Dragging the Ship Over the Mountain

By: thebeerdoctor

Recent national political events have reminded me of something I have not considered for awhile. Watching Barack Obama going through the paces of his standard stump speech reminds me of the audacity of repetition. To find out you are genealogically related to someone, you hope that someone is cool. To be more seasoned means that all that hope is boiled out of you... I think you get the idea.

As a lifelong research student I am sometimes enthralled by the political process. A system that enables avarice and naked ambition to be disguised as altruism and public service. This, it has been said, is par for the course. The political professionals, sometimes known as insiders, are hip to this gag. But what about the voters?

Maybe it is just blowback for being a political junkie, but I swear I recently thought I saw Barack Obama looking somewhat like Klaus Kinski. Klaus Kinski? Yes, the late actor who portrayed a vampire in Werner Herzog's remake of Nosferatu. But that is not the movie I am reminded of. Rather, it is the epic movie Fitzcarraldo.Fitzcarraldo, if you have never seen it, is a movie about a man dragging a 200 ton steam ship over a mountain, as part of a commercial enterprise to build an opera house in a South American jungle town. Kinski's magnificent portrayal of Fitzcarraldo is that of a man with a dream obsession, and an indomitable will to make that vision a reality.

What is also quite remarkable about Fitzcarraldo is that the film itself is a record of visual truth. There are no special digital effects. Thus, the movie was indeed shot in the jungle, and that really is a full size ship being dragged over the mountain, and subsequently, bouncing down river rapids. There are no miniatures involved! Which strangely, reminds me of Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign. His vision obsession, with his background as a community organizer, is to change the discourse of American politics so that real problems can be addressed. But one of the biggest obstacles in realizing this vision is the Democratic Party itself. That is the ship he is trying to drag over the mountain.

Consider this: look at the state of this country, as created by the politics-as-usual crowd. Hillary Clinton still boasts of the good times the country enjoyed when her husband was President, taking exaggerated credit for economic expansion (the dot com bubble) but not the retraction (when the dot com bubble burst) right after team Clinton left the White House. The same can be said about Bill Clinton's cheerleading and implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. A policy that enabled businesses to exploit labor south of the border (Yes you can in Yucatan!), eliminating thousands of living wage jobs in the United States, simultaneously, causing thousands of undocumented workers to risk life and limb to cross into the U.S., after multi-national agribusiness reaped havoc on local Mexican agriculture. Family farmers found themselves beneath the shadow of the Jolly Green Giant. This would be laughable if it was not so tragic.Empty rhetoric or not, part of the appeal of Barack Obama's speech is that it invokes the idea of a more civilized world. Where free enterprise is not allowed to become the tyrant known as monopolized capitalism, and that human labor with dignity matters.

That may seem vague and unrealistic to some, but considering the delusional mindset in place now, this ship of state is about to head down the rapids, and could very easily smash up against the impending rocks.The movie Fitzcarraldo has a bittersweet ending. Although his commercial enterprise fails, Fitzcarraldo sells his ship and uses the money to bring an opera company to the jungle. His dream was realized, just not the way he imagined.