Every Christmas, I watch – with ritual delight – It's a Wonderful Life, a movie that's full of hope and community love. It was released in 1946 and directed by the idealistic U.S. patriot, Frank Capra, a man who was compelled to change his middle name from Rosario to Russell (Italian immigrants to the U.S. were particularly despised in the late 19th and early 20th centuries). Within four days after December 7, 1941, Capra quit his directing career, resigned from the presidency of the Screen Directors' Guild, and joined the Army. He was commissioned as a Major in the Army Signal Corps and contributed to the Why We Fight film series with the aim of helping servicemen and civilians understand the war.
I am a deep Frank Capra fan.
And now, a movie review – 85 years late.
Meet John Doe (1941) was also directed by Frank Capra, and stars Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward Arnold, and a scene-stealing Walter Brennan.
Edward Arnold plays D. B. Norton, a ruthless businessman and would-be politician who understands that if he can control the news, his power could be unlimited. To that end, he buys a newspaper and begins firing the staff, replacing them with his own people.
One of the columnists to get the axe is Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), who makes a desperate appeal to the newly-installed editor, Henry Connell (James Gleason), because her income supports her little sister and widowed mother. Connell tells her, "We don't need your column. It's lavender and old lace... What we need is fireworks, people hit with sledge hammers, start arguments!"
Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
Ann Mitchell is required to write one more column before she cleans out her desk, so she cooks up an outlandish tale. She claims that she has received a letter from a "John Doe," an out-of-work and homeless man – in the parlance of the day, a bum – who has decided to jump off the roof of City Hall on Christmas Eve, "On account of... it seems the whole world is going to pot."
A competing newspaper calls her bluff on the authenticity of the letter. So now Ann Mitchell has to "prove" the existence of John Doe by presenting him in public. The scheme escalates as she auditions several homeless men to portray John Doe. She chooses a down-and-out baseball pitcher, Long John Willoughby (Gary Cooper).
Ann writes more letters in the name of John Doe. She writes a radio address for the John Dow she created to read, and John Doe quickly becomes a national sensation. In response, people all over the country form John Doe Clubs in their communities, all in the name of compassion and good-heartedness, using the slogan, "Be a better neighbor."
The villainous D. B. Norton sees an opportunity with the John Doe Clubs. Now that he controls a good portion of the media, he conceives an evil stratagem to have John Doe publicly endorse him for President.
D. B. Norton is playing on the emotions of the people, a collective American propensity for kindness.
Our current administration is gambling on a different emotional response from its base.
Deportation
I’ll not get into the thorny weeds concerning immigration and assylum, and raids and arrests made by ICE, and those pesky old American rules of due process. But…
I will confess to a personal semantic problem with the word, “deportation.” In the not-so-distant past, I thought deportation was the act of returning people to the countries from whence they came. (Remember the angry yet gleeful chants of, “SEND THEM BACK! ?”) I have come to learn that deportation just means shipping people... anywhere but here. One such place is the barbarous Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo — CECOT, the El Salvadorian mega-prison. The more we know about this place, the worse we know it to be. For the administration to deport people to this prison is the vilest sort of "out of sight is out of mind."
Of course, here in the U.S., we have Alligator Alcatraz. There are those who think the idea of a detention prison built in the middle of the Florida Everglades is sadistically funny. While visiting the facility for a photo op, the President told his entourage, “This is not a nice business... You know, the snakes are fast, but alligators, we’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator, OK? If they escape prison, how to run away. Don’t run in a straight line. Run like this..." he said, weaving his hand around.
The Florida GOP is now selling T-shirts, caps, baby onesies, and other swag "branded" with sanguinary cartoon alligator imagery.
When touring the prison, the President said, "Well, I think would [sic] like to see them [more detention centers] in many states. Really, many states. "And, you know, at some point, they might morph into a system."
And speaking of that morphed-into system…
The readers of The Covington News all know about the million-square-foot warehouse that the Federal Government bought as a proposed detention center in our own backyard, the picturesque town of Social Circle, Georgia. The purchase is complete; the U.S. Department of Homeland Security paid $129 million for the warehouse that was valued at 36 million in January of 2025. The local government and citizens of this tranquil neighboring town of 5500 were not given a heads-up from ICE. They learned about the planned detention center from a report in The Washington Post.
One wonders if any real foresight went into the decisions made by the Department of Homeland Security and ICE to purchase great big warehouse prisons. To store eighty-five hundred to ten thousand human beings... well, ya gotta have water coming in and waste going out.
I’ll bet the warehouse prison planners at DHS said the word, “just” a lot –– the kind of “just” that costs a lot of time and money.
As in, “We’ll just drill wells.” (Some homes in the area use wells, and groundwater is finite.) Or, “We’ll just have big tanks and fill them during off-peak hours.” (Again, a finite supply.) Or, “We’ll just get water from Newton County. (Um, fellas, there ain’t no pipes.) “OH! OH! I got it! We’ll just circulate the water and waste with trucks. (Spit-take laugh!)
This isn't the first time this administration has been asked, "How did you not plan for this?"
And so, the city manager of Social Circle, Eric Taylor, put a lock on the warehouse's water meter. Afterwards, the city council and the mayor gave their approval. This is sort of an act of a smaller government’s (local) civil disobedience against a larger government (Federal).
Regarding "smaller government"...sorry, my syntax might be throwing you off. Please don’t confuse “smaller government” with "the Party of Small Government," which obviously no longer exists.
And now, there's a nationwide hold on warehouse detention centers. I like to think that Mr. Taylor's simple act with a lock-&-key has big consequences.
There you have it, Taxpayers. The Federal Government is stuck with a lot of empty warehouses. Talk about your "waste and abuse." No wonder that in November of 2025, when Scott Kupor, the director of the US Office of Personnel Management, was asked by Reuters about the status of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he tersely answered, "That doesn't exist."
Playing on Emotions
Here's the biggest concern I have for my Country: In Capra's Meet John Doe, the aforementioned power-hungry fictional character D. B. Norton exploits the electorate's kindness. But in our current time, the emotional tendency the reality TV star, Donald J. Trump, is gambling on for maintaining the fealty he craves is cruelty.
In his autobiography, The Name Above the Title, Frank Capra said this about the theme of some of his movies:
"...mankind needed dramatizations of the truth that man is essentially good, a living atom of divinity; that compassion for others, friend or foe, is the noblest of all virtues. Films must be made to say these things, to counteract the violence and the meanness, to buy time to demobilize the hatreds."
Let us strive to be good living atoms of divinity.
This essay was made by A.I. (Andy Irwin). Andy Offutt Irwin is a storyteller and songwriter from Covington, GA. He is also a longtime columnist for The Covington News. He can be reached at aoirwin@gmail.com.
