A little moure Can-am Holiday Crossover

We wound up selecting Argo, Ben Affleck's 2012 Best Picture winner via Redbox, rather than either of the New Yorker-reviewed films I'd thought about watching earlier in the day, as our Independence Night film at home last night. This continued our Alan Arkin film festival in honor of his passing last week.

The historical story in it was a side piece to one I remember vividly- the 1979-81 Iranian hostage crisis. We both remembered the storming of the US embassy there, followed by the taking and keeping of American hostages that became a nightly date count by Walter Cronkite and spawned Ted Koppel's long-running Nightline series, and finally ended with their eventual release on the day of Reagan's first inauguration. That timing was a final (and, we'd later learn, Republican orchestrated) Fuck You to Jimmy Carter, who was probably tossed from office primarily by the hostage crisis and the oil price hike it ushered in. 

I'd had a front-row seat to much of the early part of the story, though, because I was at Cornell and working for The Sun when the toppled Shah came to America for medical treatment at our university's Manhattan medical school and hospital.  Demands to return him to the mullahs, and almost certain death one way or another, were ignored by the doctors and the diplomats, and that refusal was a triggering event in the violent incursion on that little square of American soil in the heart of Tehran.  I doubt we appreciated the severity of the revolutionaries' feelings at first: in the "joke issue" of the paper that came out shortly before the fall of the embassy, The Sun's fake editorial on the subject was titled "Sell The Shah."  Some 444 days later, it wasn't quite as funny.

Argo, however, is about a film-within-a-film- or rather a film that's not one. Six low-ranking US Embassy staffers escaped to a home owned by their Canadian counterparts just as the walls were falling, and Affleck's character was tasked with getting them out of a violent and virtually locked-down Tehran.  His CIA cover story? He was producer of a D-grade sci-fi movie called Argo, and the six trapped non-hostages became his team of "Canadian" location scouts who were looking to film in Iran. Arkin plays one of the actual low-level moguls, a composite of several involved in the real story, who helps sell the escape plan to the US government and, in the end, to the Iranian radicals giving the six non-hostages their final pass onto a departing plane in the film's final moments. 

 

It may seem an ironic Independence Day film choice-focusing on arguably one of the lowest points in American foreign policy, complete with an Iranian burning of Old Glory in the opening reel. Affleck uses the opening sequence of the film to make clear that the "lowest point" did not begin in 1979. THAT was decades earlier, when the CIA decided they wanted Mosaddegh dead, or at least toppled for the oil-friendly Shah who would later show up in a Cornell hospital bed. 

It's also worth noting that obsessive focusing on visual objects, like the flag, is a big part of our holiday observances even now. The big thing in our anthem is that “our flag was still there.“ Yes, it was; but in that same war, the enemy burned our executive mansion, our capitol, and any number of other cities including a nascent  Buffalo.  Focusing on the flag, and on the personality cults, is classic “getting it wrong.”  As I watched the recreated footage of these heavily armed radicals, toting automatic weapons and carrying signs with the looming picture of their Dear Leader, they reminded me more of January 2021 here than November 1979 there. And that's what's really scary!

What comes through in the film, though, is good old North American creativity and ingenuity, rescuing these six unheralded OTHER US Embassy staffers, with a ragtag team of comic book artists (including Jack Kirby), Hollywood D-list moguls (Arkin shines here and got an Oscar nomination for it), and cooperative Canadian diplomats (led in this cast by former Jesus and then Doyle-r Victor Garber). Without firing a single shot and risking before finally avoiding many fatal shots at them, these seven brave Americans, including Affleck's character, got out of Dodgistan in safety.

That's what July 4th is all about, Charlie Brown: bad scripts turned into good ones.

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I'll end my Fourth On The Fifth wrapping up with a piece posted by a friend yesterday. It's sourced to a Steven Couch, about whom I know nothing but these words of his:

Today many Americans, like myself, might be having trouble getting excited about celebrating our country.

Think you aren’t feeling patriotic? Consider poor Vicksburg. After the Confederate lynchpin of the Mississippi River surrendered during the Civil War to the Union on July 4, 1863, the city didn’t celebrate the holiday AT ALL for more than 70 years!

And we say the Civil War ended in 1865. Pfft.

Truly feeling bitter? Consider the epic speech given by the former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1852 entitled “What is the Fourth of July to a Slave?” Google it if you really want to tap into some righteous rage.

Indeed, ambivalence about Independence Day has certainly been part of the event at various times. Consider some of these Independence Days -

Beside yourself over the January 6 hearings? In 1815, the United States Senate couldn’t even meet in their old chamber because it was still burnt to a crisp from the British the year before. They wouldn’t be back for four more years.

Bereft at our current polarization? In 1862 the country was literally at war with itself, and the righteous Union cause was losing - badly.

Aghast at the loss of hard won rights by unelected, partisan judges writing hogwash decisions? In 1896, an entire population had been told that “separate but equal” public facilities were entirely constitutional by a mostly southern Supreme Court bench. It would remain thus for almost 60 years.

In 1932, it appeared around the world that capitalism was dead.

In 1942, it appeared around the world that democracy was dead.

In 1968, our streets and campuses were in chaos and Dr. King and RFK were in freshly dug graves, along with thousands of their countrymen whose commander-in-chief had announced he quit the post.

In 2002, New York was still in rubble.

In recent years, our entire system seemed to be in rubble while many Americans either didn’t care or cheered the development.

I have been bereft myself so often over the years as I have well documented here, but today I’ll take a different tack.

In all of those historical instances, we did indeed overcome. At the time, I can only imagine those filled with righteous rage must have felt as hopeless as many do now, exasperated at the wrong-headedness, total ignorance, pitiable apathy, or outright complicity of too many of their countrymen. Indeed, far too many went to their graves never experiencing the deliverance that their advocacy would eventually bring to bear.

Frederick Douglass lived to see emancipation but died with race relations at their nadir in the Jim Crow era.

Susan B. Anthony never voted.

Our WWII dead never saw V-Day.

Dr. King did not see our first black President.

But they happened, nevertheless. And in large part, due to their inspirational efforts.

That is what I will turn to today when looking for a reason to celebrate. My pontifications on this platform often feel like wasted energy, and I’d be lying if I said my daily work and even career as an educator sometimes felt no better.

But just as Captain America - a proper hero for today - dusted himself off with his cracked up shield and quixotically tried to take on Thanos alone just before “Avengers assemble!” it is often darkest before the dawn. Rocky is usually at his most despairing just before the theme kicks in.

And so take heart, my friends. I won’t give you empty platitudes today. Like many before me, I have come to understand that I can’t expect to live to see the permanent resolution of all that ails us. But when my oldest nursing student daughter says “she’s boycotting the 4th of July” today to wear an “Empowered Woman” shirt she bought online, I realize the fight is not one I take on alone. We simply need to run the race well enough that it is still winnable when we pass the baton.

After all, forming “a more perfect Union” is never complete. It is ever ongoing. To think otherwise would be to expect a utopia achievable before we pass, and that is foolishness. This, indeed, is what Declaration of Independence signer Benjamin Franklin meant when asked by a woman after the Constitutional Convention what kind of government we have.

“A republic, madam. If you can keep it.”

So, Americans assemble. Eat the food. Watch the fireworks. Then tomorrow, more fireworks as we gamely go back to work building that more perfect Union we just celebrated. As Andrew Sheppard said in “The American President,” “You want democracy? You gotta want it bad, because it’s gonna put up a fight.”

Dr. King - a person with plenty of reason to lose faith - told us, “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” Like the curvature of the earth, it is impossible to see without the right perspective, but that doesn’t mean it is not there. Hang in there, people.

Happy 4th, fellow sufferers 🙂

And from me, an even Happier 5th, when all those things remain true but nobody's getting their fingers blown off in your neighbor's yard.