Not ready for the Catskills....

Ben Shapiro, still winded from writing that Poli-Sci paper "What Wall? The East German Appeasement Monkeys" has taken to writing a separate "lighter side" column called "straight from the hip" which is like the coolest title ever. In it, Ben shares the kind of humor those wacky college kids are into these days. Hey...he's trying, cut him some slack.

But I think he needs to explain this comment:

The other day, I watched the 1946 classic "The Best Years of Our Lives." Every patriot should see that movie. Rent it tonight.

I think that maybe he didn't understand the movie. It's not exactly a testament to the glory of war. Here's a synopsis:

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) is producer Samuel Goldwyn's classic, significant American film about the difficult adjustments (unemployment, adultery, alcoholism, and ostracism) that three returning veteran servicemen experienced in the aftermath of World War II. Major stars (Fredric March, Dana Andrews, and WWII vet Russell), each giving the performances of their lives, are involved in three romances (with Myrna Loy, Virginia Mayo and Teresa Wright, and Cathy O'Donnell).

The germinal idea for the literate, meticulously-constructed film came from a Time Magazine pictorial article (August 1944) that was then re-fashioned into a novel titled Glory for Me by MacKinlay Kantor. Kantor's blank-verse novel was the basis for an adapted screenplay by distinguished Pulitzer Prize winning scriptwriter Robert E. Sherwood (his earlier works were The Petrified Forest and Idiot's Delight).

The ironic title refers to the troubling fact that many servicemen had 'the best years of their lives' in wartime, not in their experiences afterwards in peacetime America when they were forced to adapt to the much-changed demands and became the victims of dislocating forces. [Photographs in the houses of each of the returning servicemen recall an earlier time that was irretrievably past.] The poignant, moving film realistically transports its present-day audiences back to the setting of the late 1940s, where the film's three typical protagonists return from their honored wartime roles to their past, altered middle-American lives and are immediately thrust into domestic tragedies, uncertainties, conflicts and awkward situations - handicapped (both physically and emotionally) by their new civilian roles.

Yeah. I bet they're showing this to the troops on their way to Kuwait.....

Why is it, every time I write about Ben, I feel like I can hear Bobby Goldsborough singing "...me and God watching Scotty grow" in the background?

I apologize to all who now have that song stuck in their head.