In the 1970s, the era of Watergate and Vietnam and many more official perfidies, Hollywood gave us a new genre of movies. The bad guys were great big, faceless institutions—corporations or the government, it didn't matter; or sometimes corporations in cahoots with the government. The good guys were anything but faceless: they had rugged, sexy, sexy faces, that belonged to A-list stars like Robert Redford and Warren Beatty. They played lone-wolf investigators, characters straight out of the film noir tradition: tormented by a longing for justice, all but undone by the fallen state of the world.

They usually were identifiably left-wing. For instance "Serpico," played by Al Pacino, was a cop, but he was also a hippie—fat beard, floppy hat, cuddly dog. Frequently, they were journalists—think "All the President's Men." If they weren't, they acted like journalists, for they were always, at bottom, investigators—even if they were only, like all those Biblical prophets in the Old Testament, accidentally drafted into the role, like Gene Hackman in "The Conversation," in which he played a surveillance expert who accidentally gathers evidence of a potential murder. In "Three Days of the Condor" Redford returns from lunch to find all his colleagues at the CIA front where he works have been murdered—because, naturally, they had learned too much about a CIA-sponsored effort to manipulate world oil markets.

That was the 1970s: never before had so defiantly anti-authoritarian popular culture been so popular. So popular, in fact, that by the end of the decade even middle-of-the-road pablum took on aspects of the general outline, just because that's the way movies were by then were supposed to be. For instance, in Beatty's "Heaven Can Wait" (1978), when Warren Beatty bargains with his guardian angel to return to Earth, the vessel his soul inhabitants is a stinking corporate tycoon whose schemes which Beatty, of course, cannot but overturn.

Things are different now. Investigating is out. "We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards," as Barack Obama said concerning the shadowy crimes of the Bush administration.

I thought about that recently when I saw "Contagion," the new thriller about a global epidemic starring Matt Damon. It's a 1970s conspiracy movie turned inside out. It's quite the cultural testament for the Age of Obama.

[SPOILER ALERT--PLOT DETAILS FOLLOW]
The good guy turns out to be Lawrence Fishburne, a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control. He's a quiet, cool, efficient bureaucrat, infinitely compassionate for his colleague out in the field whom he keeps on begging to take time off for herself. (Who needs unions when America is filled with benevolent bosses like that? And, of course, she doesn't take his advice: she works, and works, and works, to the point of contracting the dread disease herself—isn't that what we're all supposed to be doing to guarantee continued employment in our blessed age of austerity?) The media keeps on trying to press him into sensationalism. He's cool about that, too. He's human, to be sure: at one point he tells his beloved fiancée about secret plans to evacuate Chicago, giving her a jump on the chaos that ensues. That gets out in the media, and we see him scapegoated for a peccadillo, probably to lose his career, despite his manifest heroism throughout. But he's even noble in that: willingly, maturely, he graciously prepares to fall on his sword, accepting the consequences of his actions. (For a contrasting view of the CDC as a seventies-conspiracy-style victim, see Steven King's 1978 novel "The Stand.")

And here's the point about that: the film is constructed to make us feel ashamed for ever suspecting him in the first place—even though he's the guy that every other paranoia movie we've ever seen, all those ones rooted in the seventies paradigm, has trained us to suspect. We're made to feel ashamed for identifying with the hectoring media types who victimize him. Of all the panoply of powerful institutions presented in the movie, the media is the only one for whom the viewer is to feel no sympathy. "Nothing spreads like fear" is the advertising tagline. And spreading fear, according to the picture's logic, is what the media is all about.

Indeed, we're made to loathe one investigator in particular—the guy who ends up as the film's preeminent villain, worse, far worse, in fact than the multinational corporation responsible for the superbug in the first place, who it turns out is really only kinda sorta responsible, because it was all a fluke accident.

The bad guy, you see, is a blogger.

A really, really evil blogger. A moral monster, in fact.

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The reviews for "The Rally to Restore Sanity" are generally favorable. We all want our political discourse to be civil and fair, right?

The pinnacle of Saturday's rally was Jon Stewart's "merging into the tunnel" speech:

And yet these millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze one by one into a mile long 30 foot wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river. Carved, by the way, by people who I’m sure had their differences. And they do it. Concession by conscession. You go. Then I’ll go. You go. Then I’ll go. You go then I’ll go. Oh my God, is that an NRA sticker on your car? Is that an Obama sticker on your car? Well, that’s okay—you go and then I’ll go.

And sure, at some point there will be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder and cuts in at the last minute, but that individual is rare and he is scorned and not hired as an analyst.

Andrew Breitbart has been hired as an election night analyst by ABC News.

FOX News is a safe haven for any prominent right winger to get a paycheck.

And it's more than just an occasional "selfish jerk." The GOP leadership has this very week assured voters that they will not compromise with the Democrats if they win the House and/or Senate.

Here's the deal, Jon. (We love ya, but...) Take your 'merge into the tunnel' analogy: Here we are, trying to work together to get through the tunnel and resolve the problems of America.

The Right jumps in front of our car and says we don't own that car and where's the papers showing we can drive through the tunnel? We show them, over and over and over, the car's birth certificate, but the Right screams that's not the actual paper we need to drive through the tunnel. And it's their tunnel! They want their tunnel back!

We get just enough help from a few on the Right to get one or two cars through the tunnel. The Healthcare and Financial Reform cars crawl out of the tunnel, and by the time they're through they're missing tires and several cylinders, but somehow they're through. As soon as some on the Right see them emerge, they scream that the cars were "shoved down their throats" and they vow to push and repeal the cars backwards through the tunnel so it looks like it never happened. And it's their tunnel! They want their tunnel back!

The very people who told us to sit down and shut up because they had a "mandate" in 2004 insist that a "Kenyan Usurper" has "stolen" the White House. And if a Democrat points out that Obama, a US citizen, won with a ten million vote majority and 365 electoral votes? La la la la la socialism! They want their tunnel back!

One could argue that the Birthers are a small overly vocal fringe. But it's not just the birthers. The LEADERSHIP of the party now vows that any ONE of them can block the entire tunnel, because "Senate Rules." Gridlock is better than sharing the tunnel.

Michelle Bachmann is a member of Congress! And she says forget the tunnel she's taking everyone back to the DMV for two solid years of "investigations." She promises this.

And by the way, death panels exist, Social Security and VA hospital privatization are a good plan, and unemployment insurance is "unconstitutional." Those are words not from birthers or fringe elements. Those are statements from GOP candidates. And that's the GOP leadership's PLAN for the tunnel.

One cannot be "civil" to those who refute proven facts, like 'Obama is a US Citizen' or 'there are no death panels.' One can ignore them, but if they attempt to control our discourse and elections, calling them out, loudly and with a verbal punch, is the only alternative. And if they want to block progress, we must stop them from doing so, even if it costs us our civility.

One sign at the rally said, "I may disagree with you, but I probably won't step on your head." Would that the right wing goons of Rand Paul and Andrew Breitbart felt the same way.

I am for civility, honesty, and a reasonable political discourse. But attention Comedy Central: You can't have a bi-partisan discussion about civil discourse if one side is throwing cinder blocks into traffic.