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ideological culture

Heroism & Love Abounding

“I cannot express how much I love this movie,” Monica Hesse writes in her Christmas eve Washington Post column about It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, dir.; 1946).* Yet she mocks protagonist George Bailey as “the tortured Boy Scout-​type” and contends that “Mary Bailey is the true hero.” Meaning that her husband George — beloved by many in fictional Bedford Falls — is not the “true hero.”

Puh-​lease. 

Even Mr. Potter, the movie’s villain, acknowledges that Bailey is “no ordinary yokel.” George is bright, ambitious, hardworking and, most importantly, a good man — someone who cares about people.

He makes sacrifices: taking over his deceased father’s business instead of going to college with money he has saved; loaning that money to his brother to go in his stead; and once turning down ten times the salary so that folks in the town have “someplace to go without crawling to Potter.”

Hesse ignores all this to mark George as a deadbeat regularly bailed out by his wife, Mary. When in one scene “a market crash threatens to sink the Bailey Building & Loan,” Hesse smugly asks, “whose idea is it to donate George and Mary’s honeymoon funds to keep things afloat?”

Indeed. But George earned that money and, having just shared it with his new bride, would never take it back. Still, many spouses would lack Mary’s quick thinking. 

Hesse belittles George’s existential panic at impending bankruptcy and scandal as “his foul work-​mood,” and highlights Mary as “the one who’s been home all day with a sick toddler.” 

As if a competition. 

Most perplexing for Hesse? “[T]he movie suggests that the saddest thing of all is that Mary Bailey became a librarian.” Well, not exactly. In the world the angel shows, in which George had never been born, it is that Mary “never married,” not the librarian gig, that rocks George.

But had Mary wed a wonderful fellow enjoying a relentlessly happy family, that would hardly demonstrate to George Bailey what the angel Clarence insists, that George’s life mattered.

“The entire movie celebrates the personal sacrifices of a nice man,” claims Hesse, “while ignoring the identical sacrifices of a nice woman.”

It’s a Wonderful Life is told from George’s perspective but doesn’t ignore Mary’s sacrifices at all. If it did, how on earth could Hesse recount them?

Moreover, George and Mary are more than merely “nice.” They have the courage and commitment to do for each other and the world around them … even under enormous stress. 

Both are heroes. Don’t let Monica Hesse or anyone tear them asunder. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* If you are part of the less than 1 percent who have somehow dodged viewing the ubiquitous film, George’s uncle misplaces (into Potter’s evil hands) $8,000 of the company’s money, which would force the Bailey Building & Loan into bankruptcy likely followed by George’s criminal prosecution. Desperate and unable to come up with the money on Christmas eve, George considers suicide to save the business and his family with his life insurance money. But an angel intervenes and shows George what the world would be like without him. George decides he wants to live and get back to his wife and kids and, when the angel returns him to real life, Mary has rallied all his friends who contribute many times the amount of money needed. Lots of heroes found in this flick.

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links

Townhall: Resistance in Munich

The White Rose dissidents have lessons for you and me, even today.

Click on over to Townhall, for Paul’s latest discussion of the White Rose students and their sacrifices. Then come back here to learn more. And get involved in making the world a better, freer place.

Categories
video

Video: The Last Days of the White Rose

If you have been following the “Today in Freedom” and new visual meme features here at Common Sense, you are aware of The White Rose, the group of German dissidents who in 1942 and 1943 produced pamphlets against the Nazi regime.

There have been several good books and movies produced about these young and now long-​gone heroes. One of them is available free on YouTube. It focuses on young Sophie Scholls, and her final days — that is, her and her brother’s direct encounter with the Gestapo and the totalitarian Nazi state. Well worth watching, though prepare yourself — it is not a light, comic romp; anything but:

See the Townhall column of these events, now published on this site.

You owe it to yourself to read the six pamphlets of the White Rose, now available here.

Categories
meme

Read the White Rose Leaflets

“Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be ‘governed’ without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.”

Click here to read a complete collection of the White Rose leaflets


White Rose

Click the thumbnail image above to view at full size, and then “right-​click” or “control-​click” to download. And please do feel free to share with your friends!

Categories
meme

Protesting the Nazis in Munich, in 1943

A brother-​and-​sister team of anti-​Nazi activists were arrested on this date in 1943:

To download the full image, click it [above] to view it first in a separate window; download it from there.

Read their pamphlets at our Library on This Is Common Sense.

Categories
Today

Hans and Sophie arrested

On Feb. 18, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl, a brother and sister, were arrested at the University of Munich for secretly (or not so secretly) putting out leaflets calling on Germans to revolt against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. In the previous year Hans had founded a group of students, who called themselves “The White Rose.” The group wrote and distributed six leaflets aimed at educated Germans. The leaflets made their way across Germany and to several other occupied countries. The Allies later dropped them all over the Third Reich.