see also: Gunner Palace

[by Cynthia Fuchs]

[previous page: I do focus unduly on United States, because I love America. I show tough love to America, as any parent would a child addicted to something.]

Morphizm: William thinks through some difficult questions on camera, with frighteningly little information.
EJ: Though he is deeply reflective, he is naïve about all that awaits him, all that Wilton learned in the battlefield. But when Wilton entered the military, it was a matter of duty. As he says, "When the bugle calls, you go." William never mentions a thing about fighting for his country. What he mentions is what the military appeals to, the "opportunities" the military can provide. So he's on the least informed end of the film's spectrum, notwithstanding his intellect. And in the middle, between those two poles are the pilots. They understand the challenging moral dilemmas that service poses; whether they agree with an order to not, they obey it. They are still comfortable enough with that role that they obey without engaging in the kind of deep thinking that Wilton does. So those three sets of characters represent a range of evolved thinking, across members of our military family.

Morphizm: And as pilots, they have a certain remove from their targets, granted by increasingly advanced technologies.
EJ: We showed the film at West Point. The cadets collectively gasped at two moments in the film that civilian audiences don't notice, both having to do with William. One is the scene where William is told he might become a pilot some day, and given his level of education, age, and less than straight-laced persona, the cadets all knew that was a cruel ruse. Later, when he's glancing through a brochure of helicopters and points out one he's been told he might be able to fly in the service, they gasped again, because that helicopter had been discontinued two years before this scene was shot.

Morphizm: Do you see a way out of all this?
EJ: Yes, I do. I'm optimistic because I'm not overly preoccupied with the present.

Morphizm: A decision that's a function of not being in a war zone?
EJ: Yes. But there's a tendency in our society to forget history. It's the long story of many dark chapters, followed by enlightenment. We are living in a dark chapter and the majority of people feel it. What happens in the darkness, I think, is people wake up, become concerned and frustrated, and look for answers. Usually, when their voice rises to the point of being heard, it is too late for many people. It certainly looked to the black South Africans that they would never overcome their white oppressors. For the colonists, triumph over the British empire must have seemed a tall order. And it must have seemed to the French that they would never eject their tyrant.

Morphizm: These are violent overthrows.
EJ: They don't always have to be. For Nelson Mandela, everything was bloody except the revolution. He figured out, through the strength of reason, decency, charisma, and a devotion to democratic principles, that violence begets violence. If you look at the prelude to the Iraq war, 30 million people marched in protest before a single shot was fired. If you compare that to the Vietnam war, about 13 Quakers marched down Fifth Avenue and nobody even heard them.

People will say, "But it didn't stop the war." But this is a long-term struggle. Someone once asked Zhou En Lai what he thought about the French Revolution. "Too soon to tell," he replied. We are only a small blip in the tension between the basic altruism and basic avarice of the human being. It's all of our mandate to find a sustainable and decent way to go forward. And we can only do that if we keep our eye on the struggle.

I take comfort from a strange place, in the lies we were told to go into this war. The extent of those lies underscores that it was against our better judgment to go to war in Iraq. I trust the good intentions of the public. If that means we have to endure a dark stretch of time, revolutionary change takes many forms. We adapt. We learned that we could not turn to the usual source of information, the mainstream media, because journalism is prey to the same forces of runaway corporatism that Eisenhower was warning against. And so the public looked elsewhere, to documentaries, to the blogosphere, the internet, satellite radio, or papers they'd never read before. That's a very inspiring phenomenon. That's not good news for CEOs of major media organizations, but it's very good news for anyone who cares about democracy. Because it says that no matter what you do to democracy in the halls of power or corporate America, you can't take it from human beings.

March 01, 2006

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