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What Was America?
America was a movie in which the president saves the world in a ball gown with an automatic weapon.
Leaving this week’s New York premiere for the film, which sprawled over several theaters on a bought-out floor of the Regal in Times Square, I was greeted by a barrage of news stories about the markets being thrown into chaos by our country’s real-life commander-in-chief, Donald Trump, who has been turning tariffs on and off like Stephen Stucker with the runway lights in Airplane! Institutions may be flawed, but the movie affirms that incremental progress can be measured in successes such as a Black woman rising to the role of president, an achievement more meaningful than her actual politics, which are expressed only by way of a vaguely described policy to make digital banking available to rural residents in sub-Saharan Africa. The spectacle of Davis, all brawn and Juilliard-honed gravitas as she leaps down into an elevator to fight some Russian mercenaries (in the process winning the support of the boorish British PM and the head of the IMF), isn’t just a ludicrous relic from an alternate timeline in which we as a country continue to see ourselves as valiantly leading the way to a better future.
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