The viewer departs from that scene with loathing and rage at that cop who has perpetrated a virtual Auschwitz moment on an innocent woman right on a public street of an American city. One hates the son-of-a-b*tch.
A good while later in the film, this same policeman comes upon a serious traffic accident on one of L.A.'s freeways. He runs quickly to an overturned car, where the driver is pinned inside the vehicle and in imminent danger of death because of the steadily leaking gasoline and the presence of fire in the vicinity. Guess what? In one of those coincidences that one accepts in Dickens, and as readily also in Crash, it is the same woman.
The scene that transpires between the policeman and the woman is an extraordinarily intense roller-coaster ride of emotion and action and danger. By its conclusion, one has seen -and, oh-so-movingly, this woman has also seen""that the very same man who, just hours before, had sadistically violated and humiliated her is also her selflessly heroic rescuer. At great peril to himself, he bravely and effectively -and even lovingly""saves this woman's life.
Even writing about it now brings tears to my eyes. The Nazi from that first scene is the knight in shining armor in the later scene.
If, like my correspondent writing about my "upright" friend, we could not say anything positive about a man who'd do something so despicable as how that cop treated that innocent woman, would we have missed anything important?
Should we call this man evil?
Mixtures
People are complex, many-layered creatures. Forces for good, and forces for evil, both find a foothold in the human soul.
Which is not to say that I buy the notion I've heard from many of those liberals who have accepted my use of the e-word, using the idea that "we all have evil in us" -that we are all called upon to confront "our own inner Bush"--to make it palatable to talk about the evil of the Bushites. That approach muddies the waters. We've not all been dealt the same cards, and so we do not all emerge equally broken and equally well put-together.
But nonetheless, we're none of us perfect. Nor are the Bush-supporters (like my "upright" friend) the only people with a blind spot in the way of seeing their moral imperfections and their ways of abetting evil in the world.
I do regular talk radio deep in Bush country, in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. And I know that many of the folks there see liberals as fundamentally defective in moral terms""amoral at best," one might say. They look at the evils that many liberals condone, and they draw their black-and-white conclusions""not unlike my anti-Bush email correspondent.
While I often disagree with where some of these folks draw the line between good and evil, it does seem to me that they have a point: an important strand of contemporary liberalism has turned a blind eye to the seeping up of dark and dangerous forces into American culture over the past thirty or forty years.
But that hardly makes these liberals, even if they have an important moral blind spot, reducible to their defects.
And here we come to the crux of the matter. If we in this polarized society deal with each other, across the divide, solely in terms of the ways we see the other as complicit with evil -if we write each other off in the way my email correspondent would write off my Bushite friend""we will be compounding the work of evil.
Evil tears good things apart -the way the fascistic rulers who have risen from the right are tearing up what's good in the American polity, and the way cultural decadence tolerated by much of the left has broken down some of the framework of social morality""and we can hardly afford to compound this work of division by seeing nothing positive in our flawed fellow citizens.
Goodness is about knitting things together, about creating the harmony of good order. And that will require us not simply to make war against the evil of the "other side" because of what is defective in their moral vision but also to make peace with them on the basis of what is good and right about them.
A good while later in the film, this same policeman comes upon a serious traffic accident on one of L.A.'s freeways. He runs quickly to an overturned car, where the driver is pinned inside the vehicle and in imminent danger of death because of the steadily leaking gasoline and the presence of fire in the vicinity. Guess what? In one of those coincidences that one accepts in Dickens, and as readily also in Crash, it is the same woman.
The scene that transpires between the policeman and the woman is an extraordinarily intense roller-coaster ride of emotion and action and danger. By its conclusion, one has seen -and, oh-so-movingly, this woman has also seen""that the very same man who, just hours before, had sadistically violated and humiliated her is also her selflessly heroic rescuer. At great peril to himself, he bravely and effectively -and even lovingly""saves this woman's life.
Even writing about it now brings tears to my eyes. The Nazi from that first scene is the knight in shining armor in the later scene.
Should we call this man evil?
Mixtures
People are complex, many-layered creatures. Forces for good, and forces for evil, both find a foothold in the human soul.
Which is not to say that I buy the notion I've heard from many of those liberals who have accepted my use of the e-word, using the idea that "we all have evil in us" -that we are all called upon to confront "our own inner Bush"--to make it palatable to talk about the evil of the Bushites. That approach muddies the waters. We've not all been dealt the same cards, and so we do not all emerge equally broken and equally well put-together.
But nonetheless, we're none of us perfect. Nor are the Bush-supporters (like my "upright" friend) the only people with a blind spot in the way of seeing their moral imperfections and their ways of abetting evil in the world.
I do regular talk radio deep in Bush country, in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. And I know that many of the folks there see liberals as fundamentally defective in moral terms""amoral at best," one might say. They look at the evils that many liberals condone, and they draw their black-and-white conclusions""not unlike my anti-Bush email correspondent.
While I often disagree with where some of these folks draw the line between good and evil, it does seem to me that they have a point: an important strand of contemporary liberalism has turned a blind eye to the seeping up of dark and dangerous forces into American culture over the past thirty or forty years.
But that hardly makes these liberals, even if they have an important moral blind spot, reducible to their defects.
And here we come to the crux of the matter. If we in this polarized society deal with each other, across the divide, solely in terms of the ways we see the other as complicit with evil -if we write each other off in the way my email correspondent would write off my Bushite friend""we will be compounding the work of evil.
Evil tears good things apart -the way the fascistic rulers who have risen from the right are tearing up what's good in the American polity, and the way cultural decadence tolerated by much of the left has broken down some of the framework of social morality""and we can hardly afford to compound this work of division by seeing nothing positive in our flawed fellow citizens.
Goodness is about knitting things together, about creating the harmony of good order. And that will require us not simply to make war against the evil of the "other side" because of what is defective in their moral vision but also to make peace with them on the basis of what is good and right about them.
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