KURTZ 
” Are you an assassin?”
WILLARD
” I’m a soldier.”
KURTZ
” You’re neither. You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks
to collect a bill.”
Last night, while busting away at scales and arpeggios, working my way up the metronome, I watched Apocalypse Now (Redux), Coppola’s “definitive” version, with 40 something extra minutes of footage, remastered, remixed, and generally, filmically tweaked.
Alas, the movie is the worse for the extra footage — it was always a big film, but it just hurtled forward — all that extra stuff (and some of it is great, the extra Robert Duvall-age especially) just drags the narrative down. The music is terrible. I’m sure it was just overage from the original sessions, but there’s actually, like, romantic love music when they’re hanging out with the French colonials — it’s romantic, ah, what’s the word, dreck, hahaha, oh, terrible!
The real reason I’m writing this is actually even worse than a synth love theme in Apocalypse Now (I gotta say, though, the lighting in the dining room scene? With Martin squinting, shading his eyes from the sun through the window, it’s all golden, increasingly intense — then it’s all gone, cold and dead? Fookin brilliant) — I’m going to tell you about the dream I had after I watched it!
Insert Psycho violin shower music here
So I watch this Vietnam epic, I go to bed, I fall asleep, and I dream:
I’m in some position of considerable authority, I’m in the White House in some situation room, and I’m just absolutely abusing the shit out of Donald Rumsfeld, hahaha, I mean I’m dressing this poor fucker up one side and down the other like he’s a private in the army of the republic of punkass.
Strange dream — I mean I get the connection, but it just seems like such an unlikely choice made by my subconscious, you know? I mean, somewhere in my psyche I was waiting for a trigger to chew out Donald Rumsfeld? What?
Well, he was the Secretary of Defense, so if I was chewing him out, I guess in my dream I was President — the person actually responsible, right? I mean, we can demonize the underlings all we want, but I believe in the Captain Kirk — or the Colonel Kurtz — school of leadership: when everything turns to shit, the guy in charge is the one to blame . So unless (in my dream) I was chewing him out pre-invasion (and I wasn’t, the whole sorry mess was laid out on a big round table), I was just being a scapegoating bush leaguer…
To wrap up this wildly careening post, I’d like to recommend a book:
The March of Folly, by Barbara Tuchman — the very first sentence: “A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.”
It is a beautifully written review of persistent and resolute boneheadedism in which she chooses (from innumerable examples) Troy, the Reformation, the American War of Independence, and finally, Vietnam to make her case. Fully a third of the book is devoted to our ever-escalating and catastrophic blunders in southeast Asia, in the best, most clear-eyed, short history of that conflict I’ve ever read.
As you read it, our contemporary follies will resonate. It’s the book you want to be read — studied — pored over — by everyone who aspires to govern.
Last year I was reading “The Art of War” over and over, and it struck me: in the prosecution of our current folly, was there a conscious decision to do the exact opposite of Sun Tzu’s precepts in every single instance?
