The Object of Ridicule

Until last night, I had never seen the movie "MASH".

That deficit in my entertainment life has a small, digressive story attached to it. When I was 15, in Monticello, New York, spending the summer with my aunt, uncle and two cousins on Sackett Lake Road, each of us cousins had an age appropriate counterpart living up the hill in a large New England mansion. Stephanie was 5, like my cousin Carol, Tony was 12, like my cousin Barbara, and James, who played the loudest rock music to the fields and blueberry bushes surrounding their property, was 14 plus, just a little younger than me.

All the neighborhood kids preferred playing at my aunt's less expansive (but still about half or two thirds an acre big enough) house, and Stephi and Tony were always among them. But James the aloof eldest tended to come down less frequently. Until one day he seemed to be hanging about. It never occurred to me why since from my perspective, the awkward age was in full swing, and things were happening to my body that made me feel more like Quasimodo than the object of anyone's desire.

Then it happened, a breaking of the teen age silence, when James and I happened to be alone amid the other children playing. "Would you like to go to see MASH?" Instead of thinking hormonally, I thought more politically, a la, the disapproval of my conservative dad who thought MASH was a sign of the doom of our civilization, and said a too quick no. As I floated in the family pool on the hill a day or so later, all by myself (we were always invited), James' mother came out and made it clear that I had said no to my first ever date request. "James" she said, "likes older women."

My feeble efforts at dating, when I realized that was what was being requested of me, are a story for another entry, if ever there be one. But as to MASH, I find myself concurring with dad, having seen it last night at the AERO theatre, with Elliott Gould and Sally Kellerman there, live, forty years after the introduction of Trapper John, Hawkeye Pierce and Hot Lips Houlihan into the popular culture. The doom of our society, incipient i 1969, has come nearly to fruition. We are just beginning to experience the death rattle.

To me, although in a relativistic society of opinion, mine has no meaning, the easy ridicule of Christianity, in particular Catholicism, was particularly disturbing. I found myself surprised that it was so blatant in a main stream movie of a time that was only just becoming cavalier about everything, particularly God and authority in any form. I knew of course, from the television series, that the featured Catholic priest was a fully realized caricature.

But in the movie, when the dentist soldier, Painless, decides that he wants to kill himself because of his failed prowess with a lady (all the more problematic for him because of the prodigious size of his appendage), the good ole boys of progressiveness, Trapper and Hawkeye, stage a "last supper" for Painless. Painless would appear to be cast in the center role of well, you know. The buffonish Fr. Mulcahy, peers in, and only vaguely seems to recognize the scene and toddles off, presumably to his bible, already previously the source of amusement as read by another caricature character, Frank Burns, the religious hippocrite. (You see, he has been sleeping with the strict miltary Major Houlihan). Painless receives communion from one of the stars and goes off to take his suicide pill in an open coffin nearby the "supper" table. Of course, he is, in a somewhat compromised drugged state, rescued from his suicidal malaise by a visit from Lt. Dish, so no one actually dies. The audience laughed at the shot by the progressive and therefore more credible than thousands of years of theology and philosophy, Robert Altman taken at one of the most sacred moments in Christian history. It was forty years ago, and it remains today, an acceptible ridicule. It is perhaps fortunate that Christians believe in turning the other cheek rather than the Fatwahs, for example. For unto today, and with even more brazenness, the Church is one of the last remaining acceptable targets for vicious humor in the name of Freedom of Speech. No such speech is acceptable for other certain religions or New Age thinking, except maybe Judaism, as the ugly head of Anti-Semitism is raising itself again in the 21st century. Which puts me to mind of an ad for a cable show, "Nurse Jackie" that is splattered on virtually every City Bus I must be next to as I drive to work. The pill popping, philandering Nurse is pictured in what appears to be a halo, a la, for example, the Lord Himself, or His Mother. The halo turns out to be a series of pills, and hypodermics. Our healer has her hand in one of those iconic (I mean as in actual Icons) poses of thumb out and two fingers up in a kind of blessing. She is holding a bottle of pills and superimposed over this respectful picture is the phrase "Holy Shift". Oh, cool, got those Catholics (because Catholics favor holy pictures of that sort) again!

Now, I am told this is part of free speech. Ok. I buy that. Except I don't see free speech being applied to Christians or Jews as they express opposite opinions. "Getting in their face" is apparently only encouraged by certain high placed individuals of our social democracy if the face being gotten into to is religious or conservative. But free speech means the religious and conservative get to do the same, right? But, therein lies the rub, that isn't the deal. Free speech is only the acceptable progressive speech, which includes making fun of any people who believe strongly in that silly God thing. Or like keeping America with its founding emblems of Liberty, E Pluribus Unum and In God We Trust. (With acknowledgment to Dennis Prager).

We better start building catacombs cause we are going to need them again.