Don't pass up the opportunity to see The Lives of Others. It is a profound depiction of the creepiness of life in a totalitarian society. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Set in the former East Germany, the movie portrays the surveillance of a prominent writer and his actress girlfriend by Stasi, the socialist regime's secret police. A.O. Scott in The New York Times wrote that the movie exposes "the grim, brutal absurdity of the late, unlamented German Democratic Republic" and "lays bare the anxious, cruel psychology of socialism as it once existed."

The Lives of Others is that exceedingly rare cinematic commodity: a story so well told that its character development entrances us despite its subtitles and without benefit of car chases, sex or gratuitous violence.

Seeing this film is also a reminder of what we should value in being an American. There is a scene at the movie's climax when the Berlin Wall has fallen and Stasi has crumbled. The public is allowed to see its secret police files.

The playwright puts in his request. We see a file clerk going through row upon row of files. It is reminiscent of a scene in Luchino Visconti's The Damned, in which a high Nazi official allows an industrialist to glimpse the vast files of the SS and particularly the file being kept on his son. It is a chilling moment that's accented by the blue-eyed Aryan Nazi's statement that the glory of national socialism is that everyone informs on everyone else.

In The Lives of Others, the file clerk brings the playwright a heaping library cart of files. He pores through them until he learns that Stasi broke his drug-addicted girl friend into confessing the playwright's involvement in the publication of an article in a West German magazine.

We who live in a free society may congratulate ourselves that we know better than the hapless creatures that walked the gray landscape of East Germany. But cultural smugness must not keep us from remembering that the struggle against government secrecy and surveillance is constant. The shocking thing about America in 2007 is how many citizens are culturally illiterate about where this nation came from, to say nothing of the blood that was shed to end slavery and the decades of struggle it took to enfranchise women.

Jefferson said that democracy depends on a citizenry that is informed. The bad joke of our so-called information revolution is that for all of the new round-the-clock information options, Americans are just as ignorant. The Pew Trust has recently polled Americans on baseline knowledge (Who is the vice president?) and found the same level of awareness versus ignorance as was found during polling in 1980. Nothing has changed. A startling level of backwardness persists.

In a totalitarian society such as East Germany or the Soviet Union or North Korea, the person who blurts out the truth about the nightmare is branded as insane. The same phenomenon may occur in the United States of America. Consider, for example, the story of Alex Young and Leslie Weise. They were ejected from a speech by President Bush in 2005 because their vehicle carried an antiwar bumper sticker: "No more blood for oil."

A lawyer defending the two men who ejected Young and Weise said: "They excluded people from a White House event because they posed a threat of being disruptive." Hmmm. So the acid test is support for the Iraq War. With so many Americans opposed to the war, how does the White House field an audience? The answer, of course, is that the president and vice president make speeches at military bases and culturally cleansed venues such as the Heritage Foundation. In cultural terms, how is that different from the kind of robotic audiences that are fielded for totalitarian leaders?

The presidency of George W. Bush is so weird that it tests our collective sanity. The obsession with secrecy, the managerial laziness and the inability to see nuance, be imaginative or seek compromise is a package that would lead to certain bankruptcy in the private sector.

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