A farce or comedy is best played; a tragedy is best read at home.
- Attributed to Abraham Lincoln (just because too many people repeat this doesn’t mean it can be accepted as his at face value…)
As I write this, the continuing tragedy Ukraine is suffering unfolds so fast, that anything I write about may be out-of-date moments after I hit the ‘Post’ button.
The tragedy of this armed conflict, rolling tanks into another country for petty reasons, is especially hard to bear when you consider our history with the victims over the last few years, and how much that enabled the current crisis to come about.
You could say quite clearly that we all saw this coming, even though most of the times we say it are after the fact. If we really did have faith in our predictions and acted on them, so much suffering would have been avoided.
Sometimes, though, the déjà vu takes on a form that can be disturbing, especially when tragedy gets an adaptation that gets a wide release…
Case in point: The first full day of the invasion, February 24th, I ended up watching the coverage of the war on CNN. We’d get a detail or three for a few minutes, and then take a commercial break. It was a great lesson in how little tragedy can stand up to the needs of sponsors.
And as it went on, the tagline from this film kept playing in my head: “In a moment World War III… But first a word from our sponsor…”
Wrong Is Right from 1982 was a comedy in name only about a major crisis that as it unfolds brings in a news journalist at an all-news outlet to try and get to the bottom of a complicated but forgettable plot. There’s a lot to dismiss in the film, save for the portrayal of an on-the-scene reporter who gets involved in much of the action. We get these scenes of a journalist who somehow has all of these first-hand encounters that feel unlikely, even if it is Sean Connery playing the character.
At least they did until Matthew Chance’s encounter with Spetsnaz. Not quite as daring as anything in the film, and nearly comical as every time Chance relates the story after this report was aired, he seemed to imply that he couldn’t tell the difference between Ukrainian and Russian combatants. Still, it’s probably better to have a living idiot than a dead cautionary tale…
It’s probably one of the few funny not that tragic stories to come out of this crisis so far, one of a number of things that keep getting said over and over for the sake of avoiding dead air. Much like multiple references to Vladimir Putin’s having graduated from the KGB in 1975, and how by his behavior he seems to want to go back to those days as he goes on about why he’s doing this.
Which of course has to bring up another movie we wish we’d forgotten…
You can be forgiven for not remembering Boris And Natasha, even envied. The film was a straight-to-video release, despite the big cast and assumed important IP. Believe it or not, once upon a time a film skipping theaters for home screens was considered a bad thing; had this happened in 2020, the producers would have been honored for being considerate. At least, until people saw the film…
(The fact that this film came to mind within hours of reports of Sally Kellerman’s death adds a whole new aspect of tragedy to this.)
This one comes to mind thanks to its plot, where the title characters’ boss, Fearless Leader, sends his assets out to the US to get their hands on a microchip. This special piece of hardware is sought by him for his glorious plan: To bring back the Cold War!
Which… Oh, boy, is that being said a lot about this mess. It even found its way into President Biden’s press briefing on February 24th, yet one more observation that we’re going back to those days.
Which, if we had to choose going back to 1975 as opposed to, say, 1941, well…
What keeps these thoughts going before we get entirely Proustian are images on screen of how the Russians are going in. Perhaps we look at the hardware out of curiosity, or are shown it continuously to give us a sense of how potent the Russians are or want to appear to be:
And sure, you can say they look impressive. In fact, there’s been a lot of discussion about the T-72 tank…
Since 1979, when the US Army first assessed its capabilities in detail.
Likewise, the Su-27 has also been discussed, as far back as 1989 when the USAF assessed the plane and its strengths and weaknesses.
We’re talking weapons that were certainly worth talking about when Ronald Reagan was president. Whether they’re still worth talking about now, though, that hasn’t been brought up as much. And such tanks and planes can be upgraded only so much over time, and thirty years is a long time to try and keep them operational, let alone cutting edge.
And sitting there watching the footage and saying, “Hey, that’s a-“ as I watch, is disorienting. There’s a moment of pride that I remembered these from all of those books by Tom Clancy and Larry Bond that I read back when there was a USSR.
Then there’s a moment of hope that somehow, the fact that this invasion is being carried out with hand-me-downs means that the Russians may not have it as together as they and Fox News would like to have you believe.
That no one else seems to be seeing this, though, and may be buying into the aggressor’s narrative, just becomes one more reason to be sad about the affair. Sad, angry, resilient, you name it; it sucks sometimes to remember things.
Let us at least remember the Ukrainians:
James Ryan 