FRIDAY, DEC 25, 2020: NOTE TO FILE
It Is a Wonderful Life
Humans are not by nature Potters
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: POTTERVILLE OR BUST, FROM THE WIRES, FULL SPEED AHEAD, WE BUSTED
Abstract: A 1946 movie, It's a Wonderful Life, tells a cautionary tale that did not have its hoped for outcome. A town seemed destined to become another Pottersville, but it followed instead a different trajectory because some of those who lived in, or remembered living in (growing up in) a different society, had a different vision for the development of Bedford Falls. The movie was based on a short story called 'The Greatest Gift' written by Philip Van Doren Stern, whose grandparents has been poor folks in the hills of West Virginia, who had to self-publish it in 1943, which he had begun in 1939. The vision ran counter to the flow of the monetary culture that was well underway by 1943. But there were still many who were not products of the Pottersvilles of the time and the rapidly growing monetary culture giving rise to them. One was a writer able to give expression to his inner vision. And another was a movie maker who could still make a movie with its anti-monetary culture perspective as there were still enough people who were not so far into their humans of NIMH trajectory that they could not recognize the vision of a different (if less monetized and more impoverished) life as alternative to the new fangled ways of modernity.
COOS BAY (A-P) — I just watched, or rather rewatched, a movie I had seen as a child and have viewed again every decade or so since. To each it speaks in a varied language, one of different concepts, ones now alien to most products of the monetary culture, to we who have eyes that see not. It could be dismissed as fantasy and enjoyed as entertainment, but I would put it in the science fiction category as it merely used the fantastic, the services of an Angel Second Class, as a device to help us think better about our normative ways that may be abnormal. While it was entertaining, that was far from the intent as usual. It was perhaps the last commercially successful movie that could be made while there were still enough people left who 'never knew the world had such heathens in it' as my grandmother, raised in the hills of West Virginny, whose vocabulary contained odd words, had frequent occasions to say. As a pubescent scholar, I determined the words to be of Elizabethan English origin, so long had her people lived in the hills apart from technoindustrial society, perhaps partially able to recover from the industrial society they came from.
Henry F. Potter was one of the heathens who controlled most of the town's businesses, and George Bailey's father was one who successfully, unlike those in most elsewheres, resisted the Potterization of society. Son George, like all of his generation, had been told the secret to living the good life of short-term self interest. A later graduate was still being told the same answer, that the greatest gift, the shortest path to wealth and power—was plastics! That the world has such heathens in it is because the SYSTEM selects for them (for a time).
That the Anthropocene would come to be readily identified in geologic strata by geologists, those from Omegacon who will pass by in about 64 million years, will be the microplastics in strata, largely unnoted during the Anthropocene, or viewed with some commingling of concern as evidence of our prosperity as viewed by almost all who had made or consumed it (for a time).
There are still some humans in the 21st century who can view the movie as a cautionary tale. They may recognize that George Baily truly is the richest man in town. He had served his community and posterity, and not God or Mammon or Empire. He had lived a wonderful life even if he nearly failed to realize he had. He was not crushed by Potter, the Establishment, the SYSTEM. The people he had enabled to live outside of Pottersville and retain a focus on posterity, to actually think more than a decade ahead beyond short-term self interest, were copykittens everyone.
If George said the $8k had gone missing, then maybe somehow it had. If he was going to be crushed by the SYSTEM for lack of money, he could be forgiven on the assumption that George was not swindling them. If he had again 'lost' a large sum of money, maybe he neither would nor should be forgiven, and George would have understood and not have expected endless trust either. Apparent cheaters can appear so by chance, fate, kings, or desperate men like Potter, so forgiving once, especially when all evidence is against someone being a cheater, then it is appropriate, in a functional society, to forgive (initially in absence of evidence of culpability).
In the functioning community of Baily Park, one of decent people living decent lives of enough in decent homes, then helping George when his chips were down would be the normal response it was not in 1946. If George Bailey lived today, if he or his father had not lived in most towns during their modernization as they didn't, then New Bedford would have become Pottersville and have 'gone to pot', meaning 'to decline or deteriorate', which observers of the SYSTEM have been noting for some time, since the expression dates back to the 16th century, well before the dissolution, the loss of functional behaviors since the 1960s when the phrase took on a different connotation.
It should be noted that the George Baileys of the world did not save it. They slowed the pace of dissolution, of our collective going to pot, of our developing multi-generational behavioral sink. For most of our ancestors it was a wonderful, if shorter, like. For we humans of NIMH who normalize our pathologies, a wonderful life is a conjecture. To recover our sense of wonder will require understanding our loss of it, understanding the dynamic that selects for the loss of the wonderful life that may be our birthright, something the UN, all governments and servants of BAU, all who are part of the dynamic and its story of human prosperity variously conceived, fail to mention. Perhaps ironically, some have mentioned it since first the recording of words did allow. Perhaps the secret awaits for the insight....
We all have a stage upon which to strut, for good or ill, for better or worse. Could there be a greater gift? To understand our pathological lives is to be, in proportion, delivered from our error, ignorance, and illusion. If you are not delivered, if in need of deliverance, assume you do not understand something vital, some secret that awaits for the insight of eyes unclouded by longing to maximize the short-term self-aggrandizement the current SYSTEM selects for.
Pathology is by definition not normal and this implies the possibility of being delivered from it. To understand is to listen to the nature of the what-is that lies all undiscovered in front of our pugged-nose faces. Listen to Nature who has all the answers. What is your question? Go forth under the open sky, while from all around comes a still voice, and ask it, then the next.
The movie version was longer with some added story elements. Was the odd granter of wishes a passing alien from Omegaton? For a simpler story without the added religious and political elements, there is:
