We as Americans often confuse technological progress with societal progress. Whether this is more pronounced in America than in other countries I have no idea, but it is difficult to sit in a state-of-the-art convention center and imagine a Roman-style collapse of the republic. We have HDTVs, damn it. We have iPhones. Surely we have advanced far beyond those past civilizations, yes? Surely we are better than any current country could be without those things? We have stealth bombers, you primitive bastards. That makes us better.
But people do not progress as fast as their tools, and societies do not even progress at the pace a single person might. Countries might have prodigious technology, and yet still harbor virulent racism. No matter what progress is made, we are still all subject to the self-inflicted effects of war. The environment itself still overwhelms our every invented protection, and easily, with a single tornado, flood, or earthquake, or volcano, or with a slight mutation to a random virus that has always been there, or with changes to the very climate of the planet. In the end we are the stuff of our biology, and harbor the same tribal suspicions and hatreds, the same greed and jealousies, and the same rough ambitions.
There is nothing that declares with (ahem) certitude that our society will always progress, and never regress. Or even collapse. There is no country that is immune to going batshit crazy, from time to time. We do it ourselves rather often: generationally, mostly. Each generation either repeats the same damn mistakes or, overcorrecting, repeats the mistakes from four or five cycles back. I expect we could mostly render history books as generic documents: During the year Y, an overwhelming fear of X assisted in Z's rise to power, after which all went to hell in a handbasket before the countering B movement succeeded in reversing the trend in year Y+N. Cut and paste, kids, cut and paste. All the rest can be done with footnotes.
Where was I? Oh, right. Progress. . . .
An all-star cast shows up at Lionel Barrymore and Billie Burke's penthouse for George Cukor's comic masterpiece, Dinner At Eight. On the guest list is an aging actress, Marie Dressler; a rich tycoon, Wallace Beery; his chorus-girl wife, Jean Harlow; and a faded movie star, John Barrymore, who's having an affair with their daughter, Madge Evans. Also in sterling support is fast-talking Lee Tracy as Barrymore's beleaguered agent, and Hilda Vaughn as Harlow's laconic maid who resembles a man in drag. Taken from the stage hit by the Algonquin Roundtable team of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, Dinner at Eight had the most star-studded cast since Grand Hotel the year earlier. Directed by a master, it's glamorous and witty; "They don't make 'em like that anymore!"
