Kwai Me a River

MONDAY, AUGUST 8, 2011

I loved the movie Bridge on the River Kwai when I first saw it as a young woman in 1957 on the big screen. Great epic about war and pride. (Still can get the whistling theme song stuck in my head!) Alec Guinness as Colonel Nicholson stubbornly insisted on building this great railroad bridge over the Kwai River in Cambodia with his fellow Allied troops interred in a Japanese POW camp. His pride and drive forced confrontations with the POW commandant, but Nicholson thought he had won because he built the bridge his way.

The scene at the end when the Allies attack the bridge and Nicholson realizes that his prideful stubbornness has in fact helped the enemy and hurt his cause is very powerful. "What have I done?" he asks, as he dies and blows up the bridge.

I keep waiting for the Tea Party to have the same "Ah-Ha" moment. They have stubbornly refused to negotiate rational resolution to a self-imposed crisis resulting in S and P lowering our ratings. No foreign country could have imposed such damage on us without a military response, and S and P is candid that the rating was lowered because of a lack of confidence in Congress to resolve the so-called crisis. (Can you tell that I am not worried about our debt? I am worried about jobs creation, but not about the debt. A mix of spending restraint, more folks working, and new taxes will resolve our problems. Not to mention the fact that those same conservatives were oh so quiet when President Bush went from surplus to an $11.9 trillion debt in 8 years. This is his debt, not Obama's!) If they remain so stubbornly fixated, we will implode. Perhaps then they will have their, "What have I done?" moment.

Until then, Kwai me a river.

POSTED BY EILEEN GOOD AT 4:36 PM


1 COMMENTS:



Anonymous said...

Thank-you. What a picture you created of our current politics using a more than 50 year old movie. I hope more people read your postings!