Russell Banks, Dreaming Up America. A novelist I have long admired and enjoyed reading makes a bold and stunning entry into the field of political analysis and progressive prophetic voice. The text is a series of commentary on classic American films, collected for a French audience, initially, and now issued as a collection of essays rather than a script. Two extended quotations may whet your appetite enough to acquire a copy for yourself, read, and pass on to others.

“Ultimately – and it gets tricky here – the path to the American Dream has become a tortured path. It has led to our building an empire. The small engine of one person’s dream of starting over has somehow morphed into the mighty engine of Manifest Destiny, or empire. From that point of view, it may be a psychotic dream, no less powerful for that – more powerful, rather, but unhealthy, an expression of dysfunction and disease. It is psychotic, in a way, to think that you can start your life over, that there’s no such thing as the past. It’s a kind of madness to think you can always improve your life, financially, economically, generation after generation, with each generation succeeding further, and not recognizing that this is simply an impossibility, one that ultimately, inevitably, like any Ponzi scheme, will lead to failure. And the economic demands and expectations that back this distorted dream are always going to be in conflict with the ideals of democracy. They demand and expect one person to trample on another. This conflicts with the democratic ideals in our sacred documents and in our hearts.” P. 45

Reflecting on Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which appeared as a film within a year of publication, Banks (whose books also quickly become movies, e.g. Afflication) opens a critique of capitalism which ultimately becomes a suggestion that a move to isolationism would, at least kill, fewer people.

“In the 1980s, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, democracy and capitalism got married. This is something I remember clearly. They were no longer just comptaoble, they were seen to be the same, a single blended unit, inseparable. It was called Free Market Democracy. Of course now it’s become the official guiding ideology of America, and it is spoken of as if it were always the case, as if written into the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. But the first time we heard it articulated and expressed as a virtue was by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and then it became the new American ideal. Now it’s how we justify conquest, how we justify economic exploitation, how we justify invasion and occupation.” P. 57

That reminds me of a program in Jerusalem I attended a few years ago. After hearing a critique of a review of a UN Commission on Human Rights, someone in the audience asked the American professor, lawyer, commissioner, to define Democracy. In addition to the separation of powers, the rule of law, the presence of a free press, an electoral process, she included as a qualification of Democracy that it created an environment hospitable to U.S. based capitalism. Banks has fleshed out her answer for me very powerfully.