posted on Jul, 11 2006 @ 11:04 AM
There's an underlayer to Carseller's complaint that goes beyond the movie and encompasses a change in American culture. I was born in the 1950s.
Back then, most Americans (my father certainly being one of them) had an innocent belief that the U.S. was the greatest country in the world, that we
were paragons of truth, justice, and all that stuff, and that every other country was both inferior and envious.
This innocence died in the Kennedy and King assassinations, the struggle over civil rights, the fiasco of the Vietnam War, and the corruption of the
Nixon administration. By 1980, equating "the American way" with "truth and justice" could no longer be done with a straight face. Some people,
Carseller evidently among them, miss that old innocence and mourn its loss, or even deny the reality of history and insist that its loss was a
mistake.
For me personally, what changed was that I no longer believe America is a paragon of truth, justice, and freedom, but I still believe she
should be. And that makes me angrier at what I see her actually doing than I would be if I weren't still a believer in the dream.