On War

The problem with explosions is that I participated in one, more than one actually. If you really want to know, one almost killed me on New Year’s Day, 2005. It was a few seconds late and a few shrapnel pieces short of the ending credits for me. It did hurt like hell though and I had a gimp limp for about a month. Someone almost got that prize money for giving me the hard good-bye.

This all came searing back into to my brain while watching Sherlock Holmes in the theater. It was the brilliantly-filmed, slow-motion, multiple explosion scene that made me think. While I should go into a long diatribe about how real explosions don’t let you get up and run through them, I won’t. What struck my mind, as I watched the flames reach out and grasp for the hero, was how explosions—the premier expression of violence in our day—have become our entertainment. Is this the price we pay for fighting wars year after year without end? Our entertainment becomes confused with our nightly news? The news and movies are filled with the same explosions therefore they must be the same. Maybe I read too much into it all but I have had a very intimate experience with a very real explosion. I hope you only watch the romanticized version on the big screen. Even more, I hope you can still distinguish between the two. I don’t want to live in a world where you can’t.

Yet what really bothered me as I watched the story unfold is how our hero is also a simple expression of violence. Sherlock Holmes, one of fiction’s great intellectual heroes, is reduced to using his logic and deductive skill to maim and bully—we call that cool. He is reduced to a back room brawler who destroys out of boredom. Does he fight evil? No, just any weaker than himself for a night's sport. Has man’s ability to think become only expressible through violence? Is that what we have become as American men? What ever happened to the idea of the common good and our heroes standing up for the weak? Why don’t our heroes use intellect to create more and destroy less? I am so tired of the anti-hero. Can I please have one hero I can look up to and strive to be like?

I could go on about this more but I am tired of asking questions; I want to go eat some popcorn and watch Gran Torino.