The White Report

I can understand why Lions for Lambs, Robert Redford’s recent movie, received mixed reviews; in fact, I can completely understand why many people would hate it. It is incredibly preachy. Around one-third of the film shows a Republican senator (Tom Cruise’s character) preaching at a veteran reporter (Meryl Streep’s character) in backing the administration’s war on terror, while, at the same time, the reporter in turn preaches to the senator about the misguided war in Iraq. Throughout the film, they preach at each other about their involvement in America’s failures.

Up to this point, that is already a lot of preaching.

The genius of the movie is that it questions whether the political debates in government and academia have any meaning at all. The sympathetic heroes of the movie are two young men who tire of the arguments and choose action, to wit, going to Afghanistan to fight for their country. As a result of political decisions that are being debated in offices and hallways a long way away, they end up in mortal danger.

The movie itself has four primary settings. The office of the senator is the first setting. In the second, a university professor’s office, Robert Redford’s character debates a promising but disengaged student about his role in life. In the third location, the reporter is at odds with her editor about the role of the press. The fourth is a snowy mountain ridge in Afghanistan.

The initial Great Debate is between the senator and reporter. Both are consummate insiders. The senator is a crucial player in a new hard-hitting military strategy in Afghanistan, with repercussions for Iraq, Iran, and the entire Near East. Vietnam was the reporter’s first reporting job, and her liberal feelings — anti-Republican and anti-war — come through crystal clear. After running through the worn out pros and cons for, and against, military action in Asia, the two end up challenging each other over who is using who in the relationship between media and government. When the reporter takes the argument back to her editor, it takes on a different slant: what is the relationship between the corporate world and ‘real’ news?

The more accessible argument is between the professor and the student. The professor is a Vietnam vet turned protester, who became a professor. He believed that he could use his intellect, his writings, and his professorial credentials to change the world. He was ineffective. He reconciled himself to a different mission: to single out a few extraordinary students and push them toward greatness.

At the moment, those who teach the social sciences can be forgiven, I think, for bearing in mind that the professor might be something other than a failure. We teach students about history, geography, and politics, but these are things that do not necessarily reach most students, but for good reason. They do not have the background for understanding the vital importance of these subjects. But as the kids grow up, they will employ what we teach — though probably without consciousness effort —- as they connect the mental dots and make sense of the world.

The student opposite Redford’s professor became a cynic, figuring at a young age that certain elites make the decisions, and that even entering those elites is corrupting. So make some money, live the good life, and wash your hands of the decisions made in the halls of power.

This brings me to Afghanistan. Two soldiers were in the professor’s class. They chose action, they chose to do something. They had faith that serving their country furnished them with the credibility to be agents of change but academia did not. The professor tried to dissuade them, but they joined the Army, as special forces soldiers. This put them in serious peril, and this tied them to the other debates.

Should the student stay home and live the good life, or take the chance of being pinned down by the Taliban in an icy gorge in the Hindu Kush? To what extent does it matter if the senator’s military plan is the correct one? Does it diminish the soldiers’ nobility and exonerate the professor and student who choose a battlefield of words in a cushy college setting? If soldiers are killed, is the reporter culpable for playing the insiders’ games instead of sounding the alarm? Does the path of action turn the soldiers into pathetic pawns in a game played for the benefit of distant powers? Or are they the lone bona fide players, and the pitiful ones are the suits who send our hopes into the snowy skies over a shadowy and barren country?

Maybe the world is just too complicated for regular folks, and the noble life of action is the morally correct one. Maybe the debates of wonks in Washington or New York no longer connect to the real world.