Johnny Cash – "The Man Comes Around" (2002)

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers

One hundred million angels singin’

Multitudes are marchin’ to the big kettledrum

In 2003, Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright was embedded with Bravo Company of the 1st Marine Reconnaissance Battalion – the unit that was the “tip of the spear” in Operation Iraqi Freedom.  

Wright’s book about his experiences, Generation Kill, was made into an HBO series with the same title.  Having never served in the military – much less experienced combat – I really have no basis for judging how accurate Generation Kill’s portrayal of life in wartime is.  But the show struck me as almost wholly authentic when I recently watched it.  

I say “almost wholly authentic” because I thought that the depiction of a couple of the Marine officers was a little cartoonish.  (I can’t imagine that those officers could have really been that stupid.)

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The Marines in Generation Kill spend most of their time fighting not the enemy, but boredom and frustration.  Their missions rarely resemble the kind of tasks they were trained to perform, and the command hierarchy does a poor job supplying their needs.  (Batteries for their night-vision optical equipment are always in short supply.)

But they are accustomed to living in a world that is largely FUBAR, and they have learned that the best way to deal with that FUBARness is to joke about it.  The jokes are usually racist, sexist, or  homophobic, but they are as funny as they are politically incorrect.  

Some of the Marines of Bravo Company

Generation Kill does have its share of terrifying moments.  While firefights are relatively infrequent, they are scary as hell when they do occur.  There are a fair number of enemy casualties as the Marines fight their way from Kuwait to Baghdad, but none of the two dozen or so characters who we get to know best in the course of the series die or are seriously wounded.

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The same can’t be said about many of the characters of the sixth and final season of House of Cards.  You would think that being a Marine grunt in Iraq is more dangerous than being a White House staffer, cabinet officer, or Washington newspaper reporter.  But in the world of House of Cards, just the opposite is true.

You’d better sleep with one eye open if you attract the ire of Claire Hale Underwood, the fictional female President who is the dominant character of the final season of House of Cards.  If she learned one thing from her dead husband – who preceded her as President – it’s that assassination can be an effective means of grabbing and holding on to power.  

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I found the ending of House of Cards so unsatisfying that I thought about throwing my shoe at my television.  But big-ass Samsung HDTVs don’t exactly grow on trees, so I left my size 12s where they belonged – on my feet.

President Claire Hale Underwood

Most people agree that House of Cards jumped the shark a long time ago.  But in its last season, it seemed that the show jumped the shark squared.  The sheer implausibility of almost every major event of season six was astonishing.

But I’ve decided that it was wrongheaded of me to expect the show to be realistic.  That never was the show’s intention.

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When I was growing up, I loved political thrillers like Fail Safe and The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May and The Parallax View.  Those movies worked because they had a high degree of verisimilitude.

House of Cards started out that way, but quickly took a very different path.

A number of critics have pointed out the Shakespearean aspects of the series – Macbeth is the play that House of Cards is usually compared to, but you can find elements of Julius Caesar, Richard III, and a number of other Shakespeare plays in the show.

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Macbeth was a real king, but the events of Shakespeare’s play deviate significantly from the historical facts.  

But while Shakespeare fabricated much of the play from whole cloth, his characters act in ways that illuminate human psychology.  Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are very real, even though they aren’t. 

Can the same be said about Claire Underwood?  Maybe . . . although she is such a hyperbolic character that it’s easy to dismiss her as a figment of a screenwriter’s imagination who is no more real than a Marvel supervillain.

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The present and former Presidents Underwood were at least loosely modeled on Bill and Hillary Clinton.  

But Claire Underwood does things that Hillary Clinton’s worst enemies wouldn’t accuse her of doing.  In fact, she does things that Donald Trump’s worst enemies wouldn’t accuse him of doing.

(Actually, I may be wrong about that last statement.)

To me, House of Cards falls short of Macbeth not because its plot is so implausible – President Underwood not only assassinates her enemies willy-nilly but also appoints an all-female cabinet (which is a bit much if you ask me) – but because Claire is about as unsympathetic and one-dimensional a character as you can imagine.  

President Underwood’s all-gal cabinet

At least Lady Macbeth had a guilty conscience about all the bad sh*t she and her hubby did.  Claire Underwood seems wholly untroubled after sticking a knife into an old friend in the Oval Office, and then pinching his nose as he lies bleeding on the carpet so he dies more quickly.

(Oops – I forgot to say “SPOILER ALERT!”  Sorry about that.) 

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While House of Cards may have gone off the deep end in its final season, one could argue that the good ol’ U. S. of A. has as well.

I’m as paranoid as the next guy about how much power our government possesses over us.  There’s no doubt that a lot of people get chewed up and spit out as a result of the malice or incompetence (or both) of government officials.

There have been plenty of other places where governments have kicked over the traces and run roughshod over their citizens.  

(Just because he never said it
doesn’t mean it isn’t true)

We assume that can’t happen here because it never has before.  But I wouldn’t be so sure.  (When it appears that high-ranking law enforcement types were at least talking about how they might nullify the outcome of a presidential election, you have to wonder.)

Let’s face it.  Most elected officials seem to be motivated by one thing and one thing only – winning the next election.  They make decisions based on whether it would help or hurt their and their party’s electoral fortunes.  Principle be damned, and the devil take the hindmost.

Here endeth the reading of the lesson.

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In the final scene of Generation Kill, some of the Marines of Bravo Company sit down to watch a video made by a soldier who brought a handheld camcorder to Iraq.  Click here to see that scene.

That video is accompanied by the title track from Johnny Cash’s 2002 album, American IV: The Man Comes Around – the last album Cash released before his death. 

The song was inspired by a dream Cash had in which he walked into Buckingham Palace and encountered Queen Elizabeth II, who called him “a thorn tree in a whirlwind.”  It’s full of Biblical references – most of them from the book of Revelations. 

Click here to listen to “When the Man Comes Around.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: