Charlie and the Schlock Factory

“This is being watched live by millions of people in 225 countries that now hate us” – Jimmy Kimmel at the 2017 Academy Awards

Jimmy Kimmel thinks that the world hates the United States because its people had the audacity to elect a President who believes in their country and feels that looking out for its interests is what a President should do. How terrible. The world hates us.

Now lets us have a visit with the Ghost of Oscars Past and a film from almost fifty years ago that won its star, Cliff Robertson, the Oscar for best actor in a lead role for 1968. That film was called Charlie.

The story of Charlie started as a short story called Flowers for Algernon in 1958 and later became a novel and a stage play by the same name. The main character, Charlie, is a man of limited mental capacity. A scientist develops a procedure to give subjects heightened intelligence and mental capabilities. The procedure is first done on a mouse named Algernon.

After Algernon the experiment is done on Charlie, who works at a bakery. He is friends with the people at the bakery. Everybody likes him. What Charlie does not realize is that the reason his co-workers like him because they make him the butt of their jokes. What Charlie sees as being one of the gang is really cruelty in disguise. As Charlie becomes intelligent, more intelligent than his coworkers by a mile, the coworkers – Charlie’s “friends”  - begin to despise him. Charlie sees this and realizes that they were never really his friends at all.

So what does this have to do with Jimmy Kimmel? There are now “225” countries around the world that now hate us. Is this because the United States has suddenly become evil, or is it that they never really liked us in the first place but were happy when we had a President who used to apologize for our mere existence and used to send our money around the world like it was going out of style?

A liberal Jewish person once asked Thomas Sowell what it would take for the world to like Jewish people.

Sowell gave a one-word reply: “Lose.”

The truth is that, like Charlie, the United States has gotten its act together. We will no longer pay people to treat us like dirt. We have decided that we will not let the world take advantage of us anymore. (And hopefully, unlike the story of Charlie, we do not revert to our old ways.)

And the world hates us for it.