Oscar for Best Picture to teach us a lesson

I was glad that No Country for Old Men won the Best Picture Oscar, because I keep thinking that it has a lesson to offer Americans that we're unlikely to sit through unless it's in an award-winning movie.  Of course, There Will Be Blood has a lesson to offer as well, but it's one that most Americans aren't ready to hear.  Heck, we make up new words, like acquisitional and shopaholic, to avoid calling ourselves greedy. 

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We might just be getting to a point where we can learn a hard lesson about pride.  Look at the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage lending market and its massive fallout in the investment market.  That little problem is all about pride, because one of the causes behind the situation is failure of this conservative, capitalist myth about self-regulation.  Where did we ever get the idea that businesses could regulate themselves?  If self-regulation worked, we wouldn't have police, because everyone would regulate their own behaviors.  We don't trust regular people to do that, so why did we trust various investment banking types to regulate the crazy and dangerous transactions they used to get cash out of the sub-prime mortgage market?  Some of them readily admitted they didn't know how the financial instruments behind the scenes even worked to make money.  Is the game different because most of these companies are run by college-educated white guys?  We're supposed to believe they can be trusted to self-regulate?  Most college educated white guys can't be trusted to self-regulate their clean underwear supply, and we let them self-regulate financial market transactions that may well cripple our economy.  That's pride. 

Maybe it's a stretch but I thought of that immediately when I watched No Country for Old Men, which contrary to what a lot of people have said, isn't a story with a sad ending.  It's a story with a cautionary ending.  It's about pride and how pride destroys otherwise rational people.  Consider Llewellyn, who gets into trouble through greed, but ultimately dies because of pride.  Worse, he actually has a chance to save his wife, but his pride pushes him on, keeps him playing a game in which he's outmatched.  His wife is a casualty of that game, and although Chigurh kills her, he makes it clear that Llewellyn's pride is the reason she'll die.  Consider Chigurh himself, a man whose pride is dangerous to him as well as other people.  He endangers himself by going after Llewellyn's wife and he does it only as a matter of pride.

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The folly of pride is also reflected in our tenure in Iraq.  What made us so sure we could ride in and put that country on the orderly path to democracy?  Our pride.  What keeps us there?  Not the lie of "terrorism," but our pride.  We're not ready to stop waving our flag and singing, "Team America, fuck yeah!"  We're not ready to repeat the humiliation of the evacuation of Saigon.  How did we end up in Iraq?  The failure of self-regulation.  We've put ourselves in a position that we have to regulate our own behavior and we've failed.  If another country had declared its intention to invade Iraq on the flimsy evidence we presented, there would have been a mechanism to stop the invasion.  Because America has positioned itself as the world's police, there is no one to stop us.  Not even when we're about to step off a cliff.

At the end of No Country for Old Men, the only one who really walks away from the experience is Sheriff Bell, who's willing to swallow his pride.  He's not necessarily satisfied with his choice--how many of us are when we sacrifice pride to pragmatism?  Still, he makes a wise decision to let Chigurh pass into the jurisdiction of other men, younger men, more prideful men.  He goes home to his wife. 

Let it be a cautionary tale against pride.  Our much vaunted American pride, the one we trumpet on bumper stickers on our SUV's in the parking lot of the NASCAR speedway outside Olathe, KS.

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