A great documentary

The breathtaking thing about this documentary - whatever else one may have to say about it - is how it shows that the disputes over economy (let's just say "the issue of the economy") is not something that has arisen from being a relatively background issue to becoming the front and center of the Great Talked About Issues of Our Times. It has not arisen at all. Not at all.

The funny thing is that it has been, and is presently, receding from our grasp and from our real attention. The grasp of the core of the issue has been undone. The terms remain, and are indeed made louder and louder - a sort of endless speculation and school of derivatives, if you will, of economic terms that at one point used to actually mean something, or at least mean something else.

For the issue of the economy was historically consistently and continually being hashed out in the front and center of the lives of people across the U.S. geographical map, with the aid of a media that had not yet been bought. And everything essential about the issue was well understood by the common people. That is to say, they understood how essentially the issue of the economy is tied to everything else.

The American century previous to the 20th, as well as the American century previous to the 19th, is absolutely astonishingly freaking rife with loud and bold and clear parallels to the here and now, even brutally clear parallels. Not just parallels in some distant disconnected sense, but of being the whole-cloth story that has been cut off from the memory of the people.