Sunday, October 23, 2005

The Guilty

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is really great in The Stand (1994). Here is this giant, dressed in long robes, ringing his bell, lumbering through the streets, delivering his message of gloom and doom. "Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead! The monster is coming!" Well, in this case the monster has already arrived and is consuming everyone in its path. Even Kareem is finally consumed. His voice is silenced. His bell is stilled. But he is less of a prophet than a town crier, really. And there is a lot to cry about.

Ed Harris plays an Army General in California monitoring the spread of a pandemic from his base of operations. You can tell from the beginning that he is deeply affected by the catastrophe: he is unshaven; he chain-smokes; and he drinks liquor. As the disease spreads, he spends hours watching people die on a video taken from the lab where the virus first escaped. He broods upon the tragedy, the lost lives. Finally he puts a pistol in his mouth and pulls the trigger. His assistants rush in to find him slumped in a chair with the word "guilty" on a piece of paper pinned to his chest. Too late, Ed. The time to blow your brains out is before you destroy the world; before your mind hatches some reckless scheme that endangers all mankind; and if not then, certainly before you implement it or let it escape.

Gary Sinise is one of the first civilians exposed to the plague, and he’s one of the first to be found immune. He is locked in a containment facility, poked and pricked by doctors and nurses who try to discover why he’s not sick. Gary is indignant because of his treatment, his lack of freedom, his lack of simple respect. But he’s also outraged that the government may be responsible for unleashing this plague upon mankind.

Too late, buddy. The time to be outraged is before they destroy the world, not after. The time to ring your bell, Kareem, is everyday when these guys in their white lab coats go off to work. The time to put the pistol in your mouth, Ed, is before you join your colleagues in the board rooms and the war rooms and sell humanity to the highest bidder. After the monster escapes is too late.

All this just shows an appalling lack of foresight, a quality that human beings are supposed to possess in abundance. And it should serve as a warning to us: it’s not too late, yet. We should warn the world now about the little monsters in hopes that we never have to mourn a world lost to big ones.
April 21, 2001

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