Amazon gave viewers an ugly Christmas surprise this year when those who engage in the American yuletide tradition of watching the cinematic classic ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ found a key scene of the movie cut out, rendering the rest incoherent. Amazon offered an “abridged” version that left out the entire “Pottersville” scene, George Bailey’s vision of what the world would have been like if he had never been born.
Apparently, the whole thing was over a copyright issue with that scene in the 1946 film, but it’s also worth noting in this connection that America is poised to emerge from its own Pottersville, the four years of the Biden-Harris regime. As it was once fashionable to say, I question the timing.
You remember the story. The angel, Clarence, treats a despondent George to an extended look at what his hometown of Bedford Falls would have become if he had not been around to exert his quiet, modest influence for the good. George, astonished, sees that Bedford Falls has been renamed Pottersville, after the heartless and amoral businessman with whom George locks horns. It’s a grim, dark place, full of battered souls whose hopes and dreams have been beaten out of them.
As George surveys the wreckage of his beloved little town, he realizes that just as many in the town have good reason to be grateful to him, he has abundant reason to be grateful as well. His vision over, George rushes home proclaiming that it is, indeed, a wonderful life.
Fox News reported Thursday, however, that “on Amazon Prime's version of the movie, details of what led to his changed attitude towards his life are left out. Instead, after the angel tells George he has to earn his wings, the scene cuts to George joyously running through the streets after he's realized the value of his own life.”
This not only makes the movie meaningless and impossible to understand, but it also leads to inevitable questions about whether woke Amazon executives decided that a trip through Pottersville was just what America didn’t need this Christmas. Look at it this way: from 2017 to 2021, Donald Trump was president. For the first time in ages, America got involved in no new wars. Inflation wasn’t eating away at Americans’ life savings. Gas prices were lower than they had been in years. Putin didn’t move a fingernail against Ukraine. Hamas hatched no plots to massacre Israelis wholesale. Trump started building the wall on the southern border, and illegal entries slowed to a trickle.
Then came the misrule of Old Joe Biden, and Trump’s Bedford Falls became Pottersville. Putin’s armies moved against Ukraine. Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023. Inflation went through the roof. Gas prices became prohibitive. Old Joe and his “Border Czar” Kamala Harris erased the border, and untold numbers of criminals and terrorists streamed in, along with hordes of economic migrants who added a further strain upon the sputtering economy. Crime went through the roof. Racial resentment went through the roof. Mentally disturbed men who claimed they were women were forced upon us from the highest levels, and everyone had to play along and agree that they were women, on pain of deplatforming and vilification as a “bigot.”
Related: Will This Be the End of Bond — James Bond?
And then, like that great, big, lovable lug George Bailey, America had a vision. It didn’t have to be this way. If Old Joe Biden’s America was a vision of what the country would have been like if Donald Trump were not president, Trump himself was still around, offering a way back to Bedford Falls. America had enough of the woke hegemony, the high crime, the high prices, the lessening respect around the world, the enforced gender madness, and all the rest and voted against Old Joe’s Pottersville.
Amazon is one of the wokest companies out there. It is in the process of killing off the James Bond series, which has run for sixty years, in pursuit of its far-left agenda. Is it possible, just possible, that the Pottersville scene got axed out of concern that too many Americans would watch it and draw the obvious analogy? Nah. Amazon wouldn’t do something like that, would it? Oh, surely not!
Join the conversation as a VIP Member