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Ever since National Review announced that Forrest
Gump
topped the list of the 100 best conservative
movies of all time,
I've wanted to see it.
I even thought of catching it at the theater when it played here last fall, but I was raised around some fairly conservative people who didn't much approve of card-playing, baseball on Sundays or the painted jezebels of the silver screen.
Forrest is now on video, I've watched it carefully, and I should be ready practice some of the conservative values allegedly promoted in the movie.
Granted, it's too late to name either of my children after Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan and commander at the Fort Pillow Massacre. I sure hope that butchering a few hundred black soldiers who surrendered in good faith is not one of the values I'm supposed to acquire.
Forrest Gump came from a single-parent household, which is bad, if I understand modern conservative dogma properly. But maybe it was acceptable, since Mrs. Gump didn't take welfare or food stamps.
Anyway, you could certainly see the depraved sexual promiscuity of the underclass when his mother readily jumped into bed with the school principal in the process of getting Forrest mainstreamed.
So why wasn't this round-heeled hussy punished for her hedonistic folly? You'd think that a truly conservative movie could have cooked up more than one mystery virus to kill the wrong kind of women.
Forrest goes to college solely on account of his athletic prowess. Shouldn't conservatives be among the first to denounce this perversion of the traditional mission of a cultural institutions? If the National Endowment for the Humanities is a waste of resources, using tax money for entertainment, then how much greater a waste is college football.
And when Forrest lands in the Army, well, here's a
certified idiot with an IQ of 75 -- an idiot who, according
to his drill sergeant, has the potential to be a general
officer. It reminded me of a hospital scene in that
subversive liberal book, All Quiet on the Western
Front,
wherein the soldiers joke that if you're wounded
and get a wooden leg, you become a civilian, but if you get
a wooden head, you can be a general.
Is Forrest Gump's opportunity to be an officer a message that gives you much confidence in the military? Is that what conservatives want us to think about the military establishment they're always urging us to support -- that it could be run by idiots?
In actual fact, Forrest Gump isn't a particularly
liberal or conservative film. It (or more properly, the
novel it is based on) is a continuation of a literary genre
that started with Voltaire's Candide
and continued
through Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn
-- send an
innocent out into the great wide world, and use that naive
vantage to satirize the greed, shallowness and hypocrisy of
that world.
There was greed, shallowness and hypocrisy in the American establishment during Forrest's years, and there was also greed, shallowness and hypocrisy in the anti-war movement.
My own memory of the latter is that the movement was run
by hipper than thou
types who didn't want you around
unless you had gone to private schools and your father was
at least a senior vice-president at a Fortune 500 munitions
company. The movie caught that -- which is may explain why
some conservatives are so enamored with Forrest.
Why else would conservatives hasten to promote Forrest Gump into a right-wing icon, an avatar of capitalism, an emblem of patriotic values?
You've got me. I was astonished in 1984 when the
Republicans adopted Bruce Springsteen's Born in the
USA
as a patriotic anthem. It was about a blue-collar
guy who'd been betrayed by a country which made promises it
had no intention of keeping. The song was about as
conservative as the Internationale, and if Ronald Reagan
had listened to the words, he'd have banned it, rather than
employ it at campaign rallies.
The first time I heard a Rush Limbaugh radio program,
the introductory music was the song Ohio
by the
Pretenders -- a song about how Republican developers of
suburbs and shopping malls had demolished the old
Democratic downtown of an industrial city in the
Midwest.
Limbaugh is one of the last people you'd expect to participate in denouncing the destruction wrought by modern capitalism, but maybe he's never bothered to listen to the words.
And perhaps that's why American conservatives leap to adopt Forrest. It isn't conservative -- it's popular, and modern conservatives so lack consistent principles that they'll jump on any bandwagon that happens to be going by.
That's sad, and it's bad for the nation. We need some principled conservatives who are just as angry about the FBI infiltration of anti-war groups 25 years ago as they are about the potential FBI infiltration of citizen groups today.
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