Someday This War's Gonna End

The creation of the vaccine in such a short time may very well be a kind of miracle, an act of human ingenuity rivaling the moon landing. However, throughout 2021, as the vaccine has slowly become more accessible and the potential of returning to some semblance of life as it was lived prior to March 2020 gets more realistic, I have found myself thinking about Robert Duvall’s Lieutenant Kilgore from Apocalypse Now. More often than not, people get Kilgore wrong. Hell, more often than not people get Apocalypse Now wrong as a whole, so it’s no surprise they would get the film’s most complex character wrong as part of that.

Depending on their level of pop culture literacy, people usually know Kilgore either because he’s the guy who says “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” or because he’s the guy who says “Charlie don’t surf!” He has come to represent the absurdity and hypocrisy of the American imperial project. He embodies the selfishness that drove America throughout the Cold War and which, as we have seen during the pandemic, is perhaps the defining characteristic of American society. I will admit to being surprised by the extent to which the pandemic exposed how willing individual Americans are to put others at risk of death so long as they do not have to be inconvenienced. In being surprised, I displayed my own naiveté - 40+ years ago, in the figure of Kilgore, that selfishness was memorialized on screen for posterity. To describe Kilgore as the archetypal Ugly American is to say too much; Kilgore is, simply, the archetypal American.

But he is also much more than that. In fact, Kilgore is the core of the film, the dark heart around which Coppola’s adaptation of Heart of Darkness revolves. For as much as Apocalypse Now is a commentary on America’s failures, it is also an examination of something much more universal: not simply humanity’s capacity to be evil but our desire to be evil. Kilgore understands this, and that’s why his line “someday this war’s gonna end” is said in resignation rather than hope. When the war ends, the freedom to embrace this aspect of human nature ends with it. Kilgore is numb to the violence around him because it allows him to embrace aspects of his self that we in the audience have been continually taught to repress. If Kilgore is a grotesque figure it is only because he, like the “premature antifascists” who fought in Spain in the 1930s only to return to America after World War II and be branded as enemies of the state, has acknowledged reality sooner than the rest of us.

This pandemic has, perhaps, caused us to finally catch up to Kilgore. It has undeniably achieved what Susan Sontag hypothesized in On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others: we are all numb to the violence of death. Everyone knows someone who has had Covid. If you are lucky you only know people who had it but did not die from it. But who has that kind of luck anymore? Certainly not me. There has been so much death that we don’t even know how to process what we have just experienced. Because America has become a militarized society we tend to think that trauma can only arise from situations of extreme or explicit violence. That is, of course, ridiculous. We have all been traumatized by Covid and we will probably carry that trauma with us forever, in the same way that, even decades later, people who lived through the Great Depression refused to discard anything.

Despite this, I think we will miss the pandemic when it’s over. We’ll miss it for reasons we are uncomfortable with, the same way we are uncomfortable with Kilgore. This pandemic has allowed us to embrace being judgmental of others, and for that judgment to be lauded rather than condemned. It has allowed us to become withdrawn or defiant without need for explanation. It has allowed us to act in ways that would, in a non-pandemic scenario, be considered irrational. It has allowed us to be both selfish and self-righteous. Like war, it has allowed us to embrace the parts of us that we have always been told shouldn’t exist, let alone be embraced. We have become Kilgore.

Someday this pandemic’s gonna end.

What does this have to do with baseball? Not much. But baseball season started on time this year, like it did in 2019. Someday this pandemic’s gonna end. Who will we be when it does?