RUTHFULLY YOURS

The president musn’t express guilt over U.S. use of nuclear weapons during World War II.

“I think the president would like to do it,” John Roos, President Barack Obama’s former ambassador to Tokyo, said the other day about a possible Obama visit to Hiroshima when he attends the Group of Seven Summit next month in Japan. “He is a person who bends over backwards to show respect to history, and it does advance his agenda.”

That a visit to Hiroshima, on which President Harry Truman dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb, would advance Obama’s agenda is clear. He has long envisioned a world without nuclear weapons, announced steps to pursue it in a high-profile speech in Prague in April of 2009, and continues to push for U.S.-Russian cuts in nuclear arsenals and global efforts to secure loose nuclear materials.

That Obama “bends over backwards to show respect for history” is less clear. Just a day before speaking in Prague in 2009, he dismissed American “exceptionalism” – America’s unique historical role in promoting freedom and democracy and, since World War II, ensuring global stability – as no more special than the “exceptionalism” that Brits, Greeks, and others feel about their own nations.

The debate over an Obama visit to Hiroshima – which would make him the first president to visit while in office – has focused almost exclusively on whether he would or should apologize for the bombing. That Obama would be tempted seems obvious, for he hasn’t shied away from publicly scolding America for its faults, from its toppling of Iran’s government in 1953 to its ongoing struggle with race at home.

“The Measure of a Man,” a film whose French title translates as “market law,’ is a condemnation of an economic system that treats its workers as disposable objects regardless of how diligently they have performed or how long they have been employed. Thierry, the protagonist played by Vincent Lindon in an award winning tour de force, is an everyman who has lost his job and been put through several retraining programs that were exercises in futility, never leading to an actual job. We see his frustration in dealing with the bureaucracy that sends people jumping through meaningless hoops only to be turned down time and again. We see him interviewed on Skype by a callow employer who whittles him down to the humiliating admission that he would welcome working for less money at a position lower than expected – only to be told that he has less than a 1% chance of getting the job – though it’s not impossible.

In the most moving part of the this film, we see him at home with a severely disabled son who is treated with dignity and acceptance by him and his wife. In one scene, the parents put on music and begin to dance together, eventually including the son and having Thierry step aside and beam as his son dances with his mother. These are scenes showing all three characters accepting their fate and moving on without self-pity as best they can. Thierry undergoes all sorts of duress : a version of group therapy in which his trial interview is critiqued by his peers; a lecture by an employment counselor who urges him to sell his house and buy life insurance; a patronizing speech by his son’s school director who now doubts that the boy can achieve his dream of going to college and a disappointment by a potential buyer of his mobile home who agreed to a price on the phone but tries to bargain him down after he sees it. His life is a series of reality bites which lead to his taking a job as a security officer at a large supermarket.