Thoughts ranjeet on 07 Dec 2006 10:19 am
A Timeless Conflict
(note : originally written in 1999. Depressingly, still applicable)
If you’d watch the movies and television shows, which I bet you do, you’d think that there’s two great forces in the world, especially in fanstasy books. There’s GOOD and there’s EVIL, constantly caught in a everlasting battle for the domination of the world. That’s the fictional world, I fear. There is a battle being waged, but it isn’t between good evil, light or dark, or even “less filling” and “tastes great.” This epic conflict is between the competent and the ignorant.
If perhaps you haven’t picked up on it, I really don’t like stupid people. If it wasn’t for the fact that they’re good for being the minions of smart people, I would say that they are wastes of skin. I will admit that at times, I am guilty of being an idiot. If I’m an idiot, though, I understand, and try and never be an idiot in quite the same way again. I may be an idiot, but I’m not ignorant. As we speak, all over the world, in all the time zones and in perhaps every corner of the inhabited world, smart people are doing great things and making the world a better place for all, and stupid people are screwing it up and taking us all back to square one.
In my short summer break a few weeks back, I happened to come across Superman II on some cable station while surfing channels. According to those ratings they give in the newspaper, this was the second best Superman film, second only to the first one. I think they just went all downhill from there. Anyways, this is the one where Lois finds out Clark’s secret, they get married or something, and Clark voluntarily opts to get his superpowers sucked out of him so he can be a normal person just like everyone else. At the same time, coincidences of coincidences, three exiles from the planet Krypton who have been enslaved in some crystal mirror plate thingie come wafting into our solar system, escape their bounds, and start wreaking havoc. These dudes have all of Superman’s powers, and there are three of them. Within minutes, it seems, they have the president on his knees, following a laughable scene where the army tries to defend the White House against super-beings who can shoot laser beams out of their eyes. Meanwhile, everyone is crying for Superman to save their asses. When he finally does come, they set up for a great battle. There are concrete blocks flying and eye beams blazing, the whole nine yards. And at one point, a stray fragment of giant concrete block hits the spire of a building, sending it crashing to the ground, heading right for a crowd of people. Comment # 1: Here we have four titans duking it out in the streets of Metropolis, and everyone and his mother is out there ogling them, getting in the way, rooting Superman on, as if their cheers will help him. No, the most they do is present themselves as great hostages, so that Superman will have to waste his time saving them instead of whupping butt. So anyways, this spire comes down, and everyone moves out of the way, except, of course, some woman with a baby carriage, who chose to just look up and scream instead of moving out of the way. Fractions of a second before she would have been wasted, Superman picks up the spire and tosses it.
Fast forward about five minutes through the fight scene, and Superman has knocking the big goofy looking exile into the stratosphere. He’s about to get started on the other two when a bus comes tooling through the intersection, even though any half-competent police force would block off the streets. Needless to say, the two villians took this chance to pick up the bus and toss it down the street, and Superman has to give up his body to save the people, getting crushed against a building in the process. When he doesn’t appear from the wreckage, the mob, stupid as they are, start shouting about how the evil people killed Superman, and then together as a mob pick up pipes and pieces of wood and start to converge upon the fugitives, because hey, just because Superman can’t beat them doesn’t mean a bunch of imbeciles can’t! Never underestimate the power of stupidity, I say. Using some of that great Kryptonian lung power, our antagonists blew everyone away, and surprise surprise, the mob’s attack was ineffective.
At this point Superman lifts himself out of the wreckage. Perhaps seeing the pointlessness of fighting with all these cretins getting in the way, he retreats to the Fortress of Solitude. All everyone else thinks, though, is that he’s running away, and that Superman is a coward, even though he has proven time and again he had more guts than all of them multiplied together and then some. They start bad-mouthing him. Another characteristic of idiots. They have short memories. They don’t remember how often he’s saved them and their pathetic little lives. They jeer him off. Back in the Fortress of Solitude, Superman manages to trick the evil-doers into giving up their powers, although he was stopped from offing one of them when they grabbed Lois.
This past summer I read Paul Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie which chronicled the actions of a lietenant colonel in the army, John Paul Vann, during the Vietnam Conflict. This is the book that the HBO special was based on. Alas, I don’t get the premium channels, so I was forced to go straight to the source. I found the book very interesting, in fact more interesting than I thought a ‘history’ would be. There was a lot of talk about the Army leaders at the time, who were so full of themselves after their World War II victory that they tended to underestimate their opponents and began to think that all wars could be fought in the same way as the wars of Europe and the Pacific, regardless of enemy, objective, or terrain. For instance, the audacity of General MacArthur was one reason that the Korean War was not as successful as we liked.
At the beginning of the war, the South Vietnamese weren’t winning, but the US generals didn’t want to admit that, so they stated that everything was going well and things were under control. However, when things started going from bad to worse, the generals were caught because they had already stated that they were winning…so they continued to lie. The effect of this was that instead of changing strategy to win, the same things were done to lose. This, and a regime that promoted ineffectiveness and low casualties over moderate casualties and winning (partly because Diem, the South Vietnamese, US-backed leader wanted his army intact to insure his personal security at the head of state) led to defeat. John Vann tried to tell people this, but wherever he went, whenever he tried to tell superiors he was either blocked by those in command who would be hurt by this information, or he just ignored. This, together with corruption among the Vietnamese and a well-prepared, thoughtful Viet Cong, led to the failure of the Vietnam Conflict.
The lesson of this thought is that Ignorance and Greed ruin the quality of life for everyone. This is pretty obvious, I’m sure everyone realizes it. But oftentimes, I just get very angry when I realize that so often in life, stupid, thoughtless, selfish people drag down the geniuses and those that would make a difference (for the better!) in this world. If only we could just create a scientific test that would detect the intelligent, thoughful, selfless people among us, we could give them nifty identification cards that would permit them to do almost anything and give them access everywhere. I think everyone out there is responsible for themselves. Not everyone can afford a first-rate college education, but I think that anyone can resolve to not be ignorant, to not let stereotypes and personal agendas cloud their judgement, to use common sense and a love of the truth to guide them through their lives. That is my hope for the human race.