Mem Day Memories...

Years ago I co-wrote a film column for an awful snarky local weekly in Metro Boston.
Sadly said weekly has survived to this day as a periodical dedicated to the lunatic notion that the Hub actually has a jet-set night life.
In those days though, it was a inane rag edited by fresh-out-of BU fratboys...pale lardy specimens in painter's pants.
Anyway....the top hammerhead decided that for Memorial Day 1992 we were gonna fill up our column with dross about all the great war movies that were available on VHS.
In vain we argued the notion that Memorial Day was not exclusively a military themed holiday....we went on to suggest that McHale's Navy joins the Air Force might not set the right tone either.
Our editor blinked brightly suggested Stripes starring Bill Murray would make a fine starting point.
Inwardly we groaned....clearly this zygote associated Memorial Day with service commedies...
Never mind the fact that no one at this publication had ever heard a shot fired in anger...indeed the city room would probably shit itself in raw terror if the delivery truck backfired out on the street.
Nope...this was the TV generation's grandchildren in the saddle, all they knew about war was that they saw on American Movie Classics.
Alas,Bobo the boy editor's so called mind was made up...he wanted war movies.
So after a certain amount of discussion we turned in a column that reveled in three great anti-war movies which we listed as Little Big Man, Dr. Strangelove, and Catch 22.
In fact our discussion about Catch 22 mostly revolved around Orson Welles' doomed attempts to option the novel for his own film adaptation.
Granted it was politically precocious to go off on such a tangent, since neither my writing partner nor I were particularly known for our pacifism.

No if anything we had a burning dislike for flabby gaseous young editors who got their sense of national sacrifice from Spielberg's "1941".
Most of whom seem to have ditched local journalism for a spot in Rumsfeld's Pentagon from the looks of things.

So let us take a moment to recall all absent friends in uniform and out.