Homeland Elegies(77)
“Mike. I don’t understand—”
“What they built, they built for themselves. The system they’ve got, we ain’t gonna change that.”
“But you’re not even trying.”
“That’s not true. I am.”
“How? Not paying taxes? Really?”
“The more you have, the more you can do. That’s the only way to change anything here. Money.” He paused. “You ever hear that thing about the Taino Indians praying to the pile of gold?”
“No.”
“It’s a crazy story, bro. But it kind of says it all. You know who the Taino were, right? They were the natives on a lot of the Caribbean islands before the Spanish showed up. When they got here—the Spanish, that is—it turned out all they were looking for was gold, and the Taino were happy to lead them to it. It didn’t mean much to them. Soon enough, the Spanish put them to work digging up that gold, though. Turned them into slaves. Word got out. So now, when the Spanish showed up on some new Taino island, the natives would just flee. They’d take their boats and head to a different island. They got pushed around the Caribbean, island after island—until they decided to make a last stand. But not by fighting. Instead, they gathered all the gold they could find and put it in a big pile. Then they prayed to that pile to let the white man leave them alone. To let them have this final island. They had their own gods, but they prayed to the gold. As they saw it, that was the white man’s god.”
“Your point?”
“Gold ain’t got no mercy. Those Indians were right. For white people, it’s all about the cash. Always has been. And we’re living in a world they made. See, maybe if we play our own game by their rules, maybe then we got a shot. But that means we gotta be keeping our money. We can’t give it to them. And we have to use it, because it all boils down to the spend. How much you are willing to spend to make what you want happen out there in the world…”
That night at my folding table, I transcribed the conversation as I recalled it and found myself only more dumbfounded in reading it back. Mike had spent the better part of two hours vilifying the white corporate property grab, and here he was advocating the conditions for an eventual corollary black one. Hadn’t he been making a case for a larger vision of the nation than one riven by race? Hadn’t that been the whole point of what he was saying about Trump? That the nation as a whole had been suffering? That it behooved us finally to see it that way? I started to doubt there was any cogent way to square his so-called concern for dwindling community with his support for Republicans who—per his own analysis!—had done so much damage to the foundations of American community in the first place. Wasn’t he just a hypocrite, like the rest of them? And what in God’s name did the Taino have to do with any of this!?
I wrote and wrote, but nothing I wrote moderated my frustration. I sensed there was something here beyond my ken, but I wasn’t convinced understanding it would make any difference. At some point, I shut my notebook and went to bed, but my aggravation lingered and led me back to my laptop, where I bounced about for an hour between websites about antitrust law and posts on Facebook about Trump’s latest antics. I tried to sleep again, but still couldn’t. Around 3:00 a.m., I got out of bed again, turned on the TV. On some barely known cable network pages way down on the on-screen guide, I noticed an airing of It’s a Wonderful Life under way.
The movie’s charcoal shades were both brisker and more somber than I recalled, like a chiaroscuro in some American Caravaggio. It was at that point in the story where Jimmy Stewart’s suicidal George Bailey is being led by his guardian angel through what would have become of his beloved town of Bedford Falls if he’d never been born. Now the town is called Pottersville, renamed for the avaricious banker Henry Potter, who has basically taken it over. Without Bailey’s building and loan association, there’s no longer a bank in town lending money at a fair rate to the local working class. Potter has been able to buy all the real estate and establish a monopoly that has its residents paying him rents they can’t afford. What was once a quaint, lovely, idyllic town is now a dreary, debt-ridden slum. Capra’s vision of municipal nightmare in Pottersville had been terrifying to me as a child, its sleazy, neon-lit enticements—the gambling, the drinking, the prostitution—without a scintilla of human allure, a foreboding police state where every relationship we’ve come to love in the film has succumbed to death, despair, or the bleak grip of Potter’s greed. I couldn’t then imagine a place like Pottersville being real, growing up as I did in an affluent westerly suburb of Milwaukee not unlike Bedford Falls. But now, as I watched the film for the first time in twenty years, my thoughts still addled by Mike’s vision of our country, Capra’s evocation of America’s darker side seemed nothing if not prescient.
I’d never realized just how much the movie was about money. George Bailey is a banker. The plot is set in motion by the loss of a client’s deposit. The antagonist is another banker, a predatory lender, who refuses to loan George the money to cover the lost deposit. An upcoming audit is what drives George to attempt suicide: his life insurance policy can cover the shortfall, keep the building and loan solvent, and ensure that his customers won’t be thrown out of their homes. In his guardian angel’s tour through a world without him, Bailey comes to see that the good of his having lived on earth was that he was able to keep his fellow citizens in homes of their own, sheltered from Potter’s exploitive rentals. Even the film’s extraordinarily moving finale—through which I cried that night, as ever—showed the townspeople of Bedford Falls gathered around their beloved loan officer, George Bailey, all with cash donations in hand to cover the missing deposit, a joyous celebration of fiscal surplus, as George realizes that he has even more money now than what’s needed to save his bank from collapse.