MORRIS: Inspired by a movie, not by a speech

I’ve been in my foxhole trying to avoid politics and contentious topics for a while now. Mostly upbeat, I’ve received a fair amount of email thanking me for various columns over the past several months. Thank you for your kind words.

However, controversy shouldn’t be avoided, so this week I thought I’d ease back into the saddle by doing a movie review and offering a brief post-mortem on President Obama’s State of the Union address. The two topics dovetail nicely.

First, if you haven’t seen “American Sniper,” you have to go see it—on the biggest screen with the loudest audio possible. This is an amazing movie. Actually, it’s bigger than a movie. It’s an important story everyone should see.

Unless you’ve been detached from all media, you probably already know “American Sniper” is based on a true story—the autobiography of veteran military Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle. Kyle is a true American hero who went to Iraq after the 09/11 terrorist attacks. Kyle put his family on hold for four tours of duty to fight for his country and save American lives.

Director Clint Eastwood did a brilliant job telling the story. Actor Bradley Cooper could not have been more engaging as Chris Kyle. Eastwood describes the movie as a story about a man who’s torn between two great responsibilities: responsibility to his country and responsibility to his family.

Kyle’s widow, Taya, has endorsed the movie as being true and authentic. She said watching the movie was like watching her husband in many, many ways, and she walked away from the movie in awe.

The film has been highly controversial. However, I don’t feel like it tried to present a particular political slant. It doesn’t try to convince you that war is a good thing. Quite the contrary—it shows you very graphically that war is hell. And this wasn’t a statement of whether we should have been in Iraq fighting or not. The movie is about a man who dedicated his life to protecting others and about the price he and his family paid for his service.

At least at the showing I attended, there was no cheering at the end. There wasn’t a feeling of, “Hooray for the good guys.” The audience sat in silence for three or four minutes while the credits rolled before we all got up and quietly filed out of the theater deep in thought.

For me, watching “American Sniper” reinforces my belief that terrorism has to be met with strength and unrelenting pursuit where it originates in order to slow and deter our enemy combatants from landing on our shores. I fear this war on terrorism has no end. We can’t stop evil people from trying to kill us. But we can offer up a resistance that shows these extremists that brutality will be met with brutality. It’s the only thing they understand.

That brings me to the subject of politics. In my humble opinion, America’s foreign policy has been a disaster under President Obama. Many believe, as I do, that our enemies have been emboldened by Obama’s lack of will over the past six years.

The Obama administration refuses to say the words “radical” and “Islamic” and “terrorists” together in the same sentence. And President Obama has been on an apology tour to the world for what he sees as past American transgressions since before he moved into the Oval Office. It’s been a huge disappointment. Worse than that, our country has been weakened on the world stage to a point never before seen in my lifetime.

President Obama’s State of the Union address didn’t talk a lot about foreign policy and terrorism. If you missed it, let’s see if I can boil down his speech for you in short order. More big-government spending, more entitlements and more anti-business regulation. More tax hikes on those greedy wealthy folks, more divisive “us against them” class warfare talk—more of the same. He also took credit for just about everything good that’s happened in the past six years.

And while saying we need to get politics out of Washington, in the same breath he threatened to veto anything that reversed his policies on immigration, health care or financial regulations. And so it goes, but only for another 724 days.

In the meantime, go see “American Sniper”. I hope your patriotic spirit is renewed and you feel as proud to be an American as I do.•

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Morris is publisher of IBJ. His column appears every other week. To comment on this column, send e-mail to gmorris@ibj.com.