Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Madness...madness!

In my job I'm exposed to a great deal of media that daily chronicles the dire straights across the country. Mix that with a number of seasonal, family, and age-related challenges and unfortunate yet expected occurrences in my own life, and I'm left in the evenings with a brain that tries to sift through an alphabet soup of alarming thoughts, which are hard to bring together in an intelligent format.

Tonight I flashed on the final few minutes of David Lean's "Bridge on the River Kwai" in which Alec Guinness plays a British officer and WWII POW (Col. Nicholson) who commands the men under him to assist the enemy in building a bridge. But instead of delaying its construction, he succumbs to his immense ego (rationalized to himself as Enlightened Superiority) and delivers a formidable bridge into Japanese hands. Here, the team sent to blow up the bridge battles Nicholson, who realizes, (SPOILER ALERT!) almost too late, the extent of his folly: