Willy Wonka and the Government Accounting Office

I'm sitting here, recovering from whatever flu-ish hell I've been plunged into, and watching Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory -- the first one. I'm mentally comparing it with kids movies of late, and finding a message that our entire culture has heard far too little of, lately -- that of personal responsibility.

Would that movie even be believable today? The Gloomp family lawyer would have reached the fudge room before Wonka finished whistling. The media would have been screaming about how poor little Veruca Salt, little white rich girl, was horribly traumautized and put in terrible danger by the horrible Wonka Corp. And the Oompa Loompas would have most likely been kept in their homeland and exploited for pennies on the dollar, Vermicious Knids be damned.

But in the technicolor childhood dream, even the Oompa Loompas know enough to blame the parents for their neglect. And Charlie Bucket knows he did wrong by stealing the Fizzy Lifting drink -- there's no spin, no excuses, just a sorrowful apology and a surrenduring of his Gobstopper.

What happened to those values?

When we have a "president" who has commited countless impeachable offenses and an administration who peddles lies and spin like it's soft-core porn to pre-pubescent boys, where does personal responsibility come in? I'm desperate to hear someone -- ANYONE -- in the public realm stand up and say, "Yeah -- I FUCKED UP". No WMD? "Oops -- my bad." Commited treason by revealing the identity of a CIA agent? Anyone?

But it's not just the administration -- our entire culture appears to have decided to live by this set of tragic rules. We've embraced victimhood as a national identity, relenquishing any and all responsibility for our own actions. Everything can be justified away, no one ever has to admit to a single failing. Slip and fall? It's someone else's fault -- find out who and sue them! For when you're eternally the victim, then nothing is your fault. Of course, that also means that the solution lies just out of reach as well. For if it's never your fault, then how can you muster the responsibility for change?

And sadly, the results of this excessive litigiousness has led us to the hot button issue of tort reform, which on the surface, thanks to all the news reports we've been fed about silly lawsuits, seems like an almost good idea, at least in sound-bite form. But that's the problem -- all of this is always in sound-bite form. Everyone loves to cite the case of the McDonald's drive-through coffee spill, as though all lawsuits of an individual against a big corporation are over equally minor matters. Yet, huge corporations in America are routinely harming individuals -- and then fighting like stray dogs over any scrap of settlement money. The tobacco companies are but the tip of the iceberg -- the drug companies are continuously finding their way into the news via criminal carelessness. Even someplace as relatively scandal-free as Home Depot has somehow managed to keep it's benign reputation while routinely killing it's customers.

Personal responsibility requires access to informed choice, if it can truly be said a choice is being made at all. If you grew up in the time of tobacco warnings on packaging, then it can be said that you were given the opportunity for an informed choice. However, if you were raised during the days of Ronald Reagan hawking smokes for their health benefits -- well, you have a legitimate gripe, because you were lied to, and your consent was ultimately compromised. Likewise, if you voted to go to war based on lies you were told and intelligence that had been spun like frothy veils of sugar, one might give you the benefit of the doubt. However, one also might ask why those lies were believed, when the rest of the world managed to see through them for the cotton candy fluff that they were.

Even the organization meant to keep our government accountable, the Government Accounting Office (GAO), seems to be rather relaxed in it's responsibilities. For in September of this year, they released a report that essentially says that it's entirely possible, maybe even probable, that the voting fraud and irregularities in the 2004 elections means that Bush is not actually our president. Is the media reporting this? Hardly. Are Americans taking to the streets, demanding accountability? Are you kidding? The XBox 360 just came out! Dude, Chill!

"So shines a good deed in a weary world".