---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 4 Aug 1994 18:47:34 -0500 From: Steven Mintz, U. Houston <[log in to unmask]> To: Multiple recipients of list H-FILM <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: Dr. Strangelove (X-PCAACA) There is pandering and there is pandering, dumbing down and dumbing down. A case could be made that Dr. Strangelove represented a pandering to an alienated left wing audience that had dumbed down to the extent that it thought that the only issue in the cold war was the barely repressed desire of the American military to destroy the world. In the guise of sophisticated political satire, the film dismisses the world historical political context needed to understand the mission of the military derided by Kubrick and Southern. Richard Gid Powers Brooklyn, NY" And sometimes, Richard, there's missing the point. Strangelove deals as much with then current analyses of "the world historical political context" as it does with the military's destructive urges. Whichever theorist the good Dr. may have been modeled after, his ideology is an extension of the ideas of the Herman Kahns, Henry Kissingers, and Samuel Huntingtons of that time -- and ours. It's very much about that sweet reasonableness that permits one to "think about the unthinkable." Such modes of thought help us to both "understand the mission of the military" and to _justify_ it. The film says, in effect, that too much think-tanking about global strategic concerns, geopolitical realism and similar mantras of the technocratic elite is a good way to get a lot of people killed en masse. Of course it's exaggerated -- it's satire. But having jousted with a former member of the RAND Corporation at a seminar in graduate school at Columbia University in the mid 60s, I don't think that Dr. Strangelove was that far off the mark. That's how it looks from my part of Brooklyn, New York. Gene Brown [log in to unmask]