them," but rather to the response of oneself. As it happened,
most of America - or so the official story would have it - went charging
off to Reagan's golden City on a Hill, invested in Wall Street, kick-started
into high gear the new information economy, abandoned the negative no-can-do
of the welfare state, and advanced into the new millennia carrying the
banner of American enterprise across the globe. As mentioned in this
film, quoting from the past, "The business of America is business,"
and American business, as the magazine so succinctly puts it, is a capitalist
tool. The New World Order (a phrase used and discarded with haste, given
its Third Reich echoes unpleasing to the ad-man’s ear) was put
firmly in its place thanks to huge government interventions, while the
magicians pulled the curtains over the Wizard’s Oz act.
Plain Talk and Common Sense (uncommon senses)
attempted to unmask this charade, surely a thankless task, drawing on
the lore and philosophy of America’s past. It asks questions,
poses riddles, and prods the viewer to ponder along with the filmmaker
on the meaning of it all. And, in typical American fashion, at end it
plops the matter directly in the individual’s lap, following in
the manner of Walt Thoreau: in the recurring parlance of the times,
"You are what you eat," or what you do. America is, in sum,
what Americans do, and let be done in their name.
