08.12.11
Fanaticism
I thought MSNBC’s work in Wisconsin on Tuesday night wildly inappropriate. They front loaded the news and were burned to a crisp.
Between Ed Schulz and Rachel Maddow, the network had built up the Wisconsin recalls as a huge victory, a raising the flag on Iwo Jima moment, a big strike back against the other side.
What they got was the losing side in the Battle of the Bulge.
Specifically, the big movie starring Richard Shaw, Henry Fonda, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson and a bunch of other name stars.
Shot in Spain, it was one of those big production movies so badly done it’s silly. Which, coincidentally, is unfortunately typical of premature Dem proclamations of victory.
By the end of the Bulge the climactic panzer battle looks like it’s taking place on a hot desert plain, not the forests of the Ardennes in the dead of winter.
“How did we get to el Alamein?” someone should have asked in post production.
Still, the Battle of the Bulge is something of a tragi-comedic show of fanaticism and delusion.
Richard Shaw plays Hessler, the ramrod steely German miraculous panzer leader, brought back for a last campaign, one to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. He gets carried away by the new Tiger tanks he’s been given (in the movie they’re old crap Pattons we sold to Spain in the 50’s and 60’s) and a group of young soldiers singing “Das Panzerlied.”
I have to laugh every time I see the scene, it’s so wonderful. This link will take you to a listing of it on YouTube.
Pick the one — uploaded by “arddel.” The sound is exquisite. Can you recognize the actor who would get a bigger role in “Where Eagles Dare”?
(It comes at 1:49.)
Behind those singing soldiers is a big banner: “Der Sieg wird unser sein.”
“The victory will be ours.”
Another banner reads: “Glauben. Kampfen. Siegen.”
“Believe! Fight! Win!”
Win the fucking future.
Hessler orders his skeptical orderly, a much older soldier who has been through all the campaigns, to sing. The man does so but you can see in his eyes he know it’s rot. What was once great now just isn’t good enough.
And to my mind it’s a good metaphor for our leaders. It was Ed Schulz in Wisconsin.
It’s Barack Obama when he went onstage yesterday at some measly battery plant in Michigan, choosing not to seriously discuss any of the problems that need fixing.
Everyone knows it’s the other side’s fault he can’t do anything. But he just can’t bring himself to speak it. Instead, another exhortation — onward to victory, the equivalent of singing a song — from the local bunker.
(Between two states, the place employed 150 people! Bethlehem Steel, even in major decline in the mid-Eighties when I lived near it, dwarfed the place.)
And, of course, the delusion applies in extremity to all the wild-eyed crazies in the GOP, virtually the entire party.
None of our leaders can bring themselves to admit what the old geezers standing behind them know, those who can be ordered to sing and go along but who do so only reluctantly.
Like in the movie, the country’s best now is not going to be good enough. Not by a long shot.
“Pivoting to jobs” and making speeches at piss ant firms found by the advance team using Google for a few minutes won’t fix it. Budget cutting and deficit chopping and clapping your hands in glee when the government is downsized and more people are put out of work certainly won’t.
There are answers but fanaticism and delusion make them unreachable and unspeakable to the people in power.
At the end of Bulge everything has gone to hell for Hessler. The battle is lost but he’s trying to force the last panzer up the hill as barrels of fuel incinerate him. The Panzerlied can be heard in the background. (Here.)
His aide, the old man, walks back to what’s left of Germany.
That’s us. No Marshall Plan or anything else, awaits, though. Just more of the same.