tom moody
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I'm on the road for the next couple of days and am currently staying at a place with the Independent Film Channel on satellite. Last night I watched The War Room, the Chris Hegedus/D.A. Pennebaker documentary about the 1992 Clinton campaign, which I hadn't seen since it came out. It invokes what seems like a golden age of civility and fair-mindedness in politics, especially in contrast to the ugly themes underlying this year's campaign (no naked, shit-smeared prisoners, no veeps saying "Fuck Yourself" on the Senate floor). Early on in the film James Carville makes a speech about how, whenever the Democrats put up someone good who will bring positive changes to a public office, the Republican smear machine goes into action (he's talking about Gennifer Flowers' affair with Clinton, and the media's preference for dirt over issues), and says in effect, "if we beat this back, we'll beat this once and for all." In retrospect--after the Clinton impeachment and the 2000 election debacle--this sounds even more wistful and wishful than it did then. The movie inspires because you witness real, positive change take place before your eyes, at a point where you'd resigned yourself to a lifetime of lugubrious, repressive Republican rule. The reminder that this actually happened, and the thought that it could happen again in the current campaign--that is, that Americans don't fear change as much as everyone assumes--brings a ray of hope to an otherwise dingy (and fear-filled) horizon.