Comment

Nov 17, 2017MICHAEL TAGGART MALONEY rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
I managed to live my entire life (a half-century plus) without having seen, until recently, TO KILL A MOCKING BIRD, the 1960 Harper Lee novel (and Pulitzer winner) about a small Southern town during the Depression and the racism endemic there which was made into a Hollywood film by Alan J. Pakula in 1962 starring Gregory Peck. It's worth seeing today if only because of Trump and his hard-shell white supremacist base of support. But the movie also brings home how we have lost our national character, our national center. Who could pull off Gregory Peck's Academy Award winning performance as Atticus Finch today? Brad Pitt? George Clooney? No. Not even close. Our loss of national purpose was made plain to me during the opening credits. A graphic depiction of the totems Boo Radley collects, it reminded me that in the 1950s and 1960s there was a great faith in public education; that with legislation and proper funding we could build an elementary and secondary education system, and from there an open university, that could erase the blight of poverty and racism; that a good primary education had as much to do with high art as big bucks. If you read your John Stuart Mill, you know that representative democracy is based on this idea. Well, we've totally lost this.