by Geoff Olson

Groundhog Day, one of the best film comedies of the nineties, stars Bill Murray as a cynical TV weatherman assigned to cover the annual Groundhog Day celebrations in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. In a yearly ritual he loathes, Phil Connors swallows his pride, slaps on a brave face and picks up a microphone. With smiling contempt for the event, the townspeople and even their groundhog, he narrates the tepid drama of the creature’s emergence from its burrow. When a storm moves in, Phil and his crew are forced to stay overnight in town. The next morning, he awakens to Sonny and Cher’s I Got You Babe on the radio, the first sign that something is wrong. To the weatherman’s horror, he discovers he is reliving Groundhog Day every day, over and over again.
Although Groundhog Day is billed as a romantic comedy, I think of it more as an existential farce – a genre unto itself. Its theme of maddening repetition perfectly sums up the human habit of doing the same dumb shit over and over again. All you have to do is pick up the newspaper to find endless evidence.
To give just one local example, consider the latest estimate from the BC auditor general of the “true cost” for the Vancouver/Whistler 2010 Olympics: a staggering $2.5 billion, four times the initial bid, with the estimate expected to rise. The local media is mildly appalled on our behalf, but it’s not like we haven’t seen this movie before: The Montreal Olympic stadium, intended for the 1976 Games, took a quarter-century to finally complete, at a price tag of $1 billion. According to Forbes magazine, Montreal, Sydney, Barcelona and Athens are still paying off debt taken on to finance the games. There is a pattern emerging; every decade or less, taxpayers in a “world-class” city wake up from their two-week party with a persistent hangover – increased property taxes, diminished civic services and a pain in the backside.
Yet in terms of repetitive behaviour that beggars the many and profits the few, sports-related megaprojects are small potatoes. The greatest debt creation mechanism ever conceived is war.
For a while, it seemed we had transcended war, or at least the big, planet-sized conflicts – the stuff of Remembrance Day and The History Channel. From the fifties on, the masters of deterrence told us the doctrine of MAD (mutually assured destruction) actually ensured our survival. With three superpowers and their proxies holding nuclear triggers to each other’s heads, it was a decades-long standoff. Then the Berlin Wall fell and the western world lived for nearly two decades in a geopolitical limbo, with global villains thin on the ground. The Ghaddafis and Ayatollahs were scary, but not in a theatrical, edge-of-your-seat sense. There were few genuine Darth Vaders who could conjure the proper heroic posturing from statesman and arms merchants. But with 9/11, the perfect figure appeared from central casting: the bearded, olive-skinned Osama bin Laden.
Intriguingly, the Bush administration soon dropped this perfectly rendered villain for the paunchy thug Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or September 11. Around this time, US Vice-President Dick Cheney told the world that the war on terror “… may never end; at least not in our lifetime.” Echoing this medieval makeover for current events, George Bush recently added, “This isn’t a battle of civilizations; it’s a battle for civilization.” That’s a pretty dramatic estimate, considering you have a better chance, statistically, of being hit by lightning than being killed in a terrorist attack.
As journalist Simon Jenkins wrote in a recent issue of the Guardian: “Terrorism is 10 percent bang and 90 percent an echo effect composed of media hysteria, political overkill and knee-jerk executive action, usually retribution against some wider group treated as collectively responsible.”
Of course, the US isn’t the only superpower on the block, and the recent saber rattling between the US and Iran doesn’t sit well in Moscow or Beijing, which have cut oil deals with the theocratic regime, the one from Tehran, that is. Religious fanatics like Pat Robertson and neocon windbags like Newt Gingrich drool over a final confrontation between the forces of good and evil, and wonder aloud if World War III is on its way. Look busy; Jesus is coming.
And now, reading from exactly the same spurious script that led up to the invasion of Iraq, pundits and policy makers are yammering about Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, and how an unhinged dictator is defying the UN and threatening the world.
Welcome to Groundhog Day, Washington-style. Global military spending is expected to hit $1.06 trillion this year, topping the record set during the Cold War era, according to a September Oxfam report. In the words of Canadian military writer Gwynn Dyer, “All the major states are still organized for war, and all that is needed for the world to slide back into a nuclear confrontation is a twist of the kaleidoscope that shifts international relations into a new pattern of rival alliances.”
With the coalition’s dustup in civilization’s crib, Canada has its own deja vu duties to perform. Afghanistan has been the tomb for imperial ambitions, from British to Russian; no one has ever been able to wrest this patch of dusty earth from the local warlords for long, and it’s not likely we will either. It’s hard to make campaigns in the Khaiber appetizing, but the cocksure leaders of the Anglo-American empire always try their best. As always, they’re prepared with a rhetorical menu, heavy on God, democracy, freedom and evil. It’s an age-old recipe for foreign campaigns, and every generation or two, young recruits and their beaming parents politely eat it.
One specific example of war’s Groundhog Day-like irrationality is the practice of aerial bombardment of civilian populations. Air wars result in the deaths of greater numbers of innocents and usually intensify opposition from those liberated from their homes or family members. But we’ve long known that, at least since Word War II. The German bombing of England did immense damage to the infrastructure, but it also sent tens of thousands down into the tube stations, where they lifted their spirits by joining in song.
In the early seventies, the US bombing campaign in Southeast Asia picked up as the land war was grinding to a halt. The Nixon White House faced an unwinnable war against the Vietcong, and not just because a guerrilla insurgency couldn’t be erased from the air. American troops were refusing to report for duty – nearly half a million worldwide, according to one estimate – and the home audience was tiring of the carnage. Even Israel, with its most recent misadventure in Lebanon, has discovered that bombarding civilians rarely works out as planned. So with all this historical background, coalition commanders somehow figure that an air campaign will work against the Taliban. (The respected European think-tank, Senlis Council, which focuses on Afghanistan, just reported the Taliban movement is “… taking back Afghanistan” and now controls that nation’s southern half.)
If the powers that be weren’t so insulated from bad advice, maybe they would recognize a recurring historical pattern. Perhaps a group screening of Bill Murray’s best film would help. In the film, Murray’s character suffers through the same excruciating pleasantries and civic bumpf day after day in Punxsutawney. With nothing to lose, Phil tells his attractive new producer, played by Andie MacDowell, that he’s reliving Groundhog Day over and over. She thinks he’s nuts, but he proves it by telling her what will happen next in the coffee shop.
Stuck in a Mobius strip of stripmalls and souvenir shops, Phil discovers a purpose: the conquest of his producer. Yet because it’s the same day repeating, she can’t recall what he told her 24 hours earlier. This means he has to compress all his efforts at revelation and romance – and getting laid – into one day. With plenty of time on his hands, Phil tries every imaginable ruse. Yet at the end of every Groundhog Day, she refuses to stay overnight, usually because his efforts seem too manipulative and rehearsed. Feeling suicidal, he kidnaps the town’s groundhog and drives off a cliff. The next morning, the bullet-proof weatherman wakes up again to I Got You Babe on the radio.
Knowing that the suicide option is out, Phil gives up and tries something new. Each relived day becomes an opportunity for him to spend his free time in any way he likes. With eternity on his hands, Phil starts to fart around the town and learns to live for the moment. He starts to find something worthwhile in average people and his personality changes for the better.
I won’t give away the ending, in case you are among the few who haven’t seen this terrific film. Suffice to say that Phil’s liberation comes as he finally learns to stop trying to control his love interest and the world at large. It’s quite a karmic message from a Hollywood production. Although there is no explicit mention of Eastern mysticism in the film, the world-weary character goes with the flow, in the true Taoist sense. (Taoists call it the “watercourse way.” You learn to not fight perpetually against the fluid dynamics of the natural order, but to use it to your advantage.) In other words, Phil learns to do the very opposite of what many of us do in our daily lives, and what many of our leaders do in our name.
The problem with Bill Murray’s character comes down to control issues. You could say that this is also the fundamental human problem with war, whether it’s war on nature, or war on each other. Not that the latter is ever an easy sell. It takes some doing to convince educated people to kill other educated people on a mass scale, considering the natural human desire for self-preservation. Hence the recourse to air wars. In the words of US marine Anthony Swafford: “If wars were only fought by the men on the ground, the men facing one another in real battle, most wars would end quickly and sensibly. Men are smart and men are animals, in the sense that they don’t want to die so simply for so little.”
Smart, but not quite smart enough. Over and over again throughout history, the powers that berieve have used the fig leaf of organized religion and fear of the faithless to conceal grabs for real estate. Isn’t it wondrously strange that the Creator promised the same patch of land to people of different faiths? And doesn’t He move in mysterious ways, putting so much of the oil, gold, silver, uranium, gallium, molybdenum, etc., under the dusty feet of poor people in distant lands?
One definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. In terms of the planet’s population, a great number of people do not wish to keep pursuing our insane Groundhog Day schemes of military command and control, but those who do are sitting behind the big desks and taking the important calls. While there are greater numbers of people around the world clamouring for peace, their calls usually don’t get through.
But even more sobering, there are millions upon millions more with an unquestioning dependency on the status quo: the two cars, the commute, the mortgage and the nights relaxing in front of the tube. The lifestyles in the West, and increasingly the East, are inextricably bound to global campaigns, ensuring an uninterrupted supply of fossil fuel and other resources. You and I and everyone else are heading towards the cliff, like Phil and his kidnapped groundhog. It will take much more than a Sonny and Cher song to wake us up.
Groundhog Day is a multidimensional film with many interpretations, most of them hopeful. Phil is not just a helpless victim; by responding differently each day to the people he meets, and by travelling down different routes at differing times, he becomes an active participant in reality’s outcome. Each differing choice results in a different fate, not just for himself, but for others as well. You could convincingly argue that this actually happens in real life. A fork in the road presents different options. Each takes you down a different path with unpredictable results, not just for you, but for those you meet. For good or ill, every one of us is in the reality-construction game.
We cannot predict the outcome of things, even within the small circle of our own lives. But for all our ignorance, we still have free will. We have it within ourselves to choose to remain safely within the holes we’ve dug for ourselves, cursing the darkness. Down below, there’s no chance that we’ll see our own shadow. But there’s also no chance of standing together and at last seeing the light.

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