Anyone who watched yesterday's coverage of the Reagan funeral for more than five minutes (as I did, after trying in vain to find a rerun of The Simpsons) couldn't help but notice that the eulogists were all firmly on message: Reagan was an eternal optimist, a president who trusted in individual ability and in the people's capacity to solve their own problems without governmental interference. (As an article in today's Wall Street Journal points out, this was no accident. Reagan's own advance men have been planning this funeral for years, and they're very aware of the headline, picture, and story that they're trying to convey: Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and brought back "America's faith in itself.") Based on their recent campaign ads, both of the current candidates for president would like to exude the same sort of bland optimism about "believing in America's people."

As myths go, this is far from a bad one...unless we use it to justify rolling back our social obligations to people whose circumstances make it very difficult, if not impossible, for them to put the American dream into practice. This, I suppose, is what I was trying to get at in my last post. It's all very well and good to suggest that ability, optimism, and determination, not to mention education, are all that one needs to move between social classes, but the makers of Spellbound didn't have to go very far to find at least one compelling anecdotal counterexample of a luminous young girl whose ability, optimism, and determination didn’t prevent her from retracing the same family history (I hesitate to call it "class destiny") of her mother, her grandmother, and "various aunts and cousins," complete with a baby and a bunk at a homeless shelter at the age of eighteen. Hence my ambiguous sigh.