June 22, 2004

"How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb." The 1964 movie nominated for four academy awards, The Stanley Kubrick film that summed up the madness of the Cold War. The comedy titled "Dr. Strangelove" that we are reliving today and that no American television network dares to replay.

Instead, those of us sickened, nauseated, and disgusted with watching the news, those of us who turn to the movie channels for a little relief are treated to a continuous stream of reruns of old Clint Eastwood westerns, World War II movies like Patton and others where the heroes always survive unscathed, and a host of modern superhero movies where the good guys perform impossible feats of physical dexterity while making pithy remarks and the bad guys are the worst shots in the world. War is depicted as a great adventure and a test of manhood.

If you become a fan of action movies, you could easily begin to believe that the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagall, Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Jean Claude Van Dam, Jackie Chan, Sylvester Stalone, Keanu Reeves, Al Pacino, Nicolas Cage, Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise and even Gene Hackman or Julia Roberts could make up the greatest Delta Force in the world. What else would we need to take care of pipsqueaks like Usama bin Laden?

Why are the networks afraid of showing Dr. Strangelove once in awhile? Could it be that the systems of power are today out of control? Would the inane attempts of President Markly (Peter Sellers) reflect negatively on our current president, a man who takes guidance and inspiration from a burning bush in the Rose Garden and has the power to release our overwhelming "nucular" advantage once more?

Are we afraid of a "mine shaft gap" between ourselves and the terrorists that seem to do so well with caves? Will General Jack Ripper's paranoid fears of the "Ruskies" messing with our "precious bodily fluids" remind us of the "weapons of mass destruction" that Iraq was ready to unleash against us in fifteen minutes?

Can a film from 40 years ago possibly be dangerous to today's policies simply because Burpelson Air Force Base is loaded with signs saying "Peace is our profession" and General Ripper (Sterling Hayden) claims that "your Commie has no regard for human life, even his own?" Sound familiar?

Talk about a "Blast From The Past," Joseph Farrah, the editor and CEO of WorldNetDaily.com, claims in the February issue of Whistleblower magazine; "Remember all those shelters we built and maintained in the 1950s and 1960s? It's time to bring them back. It's time to build more. It's time to train U.S. citizens they can survive a nuclear war – especially a limited one – and that they have an obligation to do so."

Later in the same article, and while talking about Osama bin Laden, he said; "If he or any of his ilk ever get their hands on nuclear weapons – and there is good reason to believe they already have – they will not hesitate to use them on us." How's that for convoluted reasoning? Did we all miss something? A nuclear explosion is pretty hard to ignore. Surely our satellites would pick it up.

There are 193 sovereign nations in the world. The United States of America maintains a military presence in about 137 of them protecting our "national interests" whatever that means. The rest are probably targets of the CIA's clandestine operations. And George W. Bush says; "We are not an empire."

We also have a military presence in Hollywood. And don't think that they're there just to lend technical support to all those recruitment high adventure movies. While the Bush administration borrows almost $700 billion this year, there's no reason to doubt that he will drop a billion or two on Hollywood's complex production and distribution network with the same sort of ties the "No Child Left Behind" educational money has to letting recruiters into our schools.

In short, we're lucky they haven't bought up all the copies of Dr. Strangelove and a few movies like Wag The Dog or even Dave have managed to sneak out in the past few years. No doubt, the military missed the fact that Dave is the preview or "trailer" to the discovery of Osama's body this coming October.

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