Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Cross-posted from Altercation, Feb. 20, 2009.

I have been holding something back, something in my pocket, for a little while. It is knowledge about a show that will hit the screen tomorrow, and not the big screen mind you, the little one.

Normally I don’t much hold with watching television. Sometimes it sucks me in on a lazy and rainy Sunday afternoon, but by and large I have missed most of the television events which form the touchstones of passing years. Seinfeld? Nope, barely ever saw an episode. Friends? No again. Desperate Housewives, Lost, American Idol and all the rest are vaguely familiar as concepts, but I can honestly say that I’ve never seen any of them.

This is not cultural superiority. It’s just how my brain works. It’s anomalous and purely a function of biochemistry in my opinion. If it makes any difference I would note that I also don’t (hold on to your hats Altercators) listen to music. Not of my own volition. I am as likely to listen to a song as I am to watch the television, so those cultural touchstones of hundreds and hundreds of years of human music-making are pretty much lost on me as well. I can recognize different singers and different bands, but for the overwhelming majority of my life music (except when I have tried to make it myself) has been wasted on my ears. And who would admit that? By any measure that is a deficiency. I know that. Like I said, I think it is just the way my mind works.

But I do acknowledge, in both cases, that there are stories that can be told through both mediums, as well as on the silver screen, which can lift the soul…or tear out one’s heart. The best “war” movie ever made, in my opinion, showed not a single gunshot, not a single scene of war. It was set not on a battlefield, but in Arlington Cemetery. It did not address issues of war and peace, but ideas of love and courage and conviction. It was not set among tanks and artillery and machine guns on a smoking battlefield, but among the men of the 3rd Infantry Regiment, our Kabuki Soldiers, burying our brothers during the Vietnam War. It was a movie which made you think, made you smile, made you cry, and made you consider the nature of human-ness. The movie was Gardens of Stone. This, I believe, is the purpose of art. That purpose is noble.

And so I recommend this to you. It airs tomorrow night, on HBO: Taking Chance. It is not about war, or politics, or right and wrong, or any of the other host of issues which people here in the United States so passionately disagree about and over which you argue with one another. It is merely the story of us, the ones who do your bidding. If you want to know more about who we are, then Taking Chance might help you understand, at least a little bit, why some of us follow this path.

I do not anticipate that it will be easy to watch.

P.S.: If these things matter, then I recommend you follow up with this book since, well, I think it does. (Watch the trailer.)

NB. The “Chance” in the title is Marine Corps Lance Corporal Chance R. Phelps, who was killed in action in Iraq on April 9, 2004.  To commemorate his life, his friends and family have established Run4Chance:  The Chance Phelps Foundation.