Just watched The Threads and The Day After again.
What’s interesting about The Day After is even though I was a small kid when I saw it and I didn’t really understand it, I never forgot it. It’s easy to see how it started such a dialog. What’s even more interesting is going back and reading over some of the batshits on the right complain about it. Phillis Schafly claimed it was propaganda aimed at making America “unilaterally disarm.” Ben Stein lamented that ABC should make a movie about Soviet domination (which they did, but it sucked) to show why we have to live on the brink of such destruction. Same day, different shit? Yup.
Of course the Soviet Union never intended to invade the United States, nor could it have done so and succeeded. The irony of course is that these dipshit’s own hero, Ronald Reagan, was motivated to announce his policy of eliminating all nuclear weapons in large part in response to seeing The Day After. Was Reagan soft on communism? That movie combined with the psychological operations up to and including Able Archer 83 made things just a bit too real for Reagan, and, after he watched the movie, one of his advisers said that it “drew blood.” The Reykjavik conference followed shortly thereafter. Of course we know now that the Soviet Union was simply unable to keep up with our military build up, and could not have competed with us if we had decided to go ahead and weaponize space, but it was never entirely clear that this would have the result it did: the Eastern Bloc going out with a whimper. The men who ruled the Soviet Union before Gorbachev were convinced we were planning a first strike and thought that the only way to stop it would be to preempt it.
The Day After was one of those moments we can’t have anymore because, for better or worse, Americans don’t watch the same TV channel they were on. It’s too easy to change and there’s too much content on other channels. Some people might have seen it now, but it wouldn’t have been watched by 100 million people, or, a little less than half the country. In other words, everyone saw it. It changed the course of history in a way that movies, especially made for TV ones, aren’t capable of anymore, especially ones on a political topic. The best we can do these days is Sicko or Super Size Me which seem to only have the effect of giving an early warning to lobbyists to ramp up their push back.
The Threads is basically a British version that is ever more terrible, because, well, things in Britain would be even worse and, if I recall correctly, was censored to a large degree.
Ronald Reagan understood the stakes. Perhaps he had to see a movie to get it through his head, but he did. Those Republicans that claim to worship him don’t get it. I suppose they think it would be good to go back to the days where we were saved only by the common sense of a Russian Lieutenant Colonel from accidentally destroying civilization. We don’t fear “Amerika” anymore, do we? No, our worst nightmare these days is some muslim blowing up an a-bomb in one city. As terrible as it is, it is by no means as bad as what we lived under threat of for 40 years. Of course, a non-nuclear attack using box cutters has managed to deep fry the brains of so many Americans that we have actually taken several steps backwards on this issue by making the political will for military non-proliferation options anemic and by making the head hunting of an Internet gossip star (the Wikileaks guy) more important than the outing of Valerie Plame, whose life’s work was to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.
Too bad George W. Bush wasn’t President in the Cold War. The Russians could have counted on his reading My Pet Goat longer than the time necessary to make the decision to retaliate in the SIOP.
If I thought that the obstructionist fuckwads in the Senate holding up the vote on START II would be moved by watching these flicks, I would mail them a copy. But, they just don’t care anymore. Jon Kyl probably has some secret fortress in Arizona.
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The attack scene, if you can bear it: