Review: America

Saw America today for the holidays. I recommend seeing it, regardless of personal POV. It has a sufficient amount of content that even if you disagree with the central arguments, it will knock down some of the more common counters and prompt you to think of new ones. Always a good thing.

What worked:

The film has re-enactments of scenes and speeches that are performed quite well. The Abraham Lincoln they chose was very good. I'm a fan of these kinds of storytelling tools for historical pieces.

There was very nice inclusion of historical figures often lost to time, such as Madam C.J. Walker, the first female self-made millionaire in America (who was also African-American); the indentured servants of England and Ireland; and Alexis de Toqueville, one of the chroniclers of early America. As a history geek, I love seeing obscure figures pop in over low-hanging fruit.

The film does an excellent take down of Howard Zinn's arguments, ranging from Zinn's ignorance of timelines, his errors in geography, and mischaracterization of world culture of that time. The "conquest mentality" that Dinesh presents - and the way he contrasts it with a culture of consent - is argued very well. It's always nice to see the hipster poster boy of pseudo-history get taken down a notch or two. (Seriously, saying you know history by reading Zinn is the same as saying you know biology because you went to Ken Hamm's Creationist museum.)

There's a nice range of guests, ranging from Noam Chomsky to Alan Dershowitz to Rand Paul. It was great to see Dershowitz draw the parallels between Nixon's use of the IRS in the 70's to persecute his enemies, the modern cases of the IRS persecuting enemies, and the NSA spying.

Things I didn't like:

The camerawork was awful at times! Whoever was holding it needs to learn basics of framing a shot. The camera would push the main speaker to the side, wobble like a drunken sailor, cut off the tops of heads. It was annoying. Also, way too many close-ups of people and too many "over the shoulder" shots.

When Dinesh tackles the question of American foreign policy, it's pretty meh. He touches on our generous foreign aid (I remember the joke of "The Mouse That Roared," where Alec Guiness quips, "America forgives everything"), but not much else. It lacked meat.

He also has the obligatory "Look at the conspiracy happening right now!" part, which honestly he could have done without. Countering the "shame narrative" would have been feat enough and left the film a nice anti-revisionist piece. As is, it dates itself.

Thoughts:

I think a documentary that does, in fact, explore what history would have been without America's presence would be fun. I was expecting this film to have more of that alt-history flavor. Instead, it portrayed more of how America defied the mores of its time in how it behaved, often for the better. Not what I was expecting, but good nonetheless. This film is a good sight better than a lot of the garbage that gets peddled to high school students in history classes nationwide.