So there's this competition-style reality show on. It’s the one that pits the bloviating, orange-haired pustule who spouts incoherent, racist free verse against a grandparent with the temerity to possess a vagina. The show asks America to make the agonizing decision: Which one’s worse?
Well, according to several sources, this is no mere entertainment: In just a few short weeks, the results will be used to determine which striver will occupy the most important job in the country for the next four years (or until he gets bored and quits). As usual, one can turn to H.L. Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
The fact that electioneering and entertainment have become so incestuously linked is the subject of the NW Film Center’s fall series Print the Legend, which lines up 17 movies between now and Election Day that tackle the intersections of politics and mass media. The series kicks off with the movie its title quotes, 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Director John Ford and stars John Wayne and James Stewart are all poster boys for Americana, but the movie is a clear-eyed, old West examination of how much manufactured myth went into our national story.