American Pastoral

There are a lot of businesses out there with a socially constructive conscious, owners and workers labouring together as the decades pass to maintain a comfortable undiscriminatory atmosphere that is profitable for everyone involved.

Stereotyping every business as one which voraciously exploits workers is as shortsighted as dismissing a race or ethnicity based upon ridiculous fears that have no logical foundation.

If your country has a level playing field, equal opportunity for its citizens, available jobs, and workers and employers seeking social justice together, democracy can flourish, and health and well-being can intelligently prosper.

Communal affluence resulting from sure and steady productive will isn't some lofty unattainable goal to be cynically dismissed, American Pastoral familially examining this point to nurture its resiliency, its tenacity, even if it doesn't depict activists in the most flattering way.

I've never met activists like the ones in this film but perhaps they're out there.

Business owner Swede Levov (Ewan McGregor) does have a social conscious, is concerned about his multiracial workforce, and legitimately cares about their continuing prosperity, the kind of manager who constructively listens while making decisions.

His daughter rebels however, taking the side of the impoverished but taking things too far.

There's a stark difference between civil disobedience and terrorism and if your activist group doesn't understand this distinction it's best to forthrightly abandon them.

Merry Levov (Dakota Fanning) doesn't abandon them and her loving supportive network is crushed by her actions, too much emotion without enough thought, she had the opportunity to make the same difference her father had, had she been willing to listen to alternative points of view, rather than violently enraging people who perhaps would have listened.

American Pastoral isn't the greatest film but it does give a voice to the socially constructive aspect of responsible levelheaded capitalistic engagement that is often overlooked in mainstream cinema (with perhaps the worst casting of a domestic couple ever).

Creating a legit business that enables your family and your workforce to live comfortable lives is a beautiful thing, a wonderful thing, a democratic thing.

And who really knows what Trump will do.

He seems unpredictable and wild and vindictive but that could have just been a strategy he used to win votes, an odd strategy but one that worked alongside his hopes to bring prosperity back to America.

A lot of people are worried about how his irritable nature will diplomatically translate but all he really has to do to prove many of his critics wrong is sit back and be statespersonlike, listen to advisers when making decisions, and act prudently without flying off the handle.

That's not that difficult to do.

Especially if he isn't constantly provoked.

On the plus side he doesn't really owe anyone anything besides the people who voted him in. A lot of Republicans seem to hate him as much as the Democrats, he's insulted many, many big players on both sides, and doesn't seem bound by political dogma, at all. He doesn't have to scratch backs with paybacks and bivouacs. He has a blank slate and could really try to improve the lives of many impoverished Americans in a best case scenario.

He's the classic outsider, the stranger, the dark horse.

I don't know how else to look at it.

He may not sign the TPP.

He might genuinely care about finding good jobs for hardworking people.

I don't think stranger things have happened.

But maybe they will.

Into the unknown.

I'm hoping he shocks everyone by being boring.

Could have all been part of his plan.

Craziness.

*Did the Republicans create the anti-Republican Republican candidate to win back the Whitehouse? I wonder.