Notes upon the first few minutes of a movie I turned off.

No one needs to tell history majors of the inanity of war or its tremendous influence on human affairs. We know. We've studied them. Most wars are shallow, pointless, and stupid. People justify them then and later generations will justify them. In my opinion World War I, the Spanish American War, the War in Vietnam, and a myriad of other wars did nothing but spill a lot of human blood in the name of high ideals while in reality it was mere blood-letting of some anger and hostility. War is usually pointless and it is a rare and very fine leader who can keep the general banality of human nature from indulging in a base desire on par with denying poor food or the helpless assistance.

That being said, sometimes war is necessary. It is a nasty and abysmal thing, but still a necessary evil. It is not my desire to here-in discuss when war is justified and when it is not. Rather, I wish to discuss something I recently watched.

I had heard good things about Flags of Our Fathers. I had really wanted to see it when it was released. I had thought the movie would be a good study on guilt as one group goes home at the price of others who really did the deed. I will not by any means discredit Mr. Eastwood's ability as a director. I will lay siege to this movie.

Flags of Our Fathers, or atleast the bit I saw, is a jumbled mess. It starts in the dreams of an old man, and yo-yos between past and present to a degree that hardly lets one have grasp of anything. In fact that would be the main point of the movie. One feels as if nothing is real. There is no right and no wrong. The soldiers fight and die on the beach for nothing. The heads of state want to win a war just to win a war. There were no concentration camps, there were no brutal Japanese, there were no real points to this war. It was just some foolish old men sending men to die needlessly.

My generation applauds this kind of talk. It is not because of some noble enlightenment about the nature of war and its cost. (To believe that is such damned nonsense if you just look at the practical lust we have about mutilations and cruelty in our films.) Rather it is that my generation wishes to see itself as the best generation. We would rather tear down the edifices of our grandparents so we did not have to look at them. We have accomplished nothing in our lifetime except the acceleration of the destruction of the environment, the continuation of the banality of our culture, and the destabilization of world order. That is just to name a few things. When did my generation sacrifice? When did my generation give? When did my generation really practice costly grace?

It doesn't matter though because revisionist historians tell us that our grandparents were just as banal as we were. This war they fought in the forties didn't really mean anything. You see they were either saps or scoundrels. The former believed all that nonsense about ridding the world of tyranny and the latter was just in it for all they could get.

I cannot respond to such a world-view because it falls so far out beyond the pale of reality as to be considered in the realm of Lewis Carroll. We have seen the Japanese catching babies upon bayonets and holding our soldiers in zoos or working them to beyond the point of death. We know of Germans leading people to incinerators or perpetrating horrible "experiments" upon them. We had tried to appease these monsters and they forced us to have to launch a crusade upon the darkness. If there had been another way, we would have done it; but there was no other way except brute force.

Were there evils on our side? Of course there were. The internment of American citizens who happened to be of Japanese origins is a deep blemish on our country's honor. Our treatment of African American service men was bad enough, even without the stark contrast with the German soldiers we sent back to be "prisoners" in the South. That is what makes America such a unique country. We freely admit where our mistakes were. However, it also invites countries with less developed senses of "guilt" and notions of "atonement" to label us as just as vile.

But let us Americans be perfectly honest. We live in the greatest country in the world and we are inheritors of an honorable legacy. It is a legacy of ideas and ideals. A country were imperfections were written down right beside achievements; and this is where I find fault with Flags of Our Fathers.

It is a film glorifying nihilism. Nobody really believed anything. The soldiers really didn't believe in the war. They didn't believe in right and wrong in essence. They were just along for the ride history was giving them. Do me a favor, talk to a veteran from that war and ask them if that is what they really believed. Perhaps you could read some history and find the truth of the matter.

This was a war that had to be fought. It was a war that could have no appeasement save total victory by the allies. There would be other wars where the two sides could compromise, but this was a war between absolute good being represented by flawed human beings and absolute evil being represented by flawed human beings. This film would be wise to take heed of such truths and not trade the heritage of a nation for a cheap forgiveness of my current pathetic generation.