The trial in Pickwick should at least refute any glib editorial anti-Americanism (respectable among people who equate anti-Americanism with both political profundity and commitment) that suggests the judicial shenanigans are quintessentially American forms of corruption. Chicago does equate the abuses of the legal system with the equally corrupt world of show biz, but it's an ironic tribute to the enterprisingness of human corruption, which is the source of the courtroom antics, the crimes that land people in court, the nature of media stardom, and every other specialized system for expressing human desire, not forgetting sex and the conduct of most marriages.

Left-wing anti-Americans have their own version of American exceptionalism: we're the most corrupt, most violent, least intelligent, least compassionate civilization--if we can be called one--in the history of the world. It's a kind of anti-faith; you can't really argue against it. But Chicago is inspired precisely because its scope is larger. The characters express their vices in recognizably modern American idioms, but those vices predate not only the second President Bush, Watergate, and Pickwick, too, but the Republic, by a lot. Would the ninth commandment have prohibited false testimony (Exodus 20:16), would the judgment of Solomon have been set down as a marvel of clearsightedness (in the face of the very Chicago-like self-serving perjury of a "harlot") (1 Kings 3:16-28), if the moral unreliability of humans hadn't presented problems for the administration of justice even back then?

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Alan Dale is author of Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.