D-Day is patriarchy’s nightmare

I do not watch movies very often. It is too time consuming to get to the movie house. The cost is also prohibitive even when I skip the soda and the popcorn. English movies are often dubbed rather than subtitled, making them unintelligible, and the Chinese movies without English subtitles do not allow me to laugh when everyone does. Happily, good movies are not dependent on dialogue so the visual message is sufficient to absorb the cinematic intent. Still, I have 100 unwatched movies on my HD copied two Oahu trips ago, so I do not want.

CCTV has a channel that shows foreign movies, most of it in English. I get to watch at home rather than have to comb my hair to look presentable at the box office. This past week, I watched the Bridge on the River Kwai and Saving Private Ryan. I saw the Kwai movie eons ago, the first anti-war movie I had seen. The senselessness of war is beautifully rehearsed in Ryan, heart rending no matter how we glamorize it.

The Bridge on the River Kwai tells of how a battalion of British soldiers kept their upper lip intact and their morale high by refusing to be victims in a prisoner-of-war concentration camp commanded by a rather “soft-hearted” but anxious prison warden who took it a personal mission to build a needed bridge. Otherwise, commit hara-kiri if he failed. The film is focused on British soldiers manifesting discipline, and the officers exercising command prowess, building a jolly good bridge.

An escaped low-ranking American soldier who took on the identity of an officer “volunteered” to join a demolition team whose leader revealed his awareness of the soldier’s true identity. He led the team to destroy the bridge that would link the rail from Singapore to Rangoon. The proud British officer discovered the demolition wiring the day after the bridge’s turnover but shortly before the train was to cross, and in a moment of realization that he was first a soldier at war rather than a gentleman to preserve honor and tradition, he fell on the detonator in time to blow up the bridge and the train in it.

The haunting whistles of Colonel Bogey March got the hair on my arms standing at full attention.

The movie Saving Private Ryan was about one remaining live brother out of four who enlisted during the war, and Tom Hanks’ character was ordered to go find the surviving one in Europe where Private Ryan had parachuted behind enemy lines on D-Day and bring him home to his parents. Hank’s character recruited six to his command plus a cartographer who also spoke French and German, and went looking for Private Ryan. 

A contextual statement: The social structures on which our society evolved is a medieval clamor for ecclesiastical authority, the Roman Catholics sticking with the Pope, and the Protestants latching on the authority of the Bible with a contrarian individualistic bent towards the “priesthood of all believers.”

In the film, hierarchical authority is challenged by American rugged individualism of personal uniqueness. The Hanks character, ranked a captain in the US Army, was a teacher who made decisions on his feet while he figured out the moral requirement of an issue at any given moment. One of the characters in the film was a captured German soldier in an encounter where one of the seekers was a casualty, making the soldier’s capture a tense moment. Killing him tit-for-tat was the instinctive call except one of the soldiers convinced the captain to exercise mercy and not to let the other soldiers execute the prisoner. The “prisoner” was let go.

This is a fictional story, with overtones of morality and conscience. The seekers finally locate Private Ryan but decide to join him in defending the critical bridge his outfit was protecting. The “let go” German rejoins his outfit, was with an assaulting company, and shot the Allied captain that let him go. The “cowardly” soldier that originally convinced the captain to save the German “prisoner” in turn executes him.

Both movies gave us pause. It makes me think of Obama who fulfilled, if only partly, his pledge to get American troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. He had not closed out Guantanamo’s Detention Center yet, but as we already discovered in the Veterans’ medical care scandal, he is not always kept in the loop on his own watch.

I excuse him not from culpability. The drums he had unleashed to our hearing in moving out of current theatres of military operations to the Far East, makes him less a statesman struggling with the patriarchy of warmongering than a lackey of the military-industrial complex that makes the President a marketer for the drones of war. War is profitable; it is the American way!

Year-round, I am either downwind of the Laguna de Bay breeze at Manila’s well-kept Memorial Cemetery, or driving through Oahu’s silent crosses at Punchbowl close to where I delivered folks’ daily morning papers, or listening to piped music at Saipan’s American Memorial Park amphitheater at sundown. It is time for the matriarchs of peace to take over, IMHO!