Charlie Chaplin, J. Edgar Hoover, and American Character

The character of Charlie Chaplin and the character of J. Edgar Hoover offers an insightful glimpse into the forces that were formative to American character of 20^th century. With Charlie Chaplin, one sees ingenious, innovative, creative, iconoclastic character that is not afraid to shatter convention in order to show a different perspective, reveal facts not frequently known, or give a glimpse of the truth of people's lives. With J. Edgar Hoover, we see the invasive, oppressive, paranoid character that used blackmailing and extortion in order to manipulateAmerica’s elected leaders under the stated claim of protecting America.

The same characters have been seen in the last two decades of American politics, with the characters of, respectively, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. With Bill Clinton, we have seen the greatest economic prosperity in American history, the first balanced budget in 30 years, an overhaul of the government to make it efficient and user-friendly, a drastic drop in violent crime, international collaboration on matters of common import, and a serious effort toward achieving understanding and coexistence between different sections of American society. With Bush, we have seen an extra $5 trillion debt, no new jobs, wrongful wars all around the world, an aggressive inattention to the climatic disaster facing the world, bullying of all countries resulting in international isolation, and an economic collapse. That there was much howling about the character of Bill Clinton, but not about the character of George Bush, offers valuable insight into the character of the people who were behind the said howling and valuable insight as well into what they describe as their values and which values they wrongfully claim to be the values of America and use this false claim to bludgeon America and the rest of the world.

In fact, America achieved its greatness through innovation, ingenuity, and creative thinking. It leapt to the forefront of the world in early 20^th century – a time of scientific and technological ingenuity; a time also of the rejection of the Victorian norms. It is in this time that Charlie Chaplin produced most of his work, and it is in this time that J. Edgar Hoover began his campaign against what made America great. And as the same character, refashioned in different times as psychology or religion or “traditional values” or “family values,” persisted through later history in destroying America’s genius, it is valuable to examine this character and its effects on America through its history, and examine also its validity as well as its merit to the country.

There is one thing that character voters are right about: Character is of importance. The problem is that the character that has been behind most of the problems in American history is their own. The invasive, oppressive, paranoid character that would seek to remove an exceptionally successful and benevolent president for a personal mistake, but would accept a puppet being put into office through fraud and corruption and having this puppet bring America to disaster, is the only real ongoing problem with America. And it is this character that has been behind its greatest failures, from 1930s isolationism to the McCarthyist nightmare to the abuses of FBI under J. Edgar Hoover to the politically correct hysteria of 1990s to the unmitigated disaster that was the Bush regime.

America owes its existence as the country, its technological and commercial success, and its greatest scientific inventions, to the people whom these voters would describe as evil. Thomas Jefferson, John Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Steven Jobs, Bill Clinton, Walt Disney, and everyone else who has been a major contributor to America, would be described by these voters as possessing a narcissistic or a sociopathic character. So would of course the ancestors of all white, Hispanic, and Asian people living now in America – people who have rejected their homes, their countries, and their traditional way of life, to seek a better way of life in America; something that people who have such beliefs would claim to be a narcissistic or a sociopathic action. For that matter, psychology owes its existence to people like Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung who likewise would be described as possessing the same character. And it is to these people that the modern America person owes not only one's country, but everything that one knows as American way of life.

In 1960s and 1970s, the fix-all solutions was more government. By the time Ronald Reagan ran for office in 1980, a case could be made - and was made - that the government had far outstepped its proper parameters and became the problem rather than the solution. More recently, the solution for all things was more social control, until the same was being applied not only to people's actions, but also to people's minds and personhoods, aiming to control all that could be controlled and destroy what couldn't, to the point of claiming people criminal by virtue of how they think. The result of this has been unofficial entities far outstepping their proper prerogatives and, as the government of 1970s, becoming a problem in themselves. These unofficial entities, from old-boy networks to small country towns to religious organizations to practitioners of "personality psychology" to self-proclaimed spokespeople for society or for America, being unofficial, unaccountable, unchecked and unbalanced, have the capacity to commit greater violation against people's lives and liberty, and to oppress them in far greater manner, than the American government is allowed to do.

Empowering these entities resulted in a de facto totalitarianism of these entities, along with the predictable and associated abuses: runaway corruption, aggressively enforced similitude at all levels, destruction of all meaningful liberty, inquisitions against ever greater numbers of people, aggressive fear-mongering convincing people to give up their freedom and to destroy freedom in others, and subversion of psychology and law enforcement into participating in these and related crimes against Constitutional law. Until the very freedom, originality, ingenuity and innovation that made America great in the first place became a danger to the power of these entities and, being falsely portrayed as "narcissism" or "sociopathy", itself became the target of their wrath.

In 1990s America, the young people on college campuses were faced with a manufactured hysteria that brainwashed young women into being afraid of everything and everyone. This resulted in a state of affairs that was injurious especially to young women – a state described by Gwen Stefani as “I’m just a girl, living in captivity.. I’ve had it up to here.” The panic thinking extended to the economy by 2001, as the investors who were burned by the collapse of the dot-com bubble thought that real estate was a more safe investment. It was not. The computer industry boom of 1990s resulted in real prosperity. The panic-driven real-estate bubble of the Bush decade did nothing but make life more costly while no wealth was generated and incomes declined. And as it popped at the end of the decade, the result was predictable: economic collapse. So much for the wisdom, the value, and the moral authority, of the security drive. It is Benjamin Franklin who said that the people who would sacrifice liberty for security are not worthy of either. And, as history shows, neither do they get.

It is time that America remember what made it great in the first place. It was very much the innovative Charlie Chaplin character that has resulted in its greatest accomplishments, not the invasive, oppressive J. Edgar Hoover character that has resulted in greatest violations against American people. The character voters are right about one thing: Character matters. But the problem is their own character, not that of the innovative, ingenious people whom they want to demonize and to destroy.