A clockwork Marine

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.