LETTERS FROM HOME: BEATTY, `BULWORTH' GET IN AMERICA'S FACE AT THE MOVIES

May 28, 1998

Dear Leslie,

The question Warren Beatty poses in the movie "Bulworth" is: Is it possible to get away with telling the truth in American politics anymore?

We well know it's possible to get away with telling lies.

Robert Redford asked a similar question about the distortions of political images in "The Candidate" in 1972, even before Watergate. Back in 1939, Frank Capra sent Mr. Smith to Washington to see if an honest man could survive in the nest of vipers inhabiting the Capitol.

He did, but "Auld Lang Syne" eventually rang out in some way in most Capra movies.

Though "Bulworth" has flaws, it's in America's face -- just like its rap soundtrack -- about the culture of greed and corporate despotism that has usurped the vox populi. And it's eyeball to eyeball with those who stood up for what we believed in the '60s and '70s and now have become ghosts content with sport utility vehicles and 401Ks.

We bought in when insurance companies used their exorbitant profits to defeat national health care, and now most of us are saddled with HMOs that do exactly what the insurance companies warned against -- dictate our health care choices.

And we buy in through media monopolies that restrict the flow of information and promote their own agendas to the extent that nobody knows who to trust anymore.

But Capra understood something essential about Americans: We don't give up.

Denied health care we will seek out ways to heal ourselves. Denied a voice we will challenge the traditional media to race us on the Internet.

The instinct for freedom is too strong to be controlled for long. Behind the humor and outrageousness in "Bulworth" is a cry to look at ourselves and shake off the pessimism that shackles our idealism.

As a shamanic old man keeps reminding Bulworth you can't be a ghost, you've got to be a spirit.

My friend Julie was a city councilwoman, then mayor and finally a county supervisor. She used politics as a means to an end, that end being a kind of harmonic convergence of differing agendas.

It's difficult enough getting Republicans and Democrats to agree, likewise the Arabs and Israelis, and the Catholics and the Protestants in Northern Ireland. But Julie found common ground between loggers and environmentalists.

Now she works for an organization that supplies video cameras to the Third World proletariat. Their belief is that people can be oppressed only if the rest of us don't know about it. And too often the rest of us don't know because some people in tall buildings in New York don't think we should.

Julie is a spirit.

Looking at ourselves objectively is a difficult thing to do. Others' flaws and graces are so apparent but our own hide like moles if we even bother to look at all. "Bulworth" is American politics as sideshow and the American populace as drooling audience.

If the saying is right, that people get the government they deserve, we'd do well to begin expecting more of ourselves.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.