I Heard You Socialize Groceries
While ‘The Irishman’ failed to highlight the benefits of unions, a Florida grocery store showed Americans why socialism sometimes works
Like it or not, we learn our history from the movies. Steven Spielberg, who long-ago appointed himself America’s seventh-grade history teacher, understands that. Maybe because he’s trying to reach 13-year-olds, he doesn’t credit the audience with knowing or understanding very much, and ends every movie with a superfluous coda in which the point of the story is explained. And yes, Spielberg’s version of “The Irishman” would have ended with a patronizing monologue about how we “forgot about da workin’ man” against the backdrop of a tattered American flag drooping in a low breeze above a shuttered factory. And while it’s popular to view movies as purely entertainment or purely art, with no responsibility to educate, I would have preferred expository overkill to a movie about unions that doesn’t tell us anything about unions.
How are we supposed to comprehend the tragedy of our societal failures, to learn from our mistakes and plan for our future, without understanding our past?
Because my wife and I have a smiling, sweet-smelling, spitting-up newborn to take care of, we had to watch “The Irishman” in installments. As…
