I have another association with the subject of yesterday’s
post—the commentary by a colleague that his Marine-in-the-making son’s only
association with the name “Gomer Pyle” was with Full Metal Jacket.
I love reading local, small-town
newspapers—reflecting their readership, they give such a different perspective
on things than I’m used to (having grown up in LA). And when I was in grad
school, that local rag was The Virginia Gazette.
And, to help them keep atop of the fast-breaking news in that swinging
community of Williamsburg, Va., the Gazette
had a hotline. This consisted of a phone number and an answering machine,
where anyone could leave a message—anonymously—on any topic. And the paper
would publish a compilation of the, er, printable ones.
(Children—this was in the deep, dark ages, before
you could spew your crack-brained half-formed thoughtlets all over the Internet
on forums, Twitter, FB, the Wall Street Journal,
etc.)
I always thought that one of the lousiest jobs ever
(and certainly the worst in the ’Burg) was that of having to pick up those
messages off the answering machine every morning.
Well, one day, there was a rather lengthy rant
(the answering machine evidently didn’t cut you off after 60 seconds) from a Williamsburg
Public Library patron absolutely fulminating about having checked out a video
of Full Metal Jacket and being
outraged and horrified to discover that the content was vulgar, violent and offensive.
(He might have thought he was getting a sequel to No Time for Sergeants. I don’t know.)
He was appalled—appalled, I tell you—that the
library should have such filth available, and he’d expressed these feelings
by writing “filth” on the cassette before returning it.
Then he was further outraged that the library fined
him for defacing library materials.
It was not his day.
I don’t know for sure, of course, but I’ve always
imagined that the caller was one of the many, many retirees in the area,and he had no frame of reference for either the Vietnam War weltanschauung or
Stanley Kubrick.
But, leaving aside the former, anyone who’d ever
seen so much as a theatre poster for any Kubrick film—Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove,
Paths of Glory, 2001—ought to have twigged to the fact that it was just not going
to be the very model of a modern major general.
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