Wonder and Pain

Ruminations on a Timeless and Timely Classic

It’s the most wonderful time of year.

When you read that statement, you may have a mix of emotions.

On the one hand, Christmas time in the United States and much of western society, whether you celebrate it or another holiday has traditionally been a time for togetherness, celebration of shared values, shared belief and, yes, giving.

While plenty of writers and thinkers in this community have waxed poetic on the commandeering of what was once a Christian holiday into one meant to exhaust the pockets and bank accounts of Americans in an effort to juice the Q4 reports of Fortune 500 companies ahead of the dead and dark months of January and February, the fact remains that the tail end of December SHOULD be a time of happiness, of generosity and—if the world were different—a time of plenty.

Of course, this generation is far from the first to suffer economic hardship to the tune of historic levels of inflation, accelerating layoffs that seem poised to accelerate further in the new year and socioeconomic strife and anxiety in the midst of both national and international turmoil.

But what I want to do today is focus on this ‘wonderful time of year’ through the lens of culture rather than pure economics, as one informs and is informed by the other.

These days, the Christmas season can still be a time of giving thanks, sharing remembrance and celebrating, but, through decades of Marxist cultural subversion and communist infiltration—replacing the American socialist with the American oligarch in a move reminiscent of 1990s post-Soviet Russia—we have been reduced to giving thanks for what we have left, which is another way of saying, we give thanks for what [they] have not yet taken from us.

This perspective was driven home to me a few nights ago, when I took a rare break from parsing and analyzing the endless cognitive flood that is the Information War to sit down with my wife and watch one of the classics not just of the Christmas tradition, but of the American tradition in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Many have written about Frank Capra and James Stewart’s under appreciated—at the time—masterpiece, from its earnest charm to its understated—for the time—performances, but what struck me most about my most recent watch was how this film changes as the viewer—as you—age.

When I was a kid, watching this film was more about spending time with my father, a working-class man who’s never really found watching movies to be all that compelling. He’s particularly annoyed by what he calls ‘far-fetched’ movies, which renders basically anything produced by modern Hollywood inert to him, as he can’t connect with anything on screen.

In short, he’s a literal man, and while It’s a Wonderful Life features significant supernatural—or religious, depending on your perspective—elements, these elements serve as a delivery mechanism for the film’s central themes and tenets rather than as the feature themselves.

What’s interesting to me about engaging with this film and the story of George Bailey as an adult with a wife and a house—and all its requisite mortgage, property tax and energy payments and repairs—is that I can actually see why it was received, if not poorly, then certainly unevenly when it first released in 1946.

For starters, the movie isn’t a very happy one, and in the midst of economic hardship, families don’t really line up to see feel-bad stories when they’re trying to bury themselves in the energy and activity of the season to escape the very hardships it surfaces. Even if the ending is cathartic and—I would argue—quite powerful, it feels more like a relief than a celebration, an escape rather than a victory.

And yet, isn’t that the experience so many of us have when we get through the latest round of bills, the latest blitz of family crises and—in this community, at least—the latest exposure of the latest mass psychological operation deployed either FOR or AGAINST the Collective Mind we have managed to pry ourselves away from, and yet that we are, for better and worse still ultimately anchored to?

Thus, when I engage with George Bailey’s story as a grown man and in times that are beginning to reflect many of the darkest throughout American history, I don’t come away from it feeling depressed or even angry, but rather hopeful, even resolute.

For the villain of It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t a man or a character, and it isn’t even so much an institution—though the Central Banker at the heart of the fictional Bedford Falls draws most of the analysis the film has prompted over the decades—but rather, the villain of It’s a Wonderful Life is a concept—a subversive, infectious and insidious ideology that reminds the modern viewer that collectivism, Marxism, socialism, communism, liberalism or whatever label you want to assign to the latest attempt by Globalists to destabilize, undermine and ultimately tear down everything that we have been and everything that we could be as a nation and a society isn’t anything new.

And the Bank is rooted and built atop collectivism, an ideology built on cowardice and fear of loss and of being left behind by the crowd. And the crowd is a system.

Bailey’s struggles with the bank are not rooted in the bank, but in the corrupted psyches of his fellows. Friend turned foe. Neighbor turned enemy on account of the dehumanizing machine of debt and servitude.

Does that remind you of any time in particular?

There exists a thread of post-war angst in this film, which make up the blood and the money on which the System of Systems runs. While it’s not direct in this film, both Stewart and Capra served, and both were chewed up and spit out by this system—ideal men fighting in a manufactured war—as all wars are.

Righteous intent wielded by insidious and subversive hands pulling unseen strings.

Just as Bailey returns to a community he doesn’t recognize after losing himself—and perhaps his mind—in a storm, so James Stewart returned to a nation he didn’t recognize, and that no longer recognized him or those like him.

No doubt many in this community can sympathize.

That said, while disconcerting and even deflating when taken at face value, the very revelation that the ‘villain,’ or the subversive, collectivist ‘enemy’ of George Bailey hasn’t left our shores, but merely goes into hiding each generation, changing its skin and its persuasion only to continue its parasitic game in the shadows also carries with it a mirrored and highly encouraging prospect:

Put simply, we don’t have to come up with some revolutionary way to deal with an entirely new set of complex modern problems requiring untenable and borderline impossible solutions because the enemy is the same enemy it has been all along, which means that the solution is the same solution.

So simple, right? Big talk, coming from a man masquerading as a Truthful Tiger.

I understand the reaction. Hell, some days I’ll likely read this back and agree with it.

If the solution is so simple, and has been there since 1946 and before, why haven’t we implemented it?

If the solution to Globalism, collectivism and subversive Marxism was so handy to Frank Capra, James Stewart and everyone else during the Greatest Generation, why does it elude us today?

Why are Patriots in the west waging the most complex Fifth-Generation Information War in history against the System of Systems that makes up the Globalist Deep State if the answer to our problems and the cure to what ails us can be found in a black-and-white film made before many of us—most of us—were born?

Because, as many of us have been arguing for months—even years—as we have parsed this Information War and even participated directly in it, exposing the System of Systems while attempting to support Patriots fighting clandestine battles in the halls of would-be power we may never be made privy to while encouraging awakening minds to dig in the dark, so that light might dawn on the Collective Mind we are trying to save, the only way to save the sovereign land is through the sovereign mind, and the key to the sovereign mind is in the possession of each of us unto himself.

Where then, do we start to find the wonder amidst the pain of the film?

Bailey turns to family in his darkest hours just as his family turns to him.

He turns inward in order to turn outward. He dives deeper into humanism to fight its opposite, and abandons systemic, Macro thinking for Micro. Salvation for George is rooted in his family, which is rooted in the self, which is rooted in sovereignty, and in meaning.

Meaning begins inward—Bailey’s path of self destruction leads to epiphany—and then radiates outward from him, first to wife, then family, then community and then the world.

There is nothing magical about the process of Bailey’s victory over the System of Systems, even if there was something magical about his awakening.

And that is where the magic lies.

It remains true that, where it concerns mass, systemic corruption that has infected virtually all aspects of modern society, politics and government, we have little power other than the continued act of discovery and disclosure. This can be a worrying and frustrating prospect that we still face these hardships today, and that we will into the future.

Far from seeing this as the discouraging defeatism I once did, I now see the revelation as somewhat cathartic in and of itself, and a reminder that the only thing we can control—our own minds, our own awakening and our own free will—is also the most important factor in the war for the future of mankind.

That is no small thing, and that is no easy thing.

We cannot control the turnings of the world on a Macro level, even if we can and should attempt to influence its turning so that it might turn back in our favor, and in the favor of all sovereigns.

Just as George Bailey was charged with taking responsibility for himself first, his family second and his community third before he finally put the pieces of his own psyche back together in a way that made him both whole and therefore useful to the American Experiment once more, so must each of us strive to forge ourselves into paragons not necessarily of virtue or perfection, but of sovereignty, of freedom and of directed action. Paragons of building rather than destroying, of exposing rather than obscuring and of educating, encouraging and inspiring rather than despairing.

The backdrop of It’s a Wonderful Life may seem like it emanates from another era, but I would argue that, when we watch that film, we’re looking in a mirror.

Despite the luxuries of modernity—and even modernity stretching back a century and more in this nation—the continued subversion of our financial freedom and the guiding of our sons and fathers into wars they never asked for to serve masters they’ll never know is both insidious and scarring to the human psyche. And the human psyche is the sovereign psyche.

Hardship is relative and changeable over time, while freedom is absolute.

And so this season brings with it beautiful, painful duality, just as this film does.

It is a reminder of what we were and what we are, what we lost and what we could be. It is a reflection of darkness and light, both of man and of the society he builds and that builds him. It carries with it the cold of a season’s harrowing storms, both physical and psychological, and the warmth by the hearth and provided by the family gathered around it. It is both colorful in its characters and emotions and gray in its subject matter and palette.

This movie and this character—George Bailey—is not of my generation, but something about it has always been alluring to me. In an age of superheroes and larger than life characters, a man in the center of a small-scale, and yet Biblical-seeming maelstrom of hardship and striving, loneliness and togetherness, bravery and cowardice stands the test of time.

And I am not alone.

This movie has stood the test of time and continues to occupy a considerable slice of the American Collective Mind because it speaks to the soul more than the mind—not just of humanity, but of the United States. Of the American. Because the American Man is the American Nation.

Or was.

But something lost can be something found, as long as we have the will and the fortitude to search it out, and to brave the cold winds of engineered change to bring it back with us after fording into icy waters and forging out in the cold and dark, so that we might return shining like mirrored winter steel.

George Bailey reminds us that concrete actions and plans to solve the problem of collectivism ultimately rise out of the rediscovery of self-worth and meaning. The belief in something more than that self.

This is the paradox at the heart of the Wonder and Pain of this film, and of our lives: that there is something bigger than the self, something eternal and something worth defending, and that, in the very act of doing so, the self is freed and the soul along with it.

The collectivist hides the cowardly self in the seeming strength of the crowd.

The sovereign wields the crowd by displaying the courage of the unabashed and unwavering self.

One man stands against the system, and in so doing, wins even if he loses, because another has seen him stand. And on and on.

The battle IS the victory. The fight IS the freedom. The truth IS the cure.

It’s a Wonderful Life is the smallest movie ever, and the biggest.

Change starts within us, and radiates outward.

Ultimately, in remembering this, we can never lose, and just as George Bailey is proclaimed ‘the richest man in town’ in an ending scene capable of thawing even the most cynical and frosted hearts, so too might each of us join his ranks, if only we remember what we’re fighting for.

If only we remember our strength.

Until next time, stay Positive, stay Based and most importantly … stay Bright.

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