The AuthorialRabbit recently watched 1977’s Oh, God! starring George Burns in his remarkable showbiz comeback. He was in his eighties.
Singer and actor John Denver’s Moses character in the movie receives God’s word from Burns at first by speaker and car radio, later in person. As Burns’ God points out, He could deliver his message to Denver directly but had to put the words on tablets for Moses, as the latter had a poor memory.
This God is a late blooming, in retirement cap and leisure suit, of the Deist God of the 17th and 18th centuries. God sets things working but doesn’t intervene thereafter. An evangelist well played by Paul Sorvino in Oh, God! is a bejewelled version of our later personal-relationship God. The evangelist is shouting loud in our times and is a benevolent generator of material wealth, especially for the evangelist. There is no needle with an eye big enough to accommodate his kind of camel.
Denver’s character reproaches God by listing how bad the times are. God agrees, but points out it’s our fault, we have free will. God oversees the big picture but the details are ours to handle.The movie is angry at our polluting the planet to the point of the mass extinction of sentient creatures, including ourselves. God observes how bad we treat each other when it would be so much easier to give love and support.
Good for Oh, God! for raising the issues back then. But movies alone don’t fix problems. I think it’s fair to say times are always troubled, and fair to say the troubled times have gotten worse since the Fifties, certainly on the surface and certainly regarding pollution, how we treat each other and in the western world how we govern ourselves. Institutions designed to protect democracies have always been commandeered to some extent to serve the wealthy and powerful. Today with income disparity reaching ancient Rome levels at the time of the fall of that Republic and the time preceding the French and Russian revolutions, the institutions are at greatest risk since the end of WW II. Viruses like the COVID-19 flourish in environments where institutions are not respected.
The fantasy that people in the west needed after the war to disguise ugliness for a while with a narrative of progress and an improving human nature (see Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents on that subject), so people could recover from the trauma of millions dead, especially the Holocaust, had been shredded by the sixties with its new distant savage war, race riots, assassinations, the decline of traditional sources of authority and commercialization of every facet of daily life. The startling perfidy of some American politicians then — culminating in Nixon and his thugs and enablers, over the handling of the Vietnam War and lying about it (Pentagon Papers) while soldiers and civilians died and Watergate — shredded the shreds.
The shredding is underway again, perhaps more brazen. And again to some degree, like the Sixties and Seventies, like the Thirties in Europe, the quiet enablers are even more outrageous than the necessary sociopathic leader, the former’s abandonment of conscience more disturbing than the never-having-had-a-conscience leader.
I commend the still relatively free press in Western countries and commentators like Dr. Timothy Snyder of Yale (see his On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and other works) for bravely presenting well-researched objective information along with fine analysis. I hope enough of us remain strong and not despairing (and healthy) to protect our public and personal lives.
J. B. Thompson 