A disturbing thing happened to Iconoclast contributing editor William Grim while viewing Roman Polanski’s new film, The Pianist, in Munich, Germany. The movie, based on the true story of how Jewish piano virtuoso Wladyslaw Szpilman survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, is being hailed by critics as perhaps the best Holocaust film ever made, but to 200 Germans in the theater, it clearly represented something else.As the film rolled, it became increasingly clear to Grim, an Ohio native, that he was the only American in the audience. About halfway through the movie, there’s a scene in which Nazi soldiers force elderly Jews, weakened by malnutrition and hobbling on crutches, to dance until they fall to the ground in agony. The theater erupted in laughter. This kind of thing continued throughout the movie until the end, when complete silence descended upon the theater as a group of SS men prepared to meet a harsh fate in the Russian gulag.
“Remember,” Grim wrote, “this wasn’t an audience composed of skinheads from the neo-Nazi enclaves. This was a group of Germany’s best and brightest: educated, middle-class, sophisticated denizens of a major cosmopolitan city.”
To me, the most remarkable thing about Grim’s account was the comfort level with which the Germans in the audience were able to laugh out loud without fear of embarrassment or retribution.
This wouldn’t happen in America. I’m certain of it. If you picked 200 educated middle-class Americans at random, stuck them in a theater, and showed them a heart-wrenching movie about Nazi persecution of the Jews, the story of a lynching, or any of the more recent movies made about early American decimation of the Indians, no one would laugh. That’s not to say that a handful of sickos out of that group — the ones who usually make headlines — wouldn’t find it all extremely amusing. But I’d wager that they wouldn’t dare laugh out loud in the theater for fear of possible retribution from those around them.
On the whole, American culture is so obsessed with the unconscionable actions of our forebears and the real and perceived inequities of the present, we never stop to look beyond the racial, ethnic or sexual outrage of the moment to assess how far we’ve really come. Instead, we focus exclusively, neurotically, on how far we still have to go, as if the distance we’ve traveled means nothing. In the process, we often miss the significance of critical points in our own history.
Take the recent Trent Lott debacle, for instance. For a month after the racially charged comment that cost Lott the top job in the Senate, the voices in this country obsessively debated about who the racists among us really were, the relative level of their racism, and whether there was any hope that anything could be done about them, or us. But the real story of Lott’s fall, the one of historical significance, was the swiftness and the near absolute nature of the public condemnation of Lott’s words by his colleagues in both parties. Whether President George W. Bush and his Republican colleagues really wanted to kick the guy to the curb over the situation is historically irrelevant to the fact that they had to do it because public opinion demanded it.
Viewed through the lens of the history of the last 50 years, and juxtaposed against the entire history of man, the culture and the values of the people of this country have come a long, long way in a short period of time and the good people among us are to be commended for that. Incidents like Lott’s comments or well-known atrocities like the brutal slaying of Matthew Shepard may get the most media attention, but they shouldn’t define us. How we react to them as a country should.
It’s so easy to forget the good things about ourselves and so important to remember them. Among the countries of the world — England, Russia, Germany, Turkey and France, to name a few — we are unique in our willingness to face our wretched bloody past head on and to keep the memory of it alive in our popular culture. The people of the rest of the world can say what they want, but we are a people who watched thousands of our own murdered before our eyes on Sept. 11, yet still we obsess about the profiling of Arabs at airports and the civil rights of Afghan prisoners, many of whom would undoubtedly slit our throats if given the chance. That the leaders of this country even care to take the time to debate these issues is a far cry from the days when the clans, tribes and parishes of our ancestors slaughtered each other for land and spoils, executed each other over a particular choice of religion, or rebelled against a tyrannical king and then had the audacity to deny women the vote.
We’re hardly a perfect people, and we don’t live in a perfect country because there is no such thing and never will be. We’ve come a long way, though, and we should be proud.
This article appears in Jan 15-21, 2003.
