By DEXTER DUGGAN
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The financial and cultural blockbuster movie American Sniper had a private screening in one of the theaters in a multiplex in this Phoenix suburb.
By grim coincidence, it was the same day, February 11, that testimony in Texas began in the murder trial of the movie’s real-life central character, Navy sniper Chris Kyle, killed in 2013 back home from the battlefield, and also the day that front pages across the nation carried confirmation of the death in the Mideast of young aid worker Kayla Mueller, who’d lived in the Arizona mountain town of Prescott.
In the 1950s and 1960s, “Afghanistanism” meant being so disconnected from important events that a person looked only far away to inconsequential sands. But today Arabic sands are a center of geopolitical importance.
The Scottsdale screening wasn’t private because celebrities attended this showing who didn’t want publicity. Instead, it was free to everyday folks if they contacted a Phoenix radio station to register their interest in attending.
Conservative talk station KKNT (960 AM) cosponsored the evening show, along with a financial-planning firm, so that one of its broadcast hosts could present his thoughts from the front of the auditorium after the movie and ask for audience members’ comments.
The host, Seth Leibsohn, already made his mark in national talk radio as producer and on-air personality at former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett’s widely heard, East Coast-based Morning in America program.
Then Leibsohn returned to Phoenix, where he was born and raised, and is president of the policy and consulting firm The Leibsohn Group. He conducts KKNT’s late-evening daily program that proclaims “principles, not politics.”
After American Sniper concluded here after 9 p.m. on February 11, the conservative Leibsohn noted the cultural force it had exerted in just a few weeks as crowds flocked in. It sounded like he detected a historic spirit reviving in the United States.
The mid-20th century John Waynes and Jimmy Stewarts in entertainment, who used to represent the strong American character, had been followed by a culture that has “adult adolescents,” Leibsohn said.
“Sometimes the people are shaped by our leadership, and I worry about our leadership,” Leibsohn said, citing Barack Obama having just reached back a thousand years in history to condemn Christian Crusaders. It was Obama’s way of trying to minimize current carnage by radical Islamists.
Congress can give Obama a Mideast war authorization, Leibsohn said, “but I don’t know if he will know what to do with it.”
American Sniper is brutally frank, and Leibsohn thought that honesty about the seriousness of the current conflict is fitting or else the enemy can’t be properly confronted.
Those who lived through the Vietnam War era will recall U.S. military personnel returning home in the 1970s to be spat upon as “baby killers.” The U.S.’s dominant “news” media, liberal then as now, did all they could to poison the culture at home against those fighting the spread of tyrannical Communism.
These media’s love affair with liberalism hasn’t changed. It only has grown more extreme. But some cultural forces today may be dragging the media where editors don’t want to go, instead of the media themselves setting all of the cultural tone.
You want a baby-killing soldier? American Sniper shows hero Kyle, a hefty, well-fed American, played by Bradley Cooper, concealed on a rooftop with his sniper rifle as he shoots a little Middle Eastern boy on the street, then shoots the boy’s mother in her flowing robes.
Forty years ago, theater audiences would have been expected to hiss and curse the soldier. That was before Americans began to learn they were under a different kind of assault, beginning in their consciousness on September 11, 2001.
Like so many others, Kyle watched New York’s World Trade Center collapse on television after Mideastern hijackers flew two commercial jetliners with their helpless passengers into the twin towers. Kyle joined the elite Navy SEALS. He wanted to protect his guys, he said.
And if the world thought 9-11 was horrific, it still didn’t foresee the rise of today’s terrorist army of ISIS. Burning people alive en masse in New York high-rises from a distance has been succeeded by burning them in cages up close and individually.
On this particular day during the Iraq war, Kyle is watching the street for any sign of trouble as U.S. troops are about to drive down it. The boy and his mother step out from a doorway. The sniper notices that her arms under her robe seem be carrying something.
She hands grenades to her son, who starts running toward the Americans. After Kyle shoots him down, Mom picks up and heaves the explosives toward the military, for which Kyle rewards her with another deadly shot.
Beginning with the very title, American Sniper (taking its name from Kyle’s own book) avoids a soft sell. It’s not American Fighter or American Marksman or American Sharpshooter. It’s “sniper,” a skilled gunman who shoots other people from a concealed place.
The admiring movie review in the New York Daily News concluded, “So is American Sniper pro-war or anti-war? [Director Clint] Eastwood’s done his job so well, you’ll have to answer that question for yourself.”
Use your conscience and be the judge. No cue cards pop up calling for hisses or kisses. The battlefield isn’t parades with cheers. But the fight may be for moral as well as physical survival. The movie just shows unvarnished events, although not every possible event.
The movie audience didn’t peek in at home with the grenade-carrying Mom and her son. Do these Mideasterners think the American troops are decadent invaders destroying their existence? Do they conclude they’ve got to do whatever they can to repel these invaders, even though heaving a few grenades on the street is virtual suicide, as it indeed turned out to be?
Or are they brainwashed radical Islamists who welcome the arrival of the American Satans, so some farm boy from Texas can be executed right in the land of jihad?
As the troops rapidly move through a neighborhood, looking for a terrorist leader, a local resident objects. But he is rebuked with American sternness, “I don’t care if it’s your home. This is a war zone, man.”
How would we react to that in our own neighborhood?
No, I don’t mean to convey “moral equivalence.” It’s just that people can get stuck in the middle, whether George W. Bush foolishly invaded Iraq after a lot of people began to worry about shadowy Mideast terrorism, or adolescent blunderer Barack Obama fills his left-wing head with so many magical mushrooms and moonbeams, the world is lucky that it hasn’t gone up in a nuclear holocaust yet.
We see that Kyle loves his own children when he’s back home in Texas, even though he’d be shooting youngsters of the same age on the battlefield if they’re wielding weapons. But we’re shown he doesn’t love killing. He’s protecting his guys after 9-11.
At his sniper’s rooftop post another day, Kyle sees a little boy come upon a dying or dead adult by his weapon in the street. Looking down his sniper scope, Kyle quietly implores that the kid not arm himself: “Don’t pick it up. Don’t you ******* pick it up.”
The youngster does pick it up, but drops it and runs away. Already lying prone, Kyle lowers his head and lets out a huge sigh of relief that he didn’t have to pull the trigger this time.
A Chivalrous Final Touch
Back home after four tours of duty, Kyle is asked about his record kill tally of more than 160 people. “The thing that haunts me is all the guys I couldn’t save,” he replies.
Ironically, after he was safely home in Texas, Kyle and friend Chad Littlefield were killed at a shooting range just over two years ago by a troubled war vet they were trying to help. Just before the unsuspecting Kyle in his last hours goes out the door to try to counsel the vet, the famed sniper lovingly tells his young son to remember to take care of the girls, the mother and daughter of their household.
It’s likely not an admonition that a gun-toting conservative female like Sarah Palin would think necessary, but it’s a chivalrous final touch to a movie with a different, deeper sense of honor than lying, conniving Obama even could begin to understand, much less live.
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