Young dolt is showered with unmerited and unachieved blessings demonstrating that "ignorance is bliss"—Not

Rating: 1/10 (9 September 2010)

"Forrest Gump" professes to be all about innocence, but is certainly the most pernicious highly popular movie of my lifetime, whose subtext is the message that there is something virtuous about invincible ignorance, which will be rewarded in all sorts of improbable and arbitrary ways. An exercise from beginning to end in magical thinking, the movie undermines the manifest fact that achievements in life should and must be earned, and that understanding proceeds from knowledge, which must, in turn, be gained through education, the broader the better. "Forrest Gump" was the perfect vehicle for the reactionary Reagan era, with its "what me worry", feel-good-about-America message, regardless of what we were (and are) doing, and however much suffering we may countenance or cause (whether in Vietnam, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Angola, or Iraq, then or now). The movie was also a major piece of propaganda in the then new revisionism regarding the Vietnam War that began under Reagan, depicting anti-war activists as the perfect fit for that most tenacious of "urban legends", the spat upon veteran (the only people who spat upon the veterans were the Johnson and Nixon regimes that put them in harm's way, and then dumped them on the streets without providing any transitional or sustained support before PTSD was fully acknowledged as a consequence of trauma in combat). This movie is also a perfect fit for the kind of know-nothing nativism expressed by the likes of Sarah Palin and the "Tea Party" movement, and thus a sad commentary on the present condition of life in America as well. It is not a "Candide" for our time.