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?
You can find this comment and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.
Alan Dale is author of Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.
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