 |
version seven. http://demongin.org |
I Like Ike
Classic Gin
Thursday, 2005-12-29 | Classic Gin
Every year there are probably about a dozen big-budget movies that either satirize or outright pan what President Eisenhower first called "the military industrial complex" all the way back in 1961.
The attraction is obvious. Most people, answering to no higher imperatives than superstition and the desire for creature comforts as they make the decisions that shape their lives, are in the habit of simply assuming that anyone with more social, political or economic stature than them is probably involved in either a.) the occult, b.) perverse or illicit sexual exchanges or c.) shady political/financial dealings. Hence a great number of filmmakers, even if they know better themselves, annually indulge these base fantasies about what really goes on behind closed doors because they know that with even a minimal effort they'll be able to rattle enough cages that the wage-slaves will enthusiastically recapitulate the text and subtext of their movie around the water cooler on Monday morning and the critics will take the bait and engage even the most half-hearted attempts to satirize or otherwise impugn the "military industrial complex."
It's easy money.
It's also ironic. The irony consists in the fact that the man whose 1961 valediction first warned against the dangers of allowing our national destiny to fall into the hands of those shadowy aristocrat-oligarch-puppet-masters who pull the strings of the "military industrial complex" was the same man who advocated the construction of a national interstate system in order that American soldiers could quickly crush domestic insurgency.
These sentimental rememberings of Eisenhower's fatherly valediction, like the pandering filmmakers who mass-produce them, are, no matter what form they take, the naive fantasies of easily beguiled children who have yet to learn that their father was a man and that all men are flawed.
Might it be possible that Eisenhower was merely trying to throw people off the scent? Papa gives the bogeyman a name--something catchy--and warns the children to be eternally vigilant. And while the children are dutifully carrying out their vigil, papa is free to do whatever he likes.
