It was a Wonderful Life

As I look around America today, I feel like I am living in Pottersville – the dystopian town in the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, that Bedford Falls turned into when protagonist George Bailey’s guardian angel, Clarence created a world in which George had never born. Bedford Falls which was a quaint, family friendly town suddenly was transformed into a dreary, brutish, perverse place called Pottersville.

Pottersville was a hive of sin and villainy, overrun with crime and corruption. The Main Street of Bedford Falls which had been lined with a soda shop, a movie theater, the Emporium department store, and the Building and Loan where George had worked most of his life providing good, affordable housing for the citizens, had been replaced by a sleazy bar, sordid nightclubs, a burlesque club, and the Building and Loan had been turned into a brothel. The local tavern had become a seedy dive that only “serves hard liquor to men who want to get drunk quickly”. George’s own childhood home was now a transient boarding house run by his childless widowed mother.

The citizens of Pottersville had become angry, bitter, cynical versions of their Bedford Falls’ selves. There was a meanness and nastiness to Pottersville that was alien to friendly, caring, neighborly Bedford Falls. Bert, the cab driver, in Bedford Falls is a married man with a child living in a nice house in a nice community; the Bert, in Pottersville, is a divorced working stiff living in a shack in the slums who hasn’t seen his child in two years.