Living in an Incoherent, Distracted Mass

 The December 1943 DC Comics cover of Wonder Woman running for President.

There have been forty-six presidents in U.S. history, and by many standards they’ve been fairly similar men—similar in ethnicity, height, religion, chosen professions, and age.
All but a very few had at least one ancestor who arrived on American soil in colonial days.
(Therefore, many either were slaveholders, or had ancestors who were slaveholders.)
Thirty-one served in the military.
Twenty-seven were trained as lawyers.
All but two (Catholics Kennedy and Biden), were Protestants—with thirteen Episcopalians.
It’s evident that there’s been “a presidential type,” and that for generations Americans tended to be fearful of non-British influence.

TV Wonder Woman Lynda Carter played President Marsdin in five episodes of Supergirl.

Of course, women have been cast as U.S. presidents in various films and television shows.
Presidents were portrayed as women in science-fiction projects like 1953’s Project Moon Base, and 2016’s Supergirl TV series (in which Lynda Carter was President Olivia Marsdin).
Most of the time, the productions have been comedies: 1964’s Kisses for my President; a 1985 TV series, starring Patty Duke (called Hail to the Chief, that lasted seven episodes); and most recently—Presidents Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Laura Montez (Andrea Savage)—in the Emmy-winning HBO TV series, Veep.
Although Candidate Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, all elected presidents have been White Christian men of Northern European descent—with one exception (Barack Obama) who isn’t White, but fit most of the other criteria.  

Thomas Jefferson (Ken Howard) and John Adams (William Daniels) in 1776. 

The actors portrayed the parts in both the Broadway stage version and the 1972 movie.

William Daniels was the same height as the Founding Father he played—5 feet 7 inches.

While Jefferson was very tall at 6 feet two inches, he wasn’t as tall as the actor who played him—Ken Howard who was 6 feet 6 inches.

(Adams and Jefferson later became the second and third U.S. Presidents.)

Despite the fact that there were many Dutch, German, and Swedish immigrants in the colonies, it won’t shock anyone to learn that nearly all U.S. presidents had strong roots in the British Isles and Ireland.
The only exception was the 8th U.S. President, Martin Van Buren, who was of pure Dutch descent.
(In fact, English was his second language.)
Dwight D. Eisenhower was predominately German and Dutch, with some British ancestry.
Donald Trump is half-German.

The U.S. is supposed to be a “melting pot.”
Yet, few people whose parents (or grandparents) weren’t born here, made it to the White House.
Three presidents—Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan and Chester A. Arthur—were the sons of fathers who were born in Ireland, and had mothers whose people were long-time U.S. residents.
Barack Obama is the only president with a parent of non-European ancestry—but although his father was Kenyan—Obama also had deep roots in America (and in the British Isles), through his mother.*
Woodrow Wilson was exceptional in that three of his grandparents were born in Ireland and Scotland.
Trump’s paternal grandparents were Germans, and his mother was a native of Scotland, making him a true “child of immigrants.”
(It’s bizarre that an “anti-immigration politician” would be one of the few whose ancestors arrived in this country so recently.)

We don’t have DNA results for many U.S. presidents.
However, it’s safe to bet that no presidents have ever been of mainly southern European, Native American, Jewish, French, Russian, Scandinavian, Slavic, South American, or Asian descent.
In Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves by Henry Wiencek, Wiencek describes how Jefferson recoiled from the prospect that “foreigners” would get the vote.
He’s quoted as saying: “They will infuse into [the law] their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”
What Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers, feared was that “foreigners” (at that time, numerous Dutch and German settlers) were slow in assimilating into Anglo-Saxon culture.

Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis)—between abolitionist James Mitchell Ashley (David Costabile) on the left and William Seward (David Strathairn) on the right—in 2012’s Lincoln.

Actor Daniel Day-Lewis is 6 feet 2 inches—only two inches shorter than President Abraham Lincoln who was 6 feet 4 inches.

There’s no height requirement for becoming president, but they’ve usually been taller than average.
At 6 feet 4 inches, Abraham Lincoln was the tallest president.
Twenty-six of our presidents have been 5 feet 11 inches tall, or taller, and only three (Van Buren, Harrison, and Madison) were 5 feet 6 inches or under.
(The average male height in the U.S. has been 5 feet 9 inches, from 1776 through 2023.)

Although presidents are allowed to be as young as 35, most have been in their mid-fifties.
The youngest president was Theodore Roosevelt; he was 42 when he became president in 1901 (after President McKinley’s assassination.)
John F. Kennedy was the youngest elected president at age 43.
The oldest president was Joseph Biden who was inaugurated at age 77.
Until 69-year-old Ronald Reagan was elected in 1981, only two other presidents (Harrison and Buchanan) had been in their late 60’s when elected.
(It’s without precedent that the U.S. may be considering an 82-year-old Democrat running against a 78-year-old Republican, in November of 2024.)

The Constitution lists three qualifications for becoming president.
Candidates must be at least 35 years old, a natural born citizen, and a U.S. resident for fourteen years.
However, the phrase “natural born” wasn’t defined.
Was John McCain “natural born,” although he was born in the Panama Canal Zone?
Was Ted Cruz “natural born,” although he was born in Calgary, Canada?
British law of the era (when the qualifications were established), allowed foreign-born children to be “true native subjects” as long as at least one parent was British.
Thus, there’s a legal precedent for both McCain and Cruz being “natural born,” with John McCain’s case being stronger.
(Both John McCain’s parents were U.S. citizens, and his father, Admiral John S. McCain, was stationed in Panama.
Although Cruz’s father wasn’t a U.S. citizen, his mother was dual citizen of the U.S and Canada.)

It's interesting that the Trump administration changed the law—on October 29, 2019—so that automatic citizenship was taken away from children of U.S. government employees, and members of the armed forces, if the children were born on foreign soil.
(Now, these parents must apply for citizenship for their children.)
Since a child born abroad to two married U.S. citizens traveling abroad automatically acquires U.S. citizenship, it seems odd that the law was altered.
Does the Government just want more paperwork to shuffle?

According to Jamelle Bouie’s 7/2/23 N.Y. Times column “What Frederick Douglass Knew and Trump and DeSantis Don’t,” the Trump administration searched for a way to end birthright citizenship, but was unsuccessful.
Boule says that “the attack on birthright citizenship is an attempt to stigmatize and remove from society an entire class of people.”
(Is Trump still carrying a grudge because Ted Cruz beat him so many times in the 2016 presidential primaries?) 

If Republicans were able to eliminate birthright citizenship, what would the phrase “natural born citizen” mean, and why was this phrase used in the first place?
Obviously, the Founders were afraid of foreign influence, and didn’t anyone with strong ties to another country to be in charge.
Furthermore, they wanted all presidents to have been born on U.S. soil, and not to have acquired citizenship by governmental decree.
(They may have accepted a person born on foreign soil to American parents—as long as they were raised on U.S. soil—but we don’t know that for sure.)

The Founders didn’t mention experience, or education level, as a qualification for the presidency.
Despite some expressing anti-German prejudices, they didn’t specify ethnicity, or being from the British Isles.
They didn’t specify being a landowner.
They didn’t even mention whether a President could be a man or a woman.
They only listed a minimum age, being born on American soil, and residing here for at least fourteen years.
Making the qualifications minimal was an excellent decision, and I’m sure doing so was purposeful.

*According to Ancestry.com, President Barack Obama has extremely deep roots in the U.S.
He’s the 11th great-grandson (through his mother, anthropologist Stanley Ann Dunham) of John Punch—an African man who attempted to escape indentured servitude (in 1640), and ended up a slave in colonial Virginia.
Obama’s mother also had ancestors from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, and Switzerland.

Sex, Lies, and Streaming Movies*

Opposition parties (with the aid of the press), have long debated whether candidates were “fit” to be presidents.
The candidates honesty, adherence to societal norms, stability, levels of “masculinity” (whatever that means), and religious devotion, have all been measured and debated.
It was once thought that a divorced person couldn’t be elected president, or an atheist, or someone who shirked their military duty.
However, most of those “taboos” are now in the dust bin.

Integrity and character were once considered factors as to who should be elected president.
In 1952—when Candidate Richard Nixon was accused of illegally receiving $18,000 from backers—he denied using the money for his own support and played the “family” card, disingenuously saying that he’d never return the family cocker spaniel, “Checkers.”
(The speech worked, and Eisenhower kept Nixon as his running mate!)
There were many stains on Warren J. Harding’s legacy but the chief one was the “Teapot Dome Scandal”—a saga of drilling oil on federal land, bribes and interest-free loans, blackmail, gambling with the White House china, a murder-suicide, and rumored poisoning of a President by his wife.
Most of the “dirt” on Harding, came out after Harding died.
(”Teapot Dome” refers to the dome shape of one of the Wyoming oil fields where Secretary of the Interior, Albert Bacon Fall, illegally allowed private interests to drill for oil.
The corrupt former Cabinet official was eventually sentenced to a year in jail, fined $100,000, and lost his law license, but Fall was the only person who endured any consequences.)

Andrew Jackson (Charlton Heston) and his wife Rachel (Susan Hayward) in The President’s Lady. The 1953 film is on Jackson’s early life and his marriage to Rachel Donelson Robards.

Divorce was once thought to be an important issue that could break a potential candidacy.
Andrew Jackson’s marriage to Rachel Donelson Robards occurred before her divorce from Lewis Robards, making her an inadvertent bigamist.
(This scandal followed the Jacksons through their 34-year marriage, and his political career. Rachel died soon after Jackson was elected, and she was never First Lady.)
Candidate Gary Hart and his wife Oletha never divorced, but his being a front-runner (for the 1988 nomination) ended after photos of Hart surfaced on the “Monkey Business” yacht.
Andrew Jackson married a divorced woman, but the first president to be a divorced man was Ronald Reagan.
The next divorced president was Donald Trump—a twice-divorced, notorious womanizer since the mid-1970’s—who bantered about his infidelities (and personal sex life) with radio host Howard Stern during the 1990's and early 2000's.

The fact that Bill Clinton received educational draft deferments, and didn’t volunteer to serve in Vietnam, made him a “shirker,” according to a few WWII veterans.
Some life-long Democrats (like my father) chose to vote for Independent Ross Perot in 1992, rather than vote for him; however, Clinton still won two terms.

After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, PT109—the 1963 film about his WWII exploits—was re-released.

Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, were young men of the same era, and received educational and medical deferments during the Vietnam War. However, Biden expanded health care and benefits for veterans, and frequently mentions deceased veteran son, Major Beau Biden, in his speeches. 

A poster for 1995’s Jefferson in Paris with Thomas Jefferson (Nick Nolte) Sally Hemings (Thandwe Newton), and Maria Cosway (Greta Sacchi). The movie deals with the period (1784-1789) when Jefferson was the U.S. Minister to France.

Publicity about sexual indiscretions have affected political futures since the nation’s earliest days but the stories weren’t a problem, as long as they were just rumors.
Federalist Alexander Hamilton might have become one of our first presidents, had he not confessed to a year-long affair with a married woman, and making blackmail payments to her husband.
Grover Cleveland and Warren G. Harding were both accused of siring children out of wedlock.
Al Gore fell victim to the indiscretions of the president he served.
Would Gore have won the Electoral College (after winning the popular vote, in 2000), if not for the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal?
In total, four U.S. presidents have been accused of siring children with women they owned as slaves (among them, the Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemming story), and at least seventeen have been accused of engaging in sexual relations outside of marriage. 

15th President James Buchanan was the only unmarried president—leading some to question his sexual orientation.
However, if Buchanan was gay, the word didn’t get out.
His image (in the mid 1800’s at least) was “manly” enough for him to be nicknamed “Old Buck.”
Sources like Collier’s Encyclopedia make a big point of his “near-engagement” to Anne Coleman in 1819, as if to prove his “sexual normality,” but “less conservative” sources speculate about Buchanan’s “special friendship” with William Rufus King.

Fictional President James Marshall (Harrison Ford), a Vietnam War vet, fights terrorists in 1997’s thriller Air Force One. No U.S. president ever fought in Vietnam; but candidates Al Gore, John Kerry, and John McCain were all Vietnam War veterans.

Pundits have had some odd ideas about masculinity.
Why else would a Newsweek cover story (1987) describe Republican candidate George H.W. Bush”—a WWII pilot, who flew fifty-eight missions and won the Distinguished Flying Cross—as a “wimp?”
A year later, Democratic candidate, George Dukakis, was criticized for not looking sufficiently “macho” while riding in a tank.

“Mental health standards” have also been high—for presidential candidates, at least.
In 1972, Democratic candidate George McGovern was set to run with Tom Eagleton.
After it came out that Eagleton had received psychiatric help for nervous exhaustion, however, McGovern felt forced to find a new vice-presidential running mate.
(The revised ticket lost to Republicans Nixon and Agnew.)
There was also a big to-do as to whether Ed Muskie (the early Democratic front-runner in 1972), had “cried” when responding to reporter questions about his wife.
Newspapers discussed whether the liquid on Muskie’s cheeks was tears, or melting snow, and he was proclaimed “unstable.”
(Soon, Muskie’s presidential campaign was dead.)

As to religion, no U.S. president has ever declared himself to be an atheist.
Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were both “called” atheists because their religious views were atypical, and neither believed in organized religion.
Ulysses S. Grant was one president who refused to specify his Protestant religious denomination, but he never said he was without a belief in God.

Press Secretary Jerry Ross (Martin Short) sneaks the Martian “girl” (Lisa Marie) into the White House in 1996’s Mars Attacks!  He lifts a lever, under the bust of President Kennedy, which opens the door to a secret assignation space.

It's interesting that the press, and other societal critics, assumed for generations that the American public wanted a “paragon” as their president, but perhaps that was never true.
President Harry Truman never earned a college degree, and didn’t do well as a haberdasher.
Yet, many consider him a good to great president.
The fact that President John F. Kennedy conducted sexual affairs while he was in the White House was covered up at the time, but now that everyone knows, it’s done little to hurt his presidential legacy.
It appears that our “concern with fitness” is based on which political party we’re aligned with—and not by what attributes a great president should have.

*The title of this article is based on the film Sex, Lies, and Videotape, which is about sex, lies about sex, and recording stories about sex lives on videotape. Videotape is a tech dinosaur. The 1989 film starred James Spader and Andie MacDowell.

The Triumph of a Dream Over Reality

An animation cell from The Congress.

We’ve been reading about film studios scanning movie actors, and using their personas in future movies, even after the actor has died.
While researching the subject, I read about The Congress—a 2013 live-action and animated film—about an actor who’s being scanned for future use.
We found the DVD among our unwatched movies collection, and watched it.
(An added incentive was that the film is loosely based on Stanislaw Lem’s Futurological Congress.)
This article is a comparison of the 1971 science fiction book, to the 2013 genre film, and to 2022’s Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.*

A 1980's book cover for Stanislaw Lem’s Futurological Congress.

The protagonist of the 1971 novel Futurological Congress is an academic Ijon Tichy—a delegate to the Eighth World Futurological Congress studying overpopulation.
The site is a 100-story Hilton in Costa Rica, and the story takes place around the year 2000.
While attending seminars, Tichy drinks water from the public supply.
He’s unaware that it’s has been drugged to control the area in and around the hotel (ahead of a revolution) and is caught up in the savagery.
After Tichy drinks the hallucinogenic water, neither he (or the reader) can be sure which sequences are real, and which are not.

The world that Tichy lives in—prior to the revolution, and the hallucinogens—is one of ever-present violence.
A fellow delegate (standing next to Tichy) is shot—for being dark-skinned, and reaching for a handkerchief.
(Tichy washes the blood splatter from his clothes in his hotel room.)
He has a drink at the hotel bar, and learns that a bar companion is a religious sharpshooter who plans on murdering the Pope.
A sign in his room reads: “This Room Guaranteed BOMB-FREE.”
There’s a ten-foot crowbar, a khaki camouflage cape, and an Alpine rope available in this room closet—indicating that “disturbances” may be a common occurrence in this Hilton.

Tichy retreats, with a few other guests, to the basement of the hotel.
Later, he’s evacuated (in two different scenarios) by the U.S. military, and wakes up as a stigmatized “defrostee” in the year 2039.
In this “utopian” world, people are addicted to “psyches”—drugs that regulate every aspect of their lives.
A passage reads:

We live in a psychemized society.
From "psycho-chemical."
Words such as "psychic" or "psychological" are no longer in usage. . .
One should always use the drug appropriate to the occasion.
It will assist, sustain, guide, improve, resolve.
Nor is it it, but rather part of one's own self, much as eyeglasses become in time, which correct defects in vision. 

As one character says: “A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance.”
A woman tries to help Tichy acclimate to her world, but he becomes disillusioned with their relationship.
He discovers that the 2039 world wasn’t real, and that it’s actually 2098, or is it?

The major roles in The Congress are: Robin Wright (played by Robin Wright); her agent, Al (Harvey Keitel); studio CEO Jeff Green (Danny Huston); her young son, Aaron (Kodi Smit-McPhee); her teenage daughter, Sarah (Sami Gayle); Aaron’s doctor (Paul Giamatti); and Robin’s long-time animator Dylan Truliner (voiced by Jon Hamm).
Even if I weren’t interested in the subject, the performances of the actors—especially the star—made the film well worth watching.
Although the animated half of the film is a bit uneven, most of it is quite beautiful.
(The animation is all hand-drawn.)
The film is directed by Ari Folman, who wrote the screenplay. 

Promo poster for The Congress (with the original title Robin Wright at the Congress) with the emphasis on it as a live-action film.

“Robin Wright” is the protagonist of The Congress film.
She’s playing a variation of herself—much like John Malkovich did in 1999’s Being John Malkovich, and Nicholas Cage in 2022’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
She’s an actor—once The Princess Bride, and now a single mother whose son has Usher Syndrome.
Her teenage daughter (Sarah) seems bitter toward her.
Is Sarah so bitter because Robin concentrates so much attention on the son?
Twisted studio head, Jeff Green, offers her much less money than a male star would receive to sell her identity to the studio.
One condition of the sale is that she not perform again, on film or stage.
At first, she refuses, but then—after Aaron’s disease progresses—she agrees to a 20-year contract.

Robin (Robin Wright) in the Digital Domain dome made out of LED lights.

Of the live-action sequences, one of the most psychologically interesting is the scene in which Robin is scanned.
This scene doesn’t take place on a set.
As I learned in the DVD commentary, it was filmed in the actual Digital Domain studios, where actors are scanned for posterity.
She’s first asked to wear a special bodysuit, and then places herself within a giant dome made of LED lights.
Later, Robin is asked to exhibit a series of emotions, but she’s so overwhelmed by feelings of being drained, that she freezes.
Her agent Al (Harvey Keitel) extracts the emotions out of her during a long monologue.
(Her agent has a long history of manipulating her for his own ends.)

Twenty years later, an older live-action Robin drives through a crossing gate, and enters the “animated zone” to meet with smarmy CEO Jeff Green (in an appropriately cockroach-filled room).
(As Robin enters this zone, the Lem book and the film become more similar, and the film switches from live-action to animation.)
Green’s studio has made a tidy profit from Robin’s persona—in a film franchise called Rebel Robot Robin—but “animated Robin” is an ignored guest at the studio’s “Congress” (set in a 100-story hotel).
She hallucinates, and a revolution explodes (as in the book).
Robin escapes to the flooded basement—where after various “rescues”—she awakes from being frozen, and explores a future society.
Her initial companion is Dylan Truliner (voiced by Jon Hamm)—an animator who’s obsessed with her.
Unlike Tichy (in the novel), Robin isn’t just an explorer.
She’s searching for her son, Aaron.
At one point (in the hotel basement), Robin thinks she sees daughter Sarah in a corridor, but she doesn’t pursue her.)

During the hotel scenes of Futurological Congress, Lem uses a lot of familiar names—UPI, Agence France Presse, Interpol, Berkeley University—to signal that we aren’t too far in the future.
Similarly, in both animated worlds of The Congress (the present and future), entities use familiar cartoon avatars of a few years back. There are animated caricatures of famous people (among them: Jesus, Frida Kahlo, Cyndi Lauper, Frank Sinatra, Yoko Ono, and Primo Levi); actors in roles, like Elizabeth Taylor (as Cleopatra) and Clint Eastwood (from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly); as well as non-people like the “Robot” from Metropolis, and a trio of costumed “Robin Wrights” from Rebel Robot Robin.
Hotel staffers are characters from Max Fleischer cartoons (from the 1930’s and 1940’s).
The desk clerk is a sex doll.
When Robin makes her transition to the future, “Grace Jones” (in her A View to a Kill guise), wakes her from slumber.

The future in the 2013 film is very dark, but it’s not as dark as the two futures in Lem’s Futurological Congress.
After Tichy takes a dose of “up'n'at'm”—a powerful anti-psychem—he realizes he’s not living in a utopia after all.
Instead, the “magnificent hall” where he’s dining is a “concrete bunker,” and the pheasant he’s eating is “unappetizing gray-brown gruel.”
He discovers why people are always gasping for breath.
They’re out of breath from running along the streets, and only believing that they are driving elegant cars: 

Holding their hands out chest-high and gripping the air like children pretending to be drivers, businessmen were trotting single file down the middle of the street. . .
Then the vapor wore off, the picture gave a shudder, straightened out, and once again I was looking down on a gleaming procession of car tops, white, yellow, emerald, moving majestically across Manhattan.

Fifty years later, the 2098 world in Futurological Congress is even uglier—an overpopulated, glacier-filled, dying nightmare.
People aren’t just ordinary-looking; they are deformed—with tails, bristles on their backs, crude artificial limbs, and skin diseases—all “living” in a grotesque world that they are oblivious of.
(I’m not going to spoil the endings of the novel, or the film, but it’s ironic that Robin won’t sign a new contract allowing buyers to become her, but ultimately chooses to exist as another person.)

A French poster that emphasizes that The Congress is an animated film.

The Congress has several elements in common with 2022’s Everything, Everywhere, All at Once*—most importantly, that the focus of both films is on a mother and her child.
Both are genre films with an art house vibe that transport us in and out of different worlds—one a multiverse, and the other various futures.
Both films deal with metaphysical issues, as well as motherhood, feminism, and age.
A central difference is that Everything has a lot more humor than The Congress, and its’ humor has an open-hearted quality.
Most of the humor in The Congress is in the performances of Danny Huston (as CEO Jeff Green) and Harvey Keitel (as Al), but it’s a bitter sort of humor (as we watch both men manipulate Robin).

I suppose I understand why The Congress wasn’t more of a commercial success.
The title is very dull and not evocative.
The film itself is half live-action and half animation (yet clearly for adults).
The “futures” portrayed in The Congress are terrifying, and its’ portrayal of sexism is clear-eyed.
I know that we (an older couple who love genre films) would have gone to see it on a big screen, if we’d heard more about it.
As it was, we picked up the DVD because the cast was so interesting.
The Congress is currently available, on DVD, and streaming.

* Both Michelle Yeoh (the star of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once), and the directors (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) have mentioned in interviews that the directors originally wanted the protagonist “Evelyn Wang” to be named “Michelle.” However, they gave up the idea after Michelle Yeoh didn’t agree.

Trying to Make a Dream “Work”

July 4th (this country’s “birthday”) will be held this coming Tuesday, and the divisions in this country are a main topic of discussion. 
We’re careful to not discuss politics at work, or when getting a hair cut, because we don’t want conflict.
Sometimes, we don’t look forward to big parties where we might meet “unfamiliar” people who we don’t wish to offend.
Most of us get all our news from specific websites and TV channels, and seldom use others.
A few of us long for the days when it seemed that everyone was on the same page, but that time has never existed.
Leading the U.S. has often felt like herding cats.
It certainly felt that way to George Washington.

When George Washington (father of our country) became the first president in 1789, there were only 11 states.
Two of the original thirteen colonies (North Carolina and Rhode Island) hadn’t officially joined the union.
Vermont was toying with joining Canada.
Tennessee was a territory of North Carolina and Kentucky was a county of Virginia.
Great Britain was still holding onto most of the fur trading posts around the Great Lakes.
The eleven states were upset about issues in the Constitution, water rights involving Spain and their borders.
By the end of Washington’s second term, 16 states had accepted the Constitution, and the trading posts were in American hands.

In George Washington’s Farewell Address (1783), issued* when he retired as the first U.S. President, he said that he hoped our “union and brotherly affection may be perpetual” and “that the free constitution, which is the work of your hands, may be sacredly maintained.”
Essentially, Washington was warning the young nation (white men over 16) that only unity could prevent them from splintering into many parts, and from “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” usurping “the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” 

One issue that Washington didn’t mention in his Address was the practice of slavery.
In fact, he never spoke out publicly against slavery during his lifetime.
However, he did leave a will which would emancipate the 123 slaves that he could legally free.
(Under the property laws of the time, although Washington was one of the wealthiest men in America, he was only allowed to free 123 of the 317 slaves at the Mount Vernon plantation.
The other 104 slaves were either owned by his wife’s heirs, or leased from neighbors.)

A George Washington commemorative pitcher from the early 1800s.

By the time Washington died in December of 1799, he’d become a cherished symbol of democracy and unity.
Manufacturers around the world (including France and China), supplied commemorative items—plates, pitchers, clocks, and jewelry.
American women sewed memorial pillows, quilts, and black armbands.
American artists created paintings and lithographs that were displayed in homes and public places.
His Farewell Address was read aloud from books like Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator.
His widow (Martha) was besieged for locks of his hair.
However, there wasn’t much discussion as to why Washington (after years of talking about it to his family) had finally freed 123 slaves. 

A year later, minister and bookseller Mason Locke Weems published The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington, and this dubious biography further helped bolster his image.
The 5th edition of Parson Weem’s biography added several apocryphal stories about Washington—for example, the infamous “cherry tree” tale (in which virtuous young George cannot tell a lie).
(Weems also wrote pamphlets against gambling, dueling, and drinking.
It was his opinion that over-the-top language, sentimentality, and colorful anecdotes, sold books.)
The Weem’s article in Collier’s Encyclopedia mentions an estimate that his books sold over a million copies.

George Washington’s birthday (February 22) was proclaimed a holiday in 1885.
In 1971, the holiday was moved to the third Monday in February and some states began to call the day “Presidents Day”—a date when two presidents could be celebrated—Washington and Lincoln.
Worship for Washington, as the symbol of unity, had nearly evaporated by 1971, and he was replaced with the country’s martyr for unity, President Abraham Lincoln. 

A banner of Washington displayed by German American Bund at a 1939 rally at Madison Square Garden.

In the late 1930’s, however, George Washington’s “brand” was still strong enough for the German American Bund to use the first president to put a pro-American veneer on Nazism.
The Bund displayed a giant portrait of Washington (alongside Adolf Hitler) at their events—for example, a February 20, 1939 rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden.
(More than 20,000 attended the event, but as Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia predicted, the rally only discredited the group.)

According to Francois Furstenberg—in his  2006 book In the Name of the Father—Parson Weem’s biography of Washington, and Bingham’s The Columbian Orator, were both strong influences on young Abraham Lincoln.
These were two of the books that the self-educated man read by candlelight in his log cabin, and they helped to shape his deep dedication to the union. 

Scene from The Day the Earth Stood Still, showing Klaatu (Michael Rennie) visiting the Lincoln Memorial with Bobby (Billy Gray).

In the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, a visitor from a more-advanced planet, Klaatu (Michael Rennie) visits the Lincoln Memorial with earth boy Bobby Benson (Billy Gray).
The alien ambassador Klaatu is so impressed by the ideals in Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” that he decides to lecture to Earth representatives, and delay destroying the planet.

When Washington spoke for unity in his Farewell Address, there was no way for him to predict how much the country would change over the next 240 years.
The country already looked very divided to him—with the Federalists favoring a strong central government, and Anti-federalists advocating for states’ rights and a Bill of Rights.
The thirteen colonies were very religiously diverse—especially in the middle colonies.
The societies in the south, the New England states, and the middle states were already becoming vastly different.
(In fact, they may be more similar today than they were then.)
However, no one could predict the growth of giant cities, the fact that the U.S. would change from an enclave to a world power, or the internet.
By the first census in 1790 there were nearly 700,000 slaves in the U.S. (17.8 percent, out of 3.9 million people).
Only around 80,000 people lived in the three biggest cities (New York, Philadelphia, and Boston) and most Americans lived in small towns and on farms. 

There’s no record of Washington ever saying that racial divisions might split the nation in two.
He, and the rest of the Founding Fathers didn’t listen to abolitionists—Lafayette, Dr. Filippo (Philip) Mazzei, Tadeusz (Thaddeus) Kosciuszko, and Thomas Paine, to name a few—who advocated against slavery.
Some Founding Fathers, like Washington, said (privately) in their old age, that they were disgusted by the monetizing of human beings.
(Martha Washington burned all her husband’s letters to her.)

However, these great problem-solvers found that issue unsolvable.

240 years later, it's still a battle between those who want a strong central government, and those who want states rights. It’s still a clash between those who want an aristocracy of the rich, and those who want democracy. It’s still a struggle between those who want a caste system, and those who want a society where everyone receives equal respect.

In H.G. Well’s Outline of History (the “New Democratic Republics” chapter), Wells speculates on the statement (in the Declaration of Independence), that “all men are created equal.”
He says:“All men are not born equal, they are born. . .in an ancient and complex social net.”
He goes on to describe the democratic ideals of the Founding Fathers as the human spirit rebelling against the social net, and exhibiting the belief that we may “achieve a new and better sort of civilization that should also be a community of will.” 

In order to achieve democracy, and a “community of will,” the main thing we need is an acknowledged set of ideals.
Washington served for years, as an icon to create a “community of will.”
Abraham Lincoln fulfilled that role after George Washington’s influence ended.
A problem now is that we have no role models “to look up to.”
We’ve given up on political ideals.
Nihilism, cynicism and anarchy will get us nowhere.
Can we maintain a democracy any other way?

*Washington’s Farewell Address wasn’t an oration. The 6,085-word statement was given to Claypool’s American Daily Advertiser (based in Philadelphia, PA) to be published in its’ Monday Edition. The Address was soon circulated in a dozen other papers, 40 pamphlets, posters in public spaces, and books (like Bingham’s The Columbian Orator) all over the nation.

Replacing the Real World

Photos of Guy Henry being morphed into Peter Cushing (as Grand Moff Tarkin) for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

In 2016, I watched a plasticized (CGI) version of Peter Cushing playing Governor Tarkin in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story—twenty-two years after the great Peter Cushing had died.
Actor Guy Henry was used for Cushing’s body and voice; but the CGI turning him into Cushing wasn’t perfect—especially with skin texture.
I’ve long been a fan of Peter Cushing so seeing a weird mixture of the two actors on the screen—neither Guy Henry, or Peter Cushing—was very sad.
Ever since Rogue One, I’ve been interested in the idea of film studios using an actor’s persona, years after the actor is able to perform.

I’m not sure how many directors and film studios would say (on the record) that they agree with Director Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) that actors are “cattle.”
Actually, Hitchcock said that what he really meant was that actors should be willing to be “utilized and wholly integrated” into a director’s vision.
(He was also quoted as saying that “Walt Disney was smart for making his actors out of paper since he had the luxury to tear them up when he didn’t like them.”)
I’m sure that Hitchcock would have loved CGI, and I think the impulse to create performances using special effects, originates in this viewpoint—that actors are simply “tools,” rather than collaborators.

Actors dying during shoots has thrown a wrench into film productions.
In 1936, 26-year-old Jean Harlow was working on two films—Double Wedding and Saratoga—when she died from a gallbladder infection that became septic.
Double Wedding had just begun, so her footage was discarded, and the role was recast.
However, 90% of Saratoga had been filmed, so all Harlow’s remaining scenes were filmed using two actresses—one for her body (shot from the back), and another for her voice.
45-year-old Tyrone Powers had the title role in Solomon and Sheba (1959) when he had a heart attack—hours after a strenuous dueling scene (for which he did eight takes).
Yul Brynner was quickly offered the role of “Solomon.”
The Crow (1994) was about two weeks away from being finished, when young star Brandon Lee was accidentally shot on set.*
A body double (with Lee’s face digitally added), was used to complete the film.
Veteran actor Oliver Reed was filming The Gladiator (2000) when he died of a heart attack off set.
Director Ridley Scott altered the plot, and used a body double plus CGI, to complete filming.
According to IMDb, dealing with Reed’s death added about three million to the 100 million film budget.

Before CGI, genre actors (like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi) endured long, painful hours in make-up chairs—endangering their health, and (perhaps) making old age harder to endure.
Today, in the Avatar movies, “performance capture”—green dots on the actors’ facial muscles—is used to turn actors into the Na’vi race.
Buddy Ebsen was set to play the “Tinman” in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, but—after aluminum dust in the facial make-up made him seriously ill—he lost the role.

Kim Hunter in the make-up chair for the first Planet of the Ape film (from 1967).

Kim Hunter was so claustrophobic that she found the application of prosthetics intolerable.She needed a daily Valium to play intelligent ape “Zira” in 1968’s Planet of the Apes, 1970’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and 1971’s Escape from the Planet of the Apes.

Alan Cummings, with a make-up artist, during filming of X-Men United. (The character "Nightcrawler" decorated his blue skin with “angelic tattoos.”)

In the early days of CGI (2003), Alan Cummings was “Nightcrawler” in X2: X-Men United.
Cummings still sat in a make-up chair for five hours per day.
However, removing the caustic blue facial makeup was painful, and injured his skin. 

Christian Bale in 2002 (before losing weight for 2004’s The Machinist), and after losing 63 pounds for the role.

Besides turning actors into fantastic creatures, CGI also changes the appearance of actors in less extreme ways—making them older, younger, weigh more, or weigh less.
Film franchises are filmed over long periods of time.
If special effect artists didn’t de-age or age the actors, the directors would need to recast.
Robert DeNiro gained sixty pounds to play an elderly “Jake LaMotta” in 1980’s Raging Bull.
Christian Bale lost sixty-three pounds for 2004’s The Machinist.
(A little CGI would have gone a long way in not forcing these actors to put on, or lose, so many dangerous pounds.) 

Old effects in original Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine" on the left, and redone effects on the right.

Another issue about special effects is that they are always improving.
In 2006, Paramount redid all the special effects in the original Star Trek TV series—replacing star ship miniatures and painted backdrops with CGI.
The 79 episodes looked great for a while, but now  (in 2023) the revised effects look quaint.
Should artists update the effects in Star Trek every ten years, in order to keep up with the technology?
It’s unlikely that Paramount would make back the money.

Both the real and "reel" Barbara Jean Trenton (Ida Lupino) react to someone entering her private screening room in “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine.”

Writers have long been fascinated by the idea of living on in the artificial world of movies (be they celluloid or digital).
In the 1959 Twilight Zone TV episode “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” Ida Lupino played “Barbara Jean Trenton”—a famous actress who chooses existence in her celluloid past.
In the 2013 film The Congress, a film studio buys Robin Wright’s acting persona, and uses the digital “Robin” for a science fiction franchise called Rebel Robot Robin.
(In a scene in The Congress, “Robin,” her lawyer, her agent, and the studio CEO debate whether her contract should allow science-fiction films.)
True to the Isaac Asimov books, the main character of Apple TV+ and Asimov’s Foundation (2021-2023) is a digital recreation—Dr. Hari Seldon (with Jared Harris playing both the real and digital, Dr. Seldon).
In this genre TV series, mathematician Dr. Seldon dies in the year 12,069, but 34 years after his death—and for generations after—his digitized recreation interacts with his followers.
(Season Two of Foundation will premiere on July 14th, 2023.)

In summary, I think it’s fine to use technology to modify actors, or use them in roles they’ve chosen...as long as it’s with their consent, and the limitations are spelled out.
Using CGI and performance capture saves performers from spending hours in make-up chairs, as well as makes unnecessary the health risks of putting on extra pounds, or dieting to starvation.
It’s also OK (with the consent of the heirs), to complete scenes in a movie, in the event that the actor is incapacitated.
(In that situation, I would hope that the heirs had final approval on the new scenes.)
However, I would draw the line with using digital images of an actor, to “create a role,” or to sell a product, after an actor has lost the ability to give consent.
Some actors may choose to sign contracts before they pass on, but I believe the wonderful Robin Williams had the right idea.
Williams made sure legally that his likeness could not be used until 1939—twenty-five years after his death.
100 years would be preferable.

*According to The Hollywood Book of Death, by James Robert Parish, “when the gun was reloaded after the close-up shot [of Brandon Lee], the metal tip had remained behind the gun’s cylinder. When the blank went off, it was speculated, the explosive force propelled the dummy tip through the gun barrel and lodged it in Brandon’s body near his spine.” (Brandon Lee was the only son of martial artist and film actor, Bruce Lee.)