Reminders of America’s Decline

THIS SPRING brought us two movies, both set in 1947 and both intended to remind us of a time when it was easy for people to think the world had begun again as a better, happier, and more hopeful place—as a venerable, millenarian, New World tradition periodically expects it to do. In an obvious but still inspiring way, 42 showed us how, perhaps with a confidence born of our having licked the Nazis and the Japs, we turned inward after the war to lick the evil of racism among ourselves. Jackie Robinson’s breaking the color-line in baseball was a small but important early victory—more like the Doolittle raid on Tokyo than the Battle of Midway—but it still portended much more impressive and morally creditable things to come. Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg’s new version of Kon-Tiki, by contrast, looks sadly more like an end than a beginning.

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/08/08/reminders-of-americas-decline