Best Summer Film- Leave No Trace

When I was a boy, I saw a film that captured my imagination for a long time afterwards.  My Side of the Mountain was an innocent film about a boy that leaves his family and goes out into the woods to live a solitary life and live off the land in Canada.   He meets up with a vagabond that helps him survive the harsh Canadian winter, and the boy eventually returns to his worried parents but not before an unrealistic adventure about what survivalist life would be like for a 10 year old.  Critics said the film departed from the novel, was cheesy and unrealistic, but the scenery was great and it introduced us to the simultaneous conflicts between the desire to live in the state of nature, coupled with a child’s natural pull to separate from his or her parents.

Fast forward nearly 50 years and director Debra Granik (Winters Bone) tackles the same themes in a much more sophisticated and updated way in Leave No Trace.   Ben Foster plays a PTSD afflicted man who lives on public lands in Oregon with his 13 year old daughter, Tom, played by Thomasin McKenzie.  The two live deep in the woods in a primitive lean-to shelter, living off the land, gathering mushrooms and collecting rainwater.   Will teaches his daughter survival skills and home schools her so that she is academically proficient as well.

The two live a life separate and apart from civilized society.   They forage for food, collect rainwater, and entertain themselves with chess and books.  Like Thoreau, their cleavage from modern society is not complete.   They occasionally go into town (Portland) for some necessities funded by Will’s small time trade in black market drugs.   Will wants as little to do with civilization as he can get away with, presumably because civilization has cut him a raw deal for his service.  The film does not tell us how long they have been living like this, only that Will lost his wife some time ago as Tom has no memory of her.

McKenzie plays the pre-adolescent girl superbly.  At some times we see an obedient daughter, wholly devoted to her dad.   At others, we see flashes of a very capable, smart, deeply thinking and very disciplined young woman.  Her single instance of a breakdown in discipline leads to the discovery of the pair by the authorities and they are taken into custody by the local authorities for illegally living on public land.

After being forcibly removed from the forest, the civilized world is actually kind to them.  The social welfare and private charity system spring into action, find them temporary housing and find Will a job.  But Will struggles to adapt to civil society.  He can neither cope with the government bureaucracy (he cannot finish the psychological test administered to him) and chafes at working for someone else.   The announcement by the business owner that “this is how I make my money” sets the independent Will’s teeth on edge.  Tom cannot find it within himself to be subservient either to the State bureaucracy or to to a business owner.  Tom, on the other hand, wants to adapt to society and in a telling scene at the child welfare agency, her interaction with two other girls there tells us that she wants to fit in.   The divergence between father and daughter is the central drama in this wonderful film.

Good films reflect the tensions of the society in which they find themselves.   Leave No Trace is a quintessential American film.   As I discussed in my blog post last week, Laura Ingalls Wilder is an iconic figure, a true pioneer woman that was resilient enough to live much of her life very independently and even rejected social security payments from the government.   It’s no accident that we see the same themes here in this film.    Will rejects not only the government bureaucracy and charity, but struggles even to become part of the capitalist structure.   The struggle for independence has been a basic tension and struggle since Thoreau and Wilder’s childhoods.   Today, we see this being played out today in an intensifying way in our politics.  One of the basic struggles is between citizens that wish to have an expansive cradle-to-grave role for government in our lives (see Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and those of us that wish to push government away and severely limit it, even at the risk of exposing us to a harsh and unforgiving environment.

Leave No Trace is the must see film of the summer, especially for those of us with a libertarian bend.  It will leave a trace of things to think about.

Prairie Girl

 I am a charter member of the American Writers Museum (AWM).  My love for American literature was instilled in me by Robert Streeter at U of C and by my high school English and American History teachers that ran a joint program at my Chicago Public High School in which we read the literature of the historical period that was being taught in American history.  I was thrilled when I learned that AWM was opening in May of last year.  I signed up immediately and attended the museum’s inaugural day.  Since then I have attended many wonderful programs and have handed out guest passes to many people.  AWM, together with the Newberry Library and the Poetry Foundation cements Chicago as a literary and cultural center.

I am hoping that the Board of Directors and leadership of the AWM does not succumb to the insidious trend of purging writers that do not conform to the norms of political correctness or otherwise engage in censorship or de-legitimizing American authors.

The Association for Library Service to Children recently voted to change the name of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award to the bland and innocuous Children’s Literature Legacy Award.  The ALSC’s board made that decision because, “her body of work, includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness.”  It is widely thought that this “demotion” of Ms. Wilder is yet another instance of politically correct administrators and educators lowering the stature of a noted author because he or she does not conform to today’s social norms and viewpoints or what a select group of individuals believe that the correct social norms and viewpoints ought to be. 

The demotion of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the commensurate implied criticism of her work is all the more ironic since the American Writers Museum recently had a special exhibit dedicated to her life and work.  The exhibit nudged me to read Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser.   I also attended the presentation at AWM by Marta McDowell and purchased her work The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and have begun to read some of Wilder’s work.  In doing so, I learned a great deal about this remarkable woman.  She was not only a gifted writer but a true American.   Her work belongs on the same shelf with Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, Thoreau’s Walden and Cather’s My Antonia as a testament to the American pioneer grit.  She lived through economic downturns, including the Great Depression, lived in poverty most of her life, suffered numerous personal setbacks, began her writing career late in life and remained resilient and undeterred throughout.  Wilder moved from place to place, trying to make a go of it, suffering through fires, droughts, grasshopper plagues, and other disasters.   She exemplified the American spirit and found joy and happiness in many of the simpler things in life, and left a legacy for generations of children. 

Yet, the ALSC chose to demote her while the AWM chose to honor her.

Her demotion by the ALSC comes at a time of other similar occurrences.   Mark Twain was taken off the reading list at a Minnesota school district as was Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.  Penguin recently removed literary giant Lionel Shriver from her position as a judge of literary short story works largely because of her criticism of Penguin’s emphasis of “inclusiveness” over quality.   It’s one thing to relegate  a team mascot such as Chief Illiniwek or Chief Yahoo of the Cleveland Indians to the dustbin.  It is yet another to purge authors and writings from our literary heritage.

Wilder’s depictions of Native Americans were borne out of a time in which the brutal Indian Wars were still fresh in the memory of her family.   While some of her references to Native Americans were racist, there is also evidence that she also empathized with them, as biographer Caroline Fraser asserts.   And the narrative of the clashes between the settlers and Native Americans is still being re-examined as evidenced by the recent book The Earth is Weeping by Peter Cozzens.

Technology changes.  Social norms change.  Even Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton opposed marriage equality a decade ago.  If we purge our literary heritage of every writer that evidenced a whiff of racism or racist language, misogyny, religious bigotry, homophobia or other kind of bias from pre-WWII writing, there likely wouldn’t be much left to read.  Writers such as Ezra Pound and James T. Farrell would certainly be thrown overboard.

AWM is doing a fine job of bring back into our consciousness important writers from all periods of our rich literary tradition—from Thoreau to Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells and James Baldwin. That approach permits us to take pride in the glorious parts of our past, as well as face the inglorious parts.   I applaud AMW’s decision to honor Laura Ingalls Wilder and I am grateful that it did.  It exposed me to her remarkable work and life.   I implore AWM to continue in this vein, to continue to honor America’s literary giants that have withstood the test of time,  to highlight great writers that have added to America’s literary tradition, whether or not their writing conforms to today’s language and social norms.  We desperately need to hear their stories in the context in which they were written and not sanitized through the filter of political correctness.  

Sensible Immigration

The recent dust up on the border enforcement raises again the need for a sane immigration policy, which the country has struggled with for a decade or more.   I will try to cut through the demagoguery and name calling to lay out some broad principles for immigration that I hope you will find sensible, but perhaps difficult to implement.

Along with abortion, no other issue seems to elevate emotions quite like immigration.  The position of Democrats has gotten so extreme that many Democrats – like Dick Durbin of Illinois- have elected to spend more time representing the interests of noncitizens, rather than citizens of the U.S.  Many jurisdictions, including my home town of Chicago, have declared themselves sanctuary cities, and thus we are seeing the practice of nullification employed in a manner that we have not seen since the Civil War.  Cities like Chicago are permitting illegals to obtain state ID’s which will make it very difficult to prevent them from voting.  Many Democrats are now beginning to take a position that the U.S. should get rid of ICE entirely, and that includes DeBlasio, Kirsten Gillibrand, and the new Social Democrat candidate darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  Increasingly, there is a segment of the Democratic party that is championing an open borders policy.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has announced a zero tolerance policy, has begun (in some way) the construction of a border wall, and has otherwise strengthened enforcement, although he was pushed into issuing an executive order preventing children from being separated from their parents (never mind that a shoplifting mom will be temporarily separated from her child if she is caught stealing socks at Macy’s).  Trump offered a path to citizenship for the 1.8 million “dreamers” that are already here in return for wall funding and other enforcement mechanisms, which the Democrats have rejected.  

But is there a sane set of principles for all this?

Yes.

My principles are broad, yet simple.  The hard part is how to set the filters, and implement them, although I have some ideas for that, too. 

When someone comes to America, there are only three possible buckets he or she can land in:

1.      Working and supporting themselves.

2.      Social Welfare system.

3.      Criminal justice system.

Those are the only possibilities.   There are no others. We want people that are going to end up in the first category, and we need to reject individuals that are likely to end up in category 2 and category 3, or bounce between category 2 and category 3 over time.   This means doing exactly what Donald Trump has in mind—implementing a merit based system.   If you go to the Department of Labor website, you will see that the forecast for unskilled labor over the next ten years is to go DOWN dramatically.   The modern economy is going to need a lot fewer unskilled people, as opposed to the first 60 years or so of the 20^th century, when the need for unskilled labor was greater.  Because if a person isn’t in category 1, they will necessarily end up in category 2 or 3 unless they have someone to support them.  What does this mean?  It probably means taking fewer people from Mexico and Central America, and more people from places with good educational systems like India.  

In order to implement this policy, we need to be honest about the data we collect on people, correlate it to where we get them from, and track what happens to them after they get here.   With a dynamic economy, this will necessarily be an iterative process.  And we need to be honest about the costs of immigrants—both legal and illegal—that end up in buckets 2 and 3.  And we need to be honest about the total costs – that includes the costs of educating their children.  We have assumed that immigrants are good for our country (and I believe they are), but at $21 trillion in debt, we need to be more certain about it.  For instance, an illegal Mexican immigrant that works for cash and has 3 children that the American taxpayer is educating and who sends the bulk of his remittances back to Mexico is probably not a good deal for us.

With this in mind, I’ve developed three key principles for a sensible immigration policy and process, and who we let in to become part of the American fabric.

1.      Don’t kill us.  A sensible immigration policy and process should address border safety, and maintain a low level of risk that we are letting in people to do us harm.  From MS-13 to Islamic terrorists to the illegal immigrant that killed Kate Steinle, the idea that we could do away with ICE is simply insanity.  Merkel’s open borders policy is insanity.   Government’s primary job is to protect its citizens and we need to tighten up these processes, not loosen them.

2.      Pay your own way.  As discussed above, we need to ensure that immigrants don’t end up in the criminal justice or social welfare systems.  

3.      Adapt to our culture and social norms--don’t expect us to adapt to yours.  It’s fine to be proud of your heritage, but there are elements that need to be left behind.  And here I am speaking directly to immigrants from Islamic countries.   No burkas, no FGM, no child marriage, no assaulting people for drinking alcohol or refusing to serve it if you get a restaurant job.  If you don’t like our free and open society—don’t come.

These are simple, straightforward guidelines but hard to develop processes around them.  The key is how you set the filter so that we get the kind of immigrants we want.  And we MUST set filters.   No matter how you set filters, you will be open to the charge that you are racist and bigoted.   That is because the era of European immigrants is largely over.   Those nations are having a hard time maintaining their populations, and are in no position to export them.

How is Trump doing?  Actually, fairly well.  The travel ban is an attempt to set some filter, albeit imperfect.  He is enforcing border security and pushing the legislature to legislate on the issue.  With Venezuela in crisis and Mexico electing a leftist (we know where that takes economies), it will be more important than ever to solidify our border security.  But we need to do it in a way that lets in the people we want and need to be a prosperous nation.