That 70's Show

 Sometimes I sit down on the couch with my wife only to discover that the movie that is playing on our television is one she has never seen before. On this particular evening, that movie was Conrack, the autobiographical tale of Pat Conroy's experience as a teacher in a two-room schoolhouse on Daufuskie Island in South Carolina. Made in 1974, it tells the story of an idealistic young man who takes a group of black kids who have only known their own tiny corner of the world and opens their eyes to everything from baseball to Beethoven. I saw it a long time ago myself, but I was happy to give my wife this little gift of the seventies. 

I couldn't stick around and watch. As much as I enjoyed it way back when, and as much as I could find resonance in that fifty year old story in my own life, I could not stay. 

It was Jon Voight. I could not separate the man on the screen from the man he would become all these years later. The man whose heart bled as profusely as any for liberal causes like ending the war in Vietnam and worked to register voters in the inner cities as he campaigned for George McGovern has become one of the leading celebrity voices for that former game show host and twice-impeached "president." The man who won an Academy Award for his sensitive portrayal of a disabled Vietnam veteran is now a regurgitator of election fraud conspiracy and insisted that the siege of the Capitol in January 2021 was "The battle of righteousness versus Satan - yes, Satan."

I know that there are thousands upon thousands of stories about perfectly normal human beings who somehow sniffed around the Faux News tree long enough that they set up camp there and decided to stay. Finding a way out of this nonsense vortex has caused many a family dinner to turn into an episode of All In The Family. But I never would have imagined that the once and future Midnight Cowboy would eventually be recast as the Archie Bunker end of that argument. 

 Back when Jon Voight wore his heart on his sleeve and wanted to change the world, not just for a group of black kids in a two-room schoolhouse, but across this great land of ours. This onetime staunch Democrat spouted this on Faux News in 2013: "Five years ago I said Obama would take the country apart piece by piece, he would cause a civil war in this country. In hindsight we can see how many things have come to pass."

Eventually I found my way back into the living room and watched the end of Conrack. I watched that idealistic young man float away from the island that had been his home to the strains of Beethoven's Fifth. And then I remembered: Jon Voight is an actor.