Explain away! The floor is all yours!

(D)ude: Man! Before people and the press pounce upon the President of the United States’ address in Brussels, Belgium, I think Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film Full Metal Jacket and the way I watched the film myself this past Christmas puts into an honest perspective a possible answer to the question of why President Obama addressed the Iraq War as he did.

(M)an: Dude! Explain away! The floor is all yours, Dr. Strangelove!

D: Man! You know about Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb? Did you know that Kubrick’s own fear of a possible nuclear attack on New York in his mid-thirties drove him to want to do a film about the topic?  

M: Dude! Four months from today is Kubrick’s birthday—which I am absolutely certain about. I would like to know just how you would tie together that which you have promised. And why haven’t I been recommended Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket yet? Christmas was a day and three months ago!

D: Man! Well, Stanley Kubrick’s extensive research for the Dr. Strangelove led him to decide that the material would be lampooned if he were to approach it seriously, so he decided to construct a dark comedy, a nightmare comedy as he put it, which resulted in reviews from both ends of the spectrum, chastisement from the New York Times and hoorahs from the Nation and Life.

M: Dude! You haven’t answered either question, although your utilization of Wikipedia for the background is, I think, parallel to not just that of Kubrick’s thorough literature review for that particular film but all his films. I believe he wrote the screenplays for all his movies, with the exception of one or two of his initial cinematic endeavors.

D: Man! Thank you? Which, by the way, makes me wonder why Hillary Rodham Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, Sheryl Sandberg, Anna Maria Chavez, and Arianna Huffington choose actively to shun the issue of the war on women’s autonomy regarding contraceptives in the United States? They trumpet around for the Clinton Global Initiative, advocate for a public service campaign focused on “Ban [the word] Bossy” from our cultural conscience and lexicon towards girls who are assertive, and then write self-deprecatory testimonials that end up devitalizing the awesome breadth and depth of the women’s rights movement not just domestically, but internationally.    

M: Dude! Domestically, I would like to ask each of the women you just listed if they have ever utilized contraceptives themselves and specifically in what circumstances, and with whom exactly. I would like to ask the male justices of the United States Supreme Court, Scalia in particular, whether they donned chastity belts themselves with regards to their sexual lifestyles. Actually, I would like to know whether any of the men on the Supreme Court have sexual lifestyles, except for Clarence Thomas, who, I believe, like Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, enforced the morning after pill routine on 

many women throughout his bachelorhood.    

D: Man! I went to a Hobby Lobby last year and noticed an uncomfortable tension and customer monitoring by the employees towards minorities and those who were visibly dressed according to the religious practices of their particular non-Christian faith. As a White male, I felt obligated to involve a Muslim woman and her toddler child in a chatty conversation while the cashier kept marking up the twenty-dollar bills over and over that the mother had handed to her. Ironically, the cashier was from another  region of the world as well and had an accent too, I think she was a Christian convert because her mannerism hinted some resentment at the Muslim mother and child for having the economic status to practice a faith through choice. But in my conversation with the mother with toddler, I felt a similar vibe of disenfranchisement from the woman towards her husband, who was a physician and had provided for her the amenities that the Christian convert cashier could only dream about accruing because of the pay inequities and everyday jolts she’s facing because of the Republican Tea GOP’s pandering to the will of businesses, plundering local, state, and federal government, and plunging deregulatory policies.  

M: Dude! Deregulatory policies? Contraception has become a privilege! Clearly, the Republican Tea GOP, the United States Supreme Court, and the women in business who choose to never look back once they reach the epsilons of affluence, embrace exclusivity, excess, and the egregious mindset that people in poverty should mobilize through yesterday’s private almsgiving practices that are demoralizing, implicit upon the individual surrendering his or her hope and worth for someone else’s edicts! We need government assistance! It is the heart of a democracy, for every citizen to have a way and means of economic mobility without having to compromise autonomy and forfeit imagination.   

D: Man! President Obama’s address in Brussels, Belgium reminded me of coming across Full Metal Jacket while channel surfing. Matthew Modine watches as his squad is goofing around and falling in and out of hate with each other moment to moment. Modine’s character is capturing the personalities and opinions, about the Vietnam War, of his Marine comrades, on videotape at their Hue base, right before going into combat.        

M: Dude! And then?

D: Man! There is a scene of combat where the squad heartbreakingly diminishes.

M: Dude! What do you mean?

D: Man! You see, the squad is alone in a disseminated war zone where there are booby traps and an awaiting sniper in their midst who keeps wounding and killing Modine’s brothers in arms, one by one. It is here that Stanley Kubrick’s genius made me mourn every one of the guys, who die successively and in slow motion before the camera resumes the fast action needed to resonate in the audience an actual feeling of the fear of war and the loyalty that exists amongst compatriots, a loyalty that runs so deep that Modine’s squad members risk booby traps in order to recover the bodies of their fallen comrades.    

M: Dude! Do all the men in Modine’s squad die?

D: Man! No, the sniper turns out to be a female Vietnamese teenager who is surrounded by the surviving Marines at the end of her life in a bombed building and pleading to be shot and relieved of the pain of the wounds that have left her vulnerable. The thing that really got to me was that the United States Marines comply with her final wishes rather cantankerously, Modine finally agrees to bring the teenage girl’s suffering to an end,  if I remember correctly.

M: Dude! Is that how the movie ends?

D: Man! No. The final scene is the United States Marines marching onward in the night through the blazing fires and remains of an annihilated city at the Battle of Hue. The men are singing the Mickey Mouse March, ironically. 

M: Dude! I get it! President Obama is Commander-in-chief and not wanting to address his troops in a way to malign their commitment to their country, the United States of America. To undermine the honor of our soldiers and veterans is sacrilege.

D: Man! The female teenage sniper’s anguish was palpable! You actually mourn for the girl and Vietnam too!