He’s got tons to unlearn and tons more to learn.

And it doesn’t come easy. This man persists in his spiritually benighted and losing ways until he goes through the deepest, suicidal despair. But then he finally hits that place –of despair but also of surrender– where Christian miracles happen, and where he does change.

Through the process of error and failure, he eventually grows into a different kind of person, into something much more useful to the world, and much more beautiful for the world to behold. And a part of that beauty is that the arrogance has become humility, and the selfishness has become a life of service. A story of redemption and transformation, brilliantly and hillariously told.

Like I said, my favorite movie.

And lately, I’ve been having this fantasy about America going through its own kind of Groundhog Day experience, of Americans being compelled to keep going back over the past six years. I’d like to see America keep redoing it all until we as a nation learn where we went wrong, and until we learn a new way of being from which we get it right.

Reliving to relearn.

As in the Bill Murray flick, the only way to get out of the nightmare of the continual disappointment of one’s hopes would be to have a complete change of heart.

The only way to get what you want is to be spiritually transformed into someone who isn’t just about getting what he wants.

I’d like to see it. But I can’t figure out just how such an American Groundhog Day would go, script-wise, just how the film would unfold.

Maybe the movie would follow a handful of representative characters –the way INDEPENDENCE DAY did– to illustrate the different odysseys by which transformation and enlightenment is gained by different groups of American with important lessons to learn. I would love to see such a voyage traversed by one of those good Christians who care deeply about what’s right but bought the image of false righteousness by which the evil Bushites conned them.

Maybe some Americans would re-rexperience and reinterpret scenes like the dishonorable and hypocritical Republican assault on the Clinton presidency, with the new interpretation leading to different political consequences.

Maybe some would pick up on some of the clues about the spirit that animates the Bushites, for example in the way Bush mocked Karla Faye Tucker, a woman he’d put death –mocked her for her begging for mercy, and with the issue being whether she had been reborn as Bush himself claims to be. And the new insight could lead to a choice of a different political path.

Maybe some would take another look at how the media treated Bush and how they treated Gore –Gore’s awkwardnesses being given more attention and treated more seriously than Bush’s patent dishonesty and incompetence– and right then they’d figure out that they could not depend on this corporate media to give them the truth.

Maybe Americans would look at that whole march toward war in Iraq, and see the ugly power-lust behind the lies. Maybe they’d even look into that part of themselves that chose to believe the lies, and that embraced the hypocrisy of doing ugly things in the name of grand principles.

So many possible scenes to relive, until the eyes are open, and the heart is changed.

Maybe the cosmos would force Americans to relive this dark period until they’d confronted what within their own minds and spirits had gone awry to allow them to make the wrong choices they did, to lead then into helping evil come into power.

Maybe, in other words, this American Groundhog Day would show our country achieve the kind of self-knowledge that is the first step toward redemption.

So many things the American people ought to relive and relearn so that this nation –which has become a very unpleasant and arrogant player in the world system– can traverse the opening years of the new millennium the right way, having come to a place of humility and devotion.

And, in this American Groundhog Day, that nation that made itself ugly –strutting around, waving its flag as if it were God Himself– would emerge at last transformed intosomething truly worth celebrating.

By the end of the film, the spirit of something holy would shine through a nation reborn, a nation whose soul has been cleansed of the sin that these past six years have so disturbingly displayed.

I’d really like to see it.
 

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