I recently watched Saving Private Ryan, and found myself amused at the difference a few years can make in one's reactions to a film. I remember very well how, when it was first released eight years ago, many on the right embraced it (along with Tom Brokaw's bathetic The Greatest Generation) as a repudiation of all things Clintonesque. I distinctly remember columnist Suzanne Fields writing a column in which she compared the on-screen, pretend heroism of Hanks et al. with the real-life President dealing with a hostile Congress and media environment. Landing as it did in the midst of the Year of Monica, SPR seemed to offer something our then-contemporary times lacked - a certain seriousness, a depth of humanity, even a willingness to be equivocal about certain moral issues (didn't we see American soldiers engage in war crimes in this film?). Nevermind tht the shallowness was foisted upon the American people by a Republican establishment hell-bent on destroying a Pesident they considered illegitimate; the shallowness was real, and being Clinton was President, he received much of the blame for the irrational exuberance of an age more concerned with blow jobs and blue dresses than a fight against tyranny.
Fast forward to the age of Bush, and we find much the same shallowness, but it a tragic, rather than farcical shallowness (proving Marx wrong once again). Embroiled in a horrific war of choice, foisted upon us once again by a Republican establishment ill-equipped intellectually or morally to handle the strain, I found myself faced with the imperative of Tom Hanks' dying Capt. Miller: "Earn this." When I first saw the film when it was released, I felt the film offered no answers, but rather addressed this question to us, the viewers. Had we earned these deaths? Had we become worthy of the sacrifices made to keep us safe?
While one could argue the point back and forth eight years ago, in George Bush's America, it seems to me the answer is a resounding, unequivocal "NO!". Those who currently hold positions of authority and power are unworthy of the great offices they occupy. They have mortgaged our future, economically, militarily, and even morally for transient political gain. They have wasted our most precious resource - the lives of our young men and women - in a war no one wanted, and it seems, no one even thought through very clearly. Rather than a shaking Matt Damon standing before Tom Hanks, imagine for a moment, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Dennis Hastert, John Boehner, Bill Frist, or even George W. Bush standing there. These moral midgets have brought this nation to the brink of failure. The only excuse this gang of incompetents could possibly offer is that they are morally deaf to such an imperative. Such an excuse only shows the depths to which we have sunk; to offer John Bolton the office once held by Adlai Stevenson and Eleanor Roosevelt is an insult not just to the United Nations, but an example of the complete and utter stupidity of our current administration. It would be funny if lives weren't being lost even as this is typed. The stakes are much too high to pretend this is some kind of game, intellectual or otherwise.
This is the service watching Saving Private Ryan has offered in George Bush's America: We are reminded that we need people in positions of authority who are worthy of the burdens they carry, and who will lead us to be better than we are, or perhaps even thought we could be.
Virtual Tin Cup
