Tonight I pulled out an old movie
that I long ago transferred from tape to DVD, called Battle Cry. As I watched this Marine Corp fable, crafted by
Leon Uris, for the fourth or fifth time, I was telling Mertie that if she
wanted to know me as I existed mentally when I was 17, that movie had it all.
It encapsulates all I believed about men, women, sex, marriage, courage, honor,
love, faithfulness, war, children, prostitutes, America, WWII, male camaraderie,
extra-marital sex, family relations, barroom behavior, smoking, drinking and
love affairs. Battle Cry was released
February 8, 1955 when I was a high school senior. Influenced by that movie and
too many John Wayne movies to list, four months later, on June 15, 1955, I was
on a train to Great Lakes Naval Training Center. I also told my wife if she
wanted to understand my smashup and alcoholic drinking I suffered through from
around 1964 through 1976 when I stopped drinking, all she has to think about is
how the 1960s and early 1970s interacted with my outworn beliefs. The movie is
one cliche after another from start to finish, yet I found myself crying from
time to time as I watched it. I suppose I was crying over the lost innocence of
the young man I was. Later, another movie followed me into the sort of person I
became with a college degree in English after I dropped out of graduate school.
That movie was Five Easy Pieces with
Jack Nicholson as Robert Dupea who also had college degrees, drank too much and
worked strictly blue collar.
I write this not to invite my
friends to check these movies out but, like most writing, to remind myself
about who I was and who I am and about the growth of consciousness and
awareness that comes with a good education and a much better grasp of normative
human values and reality. What happened during the middle decades of the 20th
Century divided forever those who never gave up that false fable of reality
offered by Battle Cry and those of us
who suffered through and got beyond the movie Five Easy Pieces.
Modern Teapublicans live in a world
about 60 years out of date, some even 2,000 years out of date. This is why they
are full of the same kind of fear I was filled with during the 1960s. Let us
hope that their fears do not destroy the American Dream by trying to return us
to a heroic myth about the past much like Hitler and Mussolini wanted to return
their nations to a mythic reality that never existed. When I put it this way, I
realize we must not be naive enough to imagine that the far right could not
impose some fascist reality onto America. If our society became unstable enough
and if the middle class became fearful enough, America could easily slip into a
fascist nightmare. I fear the modern Teapublican by trying to destroy and
destabilize our American government hopes unconsciously to bring about a return
to mythical times they thought were so much better than modern times. Fascism
cannot come from the liberal dream any more than liberals brought fascism to
Italy and Germany. Liberals support modernity not ancient myths. They were
persecuted in those two nations right alongside the Communists.
