It was a long, low-energy weekend for me. I’m still trying to fully shake loose from the flu, so I mostly sat (or lay) around, getting nothing useful done. I did vacuum the house on Saturday, because my brother Moloch and his wife were coming Sunday evening (as shall be related anon).

On Sunday, as has been my habit, I watched a couple old mystery movies from my renter’s collection. The most interesting was The Stranger, starring Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young.

It’s the story of an escaped Nazi war criminal (played by Welles) who is tracked down, in the New England town where he is living under a false identity, by Robinson, who plays a U.N. war crimes investigator.

I found it an interesting study in Hollywood culture. The movie was released in 1946, when World War II was newly over. The moviemakers were still in full Allied propaganda mode. There’s no question of good and evil here. Nazis are evil, period (which makes the portrayal of the war criminal, even by a genius like Welles, pretty one-dimensional). It occurred to me as I watched it that evil had not, in fact, ended in the world on VE Day. Even as the movie was being filmed, Stalin in Russia was systematically murdering millions of people for whom he had no use. And doubtless many of the people who worked on the movie were huge fans of Stalin. But, you know—Stalin murdered people for progressive and internationalist purposes. So that was different.

Another hangover from World War II was that the film was unabashed, non-ironic, all but Norman Rockwellian in its American boosterism. The town of Harper, Connecticut, where most of the action occurs, is a wonderful, edenic place. Everyone’s friendly. Everyone’s honest. There appear to be no bigots (even a stranger with a plainly foreign accent, coming to town, elicits almost no special notice).

At the center of the community is a church, and—get this—the church is portrayed as a positive institution. Although Orson Welles’ villain attempts to mess with the church (or rather with its antique clock, which he’s repairing) the building itself rejects him, as it were, and finally visits on him his final doom.

If this film were re-made today, I’m confident the church would be made into a haven for fascists, and somebody would point out at the end that the people of the town, in their mob anger over having a Nazi among them, aren’t really all that different from the Nazis themselves.

That evening Moloch and Mrs. Moloch showed up. They spent the night here, so we could get up at 4:00 a.m. and I could drive them to the airport. Even as I write, they are winging their way to China, to visit The Youngest Niece, who’s teaching English there.

I envy them the travel.

I don’t envy them the twenty-hour plane ride.

Can the day be far away when everybody finally agrees that the only sensible way to fly, from the point of view of security (as well as comfort and personal dignity), is to just put us all to sleep and stack us in containers? The after-effects of the sedative can’t be much worse than jet lag.