I wish to argue that though at this stage we do not see protest and popular reaction resulting from the current economic mess, we do in fact see changes that may lead to that soon. Until just a few months ago the American Dream was still ideologically alive. All its most disgusting Friedmanite mantras were still more or less dominant in the public discourse. Till a few months ago it was possible to dismiss Edwards' focus on poverty as a joke and it was possible to still blather about a by-the-bootstraps theory of wealth-generation. That was possible because even though this had always been a hoax there was still credit. People could still put the plasma TV on credit and somehow interpret the actual material prosperity around them as a dampener of their concerns about the cost of health-care, college and the lack of public infrastructure. People could attribute their failures to personal failings and this all tied very well with the televangelist drivel about rewards that come to the worthy.

In this context the great bankers with the crazy bonuses were the facilitators of your credit excesses. You owed your plasma TV to them, you could only blame the more structural problems of your life on yourself and in any case credit allowed you to postpone the reckoning. You never interpreted your increasing work insecurity as a broader pattern. The increasing amounts of home-ownership and the easy consumerist spending made it easy to believe that all in all things are OK. The media played along and fed the myth with massaged unemployment numbers (Clinton's legacy) and promotion of ideas of reality that fit your illusion through shows like Flip that House, Desperate Housewives and other forms of suburban glorification.

That myth was exposed as the myth it was when the banks revealed the extent of their losses and when the tightening credit destroyed what remained of Detroit and the auto-industry as a symbol of American capitalism. For months it was possible to ignore foreclosures by pinning them on the poor the way that the 80s puppeteers created the infamous stories of the welfare-mama-Cadillac-drivers. As of this summer, in fact as of September, your problematic credit could be connected with a much broader picture and given that it all happened in the midst of an electoral campaign, when Obama could actually win by just pointing out the obvious, there was no way that the story would be massaged or suppressed.

The new story became the discourse. Finally millions of people in duress could connect the dots and the media fought for airtime and advertisement revenue with what they do best; the human interest story. Suddenly the people who were exceptions became a norm. The foreclosed were not a neighborhood in Toledo but rather your very own neighbors if not your friends and family. These people deserved coverage. Poverty and crisis sells advertisements and news corporations under the pressure of falling revenue were not going to resist. Only this story presented everyone with a problem: if you have victims you need criminals. Here the bankers more than obliged, behaving like Gordon Gekko without the manly appeal of Michael Douglass. It is not that they suddenly became irresponsible. They were always that, only now instead of being glorified as the pioneers of brilliant financing they appeared to be covetous, sociopaths, disconnected from society and engaging in predatory practices.

From what I have experienced US politics has always had a populist undertone. It is just that for years the populism was directed against economic issues towards the anti-abortion and anti-gay lynch mobs. Ironically the latte-sipping liberal elites could only exist in an environment of class envy. Only this was class envy which was directed against intellectuals and tolerance, Boston and Beverly Hills. It was however, still class envy. The moment the financial mess hit the fan this class envy was there to be manipulated. Up to now Obama has shown that he is not ready to use it. Nothing tells us, however, that angry economic populism and protest will not appear. I was listening the other day to an activist on the radio talking about rallies his group organize. Rallies of hundreds and sometimes thousands of foreclosed people picketing the houses of CEO's in rich neighborhoods, bringing the misery of this crisis to the creme de la creme. We may be getting there. We may just need to give it time. You know that the ideological substratum of the current system is dead when people start shouting: "where is my bailout." If that is not a call for European style safety-net I do not know what is. The language is already there, soon we may see the a-ha moment, when people really connect the dots and understand what they are calling for.

I was impressed. I felt it was a really good film, and then once the engagement with the story ended, I had to think of what it all meant. It occurred to me that Walt, the main hero in the film, a polish origin Korean War vet, was the face of 2008 Appalachian voters who swung for Obama. A member of the elusive group that some in the media described as "racists for Obama." When I was done with that thought, and with the mental footnote that the film was not really set in Appalachia but rather in the Detroit suburbs, I realized that for all the flaws of this story of Catholic redemption through self-sacrifice, GRan Torino is above all an eloquent answer to Spike Lee's complaints about Eastwood and his lack of engagement with the issue of race. If any film engages with issues of race, the Gran Torino is that. You can decide that you like it or not but in the end this film about white working-class decline in a post industrial world and about the immigrant hope and blight that replaces the traces of a once vibrant but homogenous and culturally sterile middle class life. We become more diverse, culturally richer, but also collectively poorer in this world. Eastwood does not offer solutions. His hero does not resolve the problems of race. He never transcends his prejudices. He just learns to cope with people by living next to them. Eastwood's is not an academic solution. It is not a political correctness imposed on bourgeois students who learn to hide their prejudices under the language of propriety, it is a coping through the forced reality of life. You could argue that the vision simplifies the problems of race, yet in a world where the scared white working class has come to see a black man as its potential savior, the message may have some resonance. Here too, the reality and pain of life forces changes of attitude that academic policing never managed to impose.