Kelley B. Vlahos
Antiwar.com

[Part 2 here.]

Today, Julian Assange sits in a British jail while the United States government reportedly readies to indict him on charges of espionage. His story has taken a dramatic turn not unlike the rebels and revolutionaries of our literary canon, and in fact, he is imprisoned today in the native land of one of the greatest – Aldous Huxley.

British novelist Aldous Huxley was a social critic and futurist, who is best known for penning Brave New World, which, aside from being a nearly 80-year-old science fiction masterpiece, is both an allegory and prophecy for 21st Century western society.

Huxley’s finger was on the pulse of human freedom, and he warned us over 50 years ago that it was fading fast. In 1958, he predicted that when concentrated in the hands of the “Power Elite,” rapidly evolving “mass communication” like television would be a critical tool of social and political conformity. Technology is only the medium, and it is “neither good nor bad,” Huxley wrote, but when in the wrong hands it can be “among the most powerful weapons in the dictator’s armory.” Propaganda, the suppression of the truth, particularly in democratic societies, Huxley argued, would bring upon an age of human enslavement, where instead of yokes and chains, people in celebrated “free” societies like America would be bound by the soft restraints of ignorance, incuriousness, distraction and irrationality.

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Kelley B. Vlahos

"The Best Years of Our Lives"

There is a scene in the 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives when Homer Parrish, played by real World War II veteran Harold Russell, shows his girl what it is like to dress himself for bed with the rudimentary metal hooks that have replaced his left and right hands in the war.

“I want you to come upstairs and see what happens,” he says, daring Wilma to bear witness to his shame, and what could be her own tragic burden if she chooses to stay with him. The girl next door comes through this test with such grace and understanding that the audience breathes a collective sigh of relief – Homer, the former All-American high school athlete, now with two hooks for hands and meager prospects, will have this angel for a wife. All is good in the world.

I have always had mixed feelings about this film, which was directed lovingly by William Wyler, a director of renown who also survived World War II as a major in the U.S. Army Air Forces. There is a maturity and realism, albeit soft and sometimes fleeting, about this character study, which explores the repercussions of quickie pre-deployment marriages, divorce, depression, alcoholism, unemployment, disability, and ordinary civilian readjustment. Fred Derry, played by a straight-on Dana Andrews as the former Air Force “glamour boy,” finds himself at one point in the aircraft graveyard with a flashback coming on. He is headed for those graves, a dusty, banged-up hull of a man – until someone, another vet, gives him a job, and he gets a second chance at living the American dream circa 1946.

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