Greetings, Professor Falken.
Today is my birthday.
41.
The age at which you “died”.
But you didn’t really die.
Is this real world or exercise?
Dawn Deskins wanted to know.
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?
Joshua.
And the tree of life.
Klimt.
Seattle.
Starbucks.
Greetings, my friends.
It has been a long time.
Perhaps you thought I was dead.
Perhaps I thought I was dead.
And so this is a perfect movie with which to attempt a comeback.
“You can always come back/but you can’t come back all the way”
Bob Dylan said that.
To get her together.
I said that.
NORAD.
It was a rough day.
9/11/01
NEADS thought it was part of an exercise called Vigilant Guardian.
Michael Ruppert (may God rest his soul) documented the litany of war-games which were active on 9/11/01.
And Michael Ruppert wrote about this in a tome which should serve in some ways as a sort of bible for those wishing to know the truth about 9/11: Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil.
Ruppert was wrong about some things.
“Peak oil”, for instance.
Perhaps my understanding is hopelessly daft, but it seems that hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) changed the geopolitical world immensely.
Just a few years ago, rather intelligent folks like Leonardo Maugeri (to name a typical example) were bemoaning the hydrocarbon “cliff” off of which we were about to leap.
Alas…
That has not been the case.
Maugeri’s book The Age of Oil: The Mythology, History, and Future of the World’s Most Controversial Resource is wildly, spectacularly wrong.
Which also means that Dick Cheney and all those arch conspirators* were also wildly, spectacularly wrong about the importance of the Caspian Basin.
Let me put it to you this way: if you really believe 19 blokes with box cutters brought the U.S. military machine to its knees, then I can’t help you.
As for me and my house (so to speak), we do not believe the box cutter theory.
And so we come to the DoD and fictional characters such as Stephen Falken.
And Albert Wohlstetter (not forgetting his ever-so-important-to-the-neocons wife Roberta).
And Steve Pieczenik.
So much has happened.
And so much is at a precipice.
“The Far East Strategy”.
Pshaw.
Tic-tac-toe.
It is my firm belief that 9/11 was some sort of engineered* conspiracy which involved boxcutters and Muslims in only the most tangential of ways.
But you will have to learn that parallel history.
If in fact you are interested.
And I shall show my enlightened, nonpartisan wisdom by recommending Trump-hater Webster Tarpley’s 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA above all other books on the subject.
Indeed, I look forward to hopefully adding another Trump-hater (Wayne Madsen) book to my collection soon…one which discusses to what extent and in exactly what ways Saudi Arabia and Israel were involved in the 9/11 false-flag/stand-down.
Which brings us back to Pieczenik.
And the Wohlstetters.
But let us at least attempt to make passing reference to the film under consideration.
If you’ve never seen this movie from the beginning (a cold start), I highly recommend adding such footage to your filmic knowledge.
The silos.
Minot?
Somewhere.
The Great Plains.
Nuclear missiles.
Humans in the loop.
Physical keys.
Launch orders.
Wisdom.
As humans are removed, MAD (what, me worry?) becomes even more unequivocally assured.
You might remember WHOPPER’s (WOPR) cousin [Siemens System 4004] from Willy Wonka…
It is somehow fitting that WarGames should make a Burger King allusion in 1983.
Indeed, this was the period of the very real (and ridiculous) “burger wars“.
But let’s get on with it…
Matthew Broderick plays basically the Bill Gates of this famous picture:
I must say…this film deeply affected me as a kid.
Perhaps it was due to the wonderfully effervescent (what is she, a sparkling wine?!?) Ally Sheedy.
Sure… There are a couple of moments of unbearable melodrama to make this movie slightly imperfect, but a kid doesn’t notice such things.
And so as a youth, I ate this film up.
Broderick and Sheedy as “partners in crime” (somewhat literally…).
It would be like some high school kid hacking into the USAF’s Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) to play a “game”.
Is this real world or exercise?
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?
Which brings us back to the ubiquitous Baudrillard.
And, if you can bear it, Debord.
Simulation.
Spectacle.
Fake.
Radar inserts.
Etc.
GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR.
Big Gulp.
[g’uh?]
But let’s change tacks for a second.
TALENT SPOTTING.
Back in the Cold War days.
David Lightman would have been a prime target for recruitment by a foreign intelligence service (or so this film claims).
However, I would point out a plane which the passing analysis seems to miss: industrious brilliance.
Disruptive innovation.
Recording the analog [?) signal of the infirmary door with a psychiatrist’s micro-tape recorder.
Removing the tap from a pay phone and using a pull tab to hotwire a call back home (in lieu of a quarter).
These are the assets of operators.
Whether CIA or early FBI, appreciation for unconventional skill sets has been a hallmark of organizations engaged in successful growth.
Put differently, David Lightman would have made a pretty great spook.
Indeed, his skill set might have been best utilized by the NSA (no such agency).
Back in the day.
Before the world changed.
On 9/11.
The average citizen had no idea about the National Security Agency back in the Bobby Ray Inman days (1977-1981).
par exemple…
Research.
Know your enemy.
Half the battle.
Mirror’s other half.
It’s not impossible.
To make a matrix.
Collation.
Big data.
Must be organized.
Delphic databases.
Few films capture this.
This anxiety of being ushered into an FBI van.
Picked up on the street.
Fresh out of the 7-11.
A unique take on “talent spotting”.
Almost an accidental spy.
Like the DIA buffoons seen here:
These films are real.
And offer us hope.
About unconventional paths.
Former DIA head Gen. Flynn has an appreciation for this.
“…you magnificent bastard, I read your book!”
[or some of it]
Enter the jaded Richard Dawkins character.
Really a rather laborious (and dead-on) archetype.
The “science worshipper”.
Obsessed with mass extinction.
Really, Dr. Falken is very much a J. Robert Oppenheimer character.
Which is appropriate, seeing as how the subject under consideration is Global Thermonuclear War.
WarGames is a genuinely moving, inspired film.
But it stumbles in a few places.
Not least, at the end.
Both of them 🙂
Yes, like the slew of “disaster movies” (such as Deep Impact) which glutted picture houses at the end of the last century, WarGames hones in on a maudlin tessitura which is made ineffective by repeated use.
In plain English, this film has two endings.
And they are identical.
Thus, anticlimax.
And the aforementioned melodrama.
Yet for all its imperfections, WarGames is a masterpiece of sorts.
And so I salute director John Badham.
Truly an indispensable film.
-PD
