Civic Dystopia
Growing up, I was so obsessed with movie trailers. I’m often nostalgic for the days you had to get to the theater early so you didn’t miss the previews. Sometimes I went to a movie for the previews. My guess is there’s a science behind which previews imprint at different stages of life. Almost twenty years later, I remember every frame of Mike Nichols’ trailer for Closer. The trailer for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s feature directing debut The Lost Daughter haunted me for most of my pregnancy.
Someone recently sent me the trailer for A24’s Civil War, which comes out in April. It’s a chilling watch that feels particularly apropos. Civic dystopia isn’t a new genre, but it hits differently these days.
In search of an antidote, I went into the HBO vault and watched John Adams. If this Substack has remotely inspired you to refresh your civic knowledge, stop reading and watch Paul Giamatti and his peers wrangle independence. The number of aha moments I had watching is borderline embarrassing, and not only because many of them should have happened years ago. It was just that perfect combination of entertainment and self-optimization. It un-jumbled all the disparate pieces of knowledge on how America accomplished independence from the British and left me wanting to know more.
On today of all days, I have that much more appreciation for the tenacity and fearlessness that marked the newly-independent United States. It was fraught then as it is now. The 13 colonies that signed the Declaration of Independence as states would turn against each other less than a century later over slavery. Next year will mark 160 years since the end of the Civil War. There has been tumult and increasing polarization in between, but America is the world’s oldest democracy and its preservation affects us all.
Next week, Dr. Berner from Johns Hopkins revisits Civic EQ to share her perspective on something we all struggle with — the notion of “political tolerance” — and explains why it’s so important to embrace the idea of tolerant disagreement.
More soon,
Sarah