A visit with Dr. Strangelove
A vision of presidential advisers . . .
I have been silent since the election. Not silent, but speechless. But today my husband decided he wanted to watch “something funny”. What did he choose? Dr. Strangelove, unfortunately not as funny to me as it was to him. Half-watching it with him (in the same room, but otherwise occupied, I tried to ignore it. Not because I hated it, but because by now it has become allegorical. I tend to find fodder for thought and this was no exception. He and I happen to be the beginning and end of the Silent Generation. He grew up during the Depression and graduated from High School on the year that I was born. I was born in June of 1945 to “Greatest Generation” parents, and graduated from High School in May of 1963. In Nov. of 1964, President Kennedy was assassinated, and the chaos went on and on. RFK, MLK, and then as a little afterwards ploy, Disney died along with any innocence I might ever have had.
Vietnam, G.I. baths for hippies, the poor for cannon fodder, black market capers, gold bar “out of the country” capers — well, they began to wear on you. A divorce and two kids later, I ran into a Vietnam vet and married him. By the time I escaped from that error of judgment, I found myself wanting to answer yes when presented with the question “are you a Viet-nam vet” on job applications. So, it was no wonder that, when I met a man who was seventeen years older than I and who remembered the world before Chaos overcame it, we found ourselves compatible. We are both students in the humanities, in history, and up on current affairs (in self-defense, of course)! But the longer you look into human behavior, the more circular it gets.
Reading recently in “The Garden of Forking Paths”, by Brian Klaas, I reposted and recommended his essay on the honored Cuneiform interpreter who just got a new contract with the British Museum according to this story. I got a new perspective on how long this has been going on. Noah’s Ark is nothing (I already knew that) but the written language that Dr. Finkelstein is talking about (cuneiform) is 5,000 years old. And if that’s not old enough, it supplanted a written language that came before it. Of course, any auditor might feel familiarity on the text’s topics, but then there’s Noah, 1,000 years before the Hebrew text. And don’t forget the stories of Gilgamesh. I’m surprised they haven’t resurrected him as a Super Hero. It all becomes clear when you finally realize that Father Abraham was from Ur where the story crops up so early.
I am not making light of anything here, just pointing out that humans have stories much more in common than literalists would have us believe. You may find that this particular essay will ease your mind regarding the current parade of under-achievers that will soon be ruling us.
Most people don't know is that much of what they believe in is "borrowed" from earlier stories and beliefs that migrated westward with the people that brought them.
I've grown up in a Post-Soviet world and I've always taken this movie seriously. I learned about this movie about the same time in middle school that the concept that we as humanity could end ourselves.
The idea that adults were humans, not forces of nature to be feared or adored,that we can make incredibly poor decisions that we can't take back and that destroy us, all hit home about the same time.
I'm reminded how both very powerful and very helpless we are at the same time. And I try to encourage the people around me to understanding and toward good because that's the only guardrail I can construct.