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5 Rules of Engagement attack from the multicultural front (2000) n the introductory scenes of Rules of Engagement, director William Friedkin, also the director of The Exorcist, presents his two heroes as honorable American military men.1 Terry Childers (Samuel L. Jackson) and Hayes Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones) are tough career marines and devoted comrades. As we see in the initial scenes that act as flashbacks to the year 1968, these men once served their country in the quagmire of the Vietnam War. While there, they commanded American troops in a hostile environment and placed themselves in harm’s way. They fired upon a difficult-to-see enemy and took fire in return. Under these difficult circumstances , these men were resolute in their command, mission, responsibilities , and, above all, their loyalty to their unit, the corps, and their nation. Hodges gets wounded, returns home, serves his country as a military lawyer, and then retires with the honors of his distinguished service. On the other hand, Childers rescues this wounded friend without demur , continues to serve his country in the battlefields of later American combats, and gets promoted through the ranks of military battle command . Despite their military experiences and the wisdom they have acquired throughout their careers, in the America of the narrative present they are shown to be uncertain about their identities as colonels. Twentyeight years after their service together inVietnam, the twowarrior friends are reunited at Hodges’s retirement celebration. In the narrative present, they walk together in an autumnal wood at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina . This wood of their later-aged years foreshadows a period of their lives that proves to be more dangerous than the green Vietnamese jungles of their youth. Vietnamese jungles were burgeoning, verdant, and thick with undergrowth that provided cover in which to hide. In this North American wood the vegetation has gone dormant, the ground is covered with dead and dry leaves, and the barren trees provide no hiding place for these men. Childers consoles his friend Hodges, who never came to terms with serving his country in a desk job. Childers points out to his friend, ‘‘You ain’t missin’ nothin’, Hodge. It’s a whole new ballgame—no 164 ‘‘evil’’ arabs in american popular film friends, no enemies; no front, no rear; no victories, no defeats; no mama, no papa. We’re orphans out there.’’ Childers is describing a discontent with the ‘‘isms’’ of the Clintonian era, such as multiculturalism, postmodernism , deconstructionism, and relativism. The ‘‘evil’’ Arabs in Rules of Engagement are depicted as using this discontent, in a period which many perceive as one of cultural upheaval in America, as a vulnerabilityopening America to attack. Childers’s ‘‘a whole new ballgame’’ represents his nostalgic lament for the ‘‘old ballgame’’—a time, we may assume, that hails from a pre-1968 period that the two men knew together in combat. From his description of the ‘‘new’’ we can deduce that the ‘‘old’’ was a period of certainty and clarity of conceptual boundaries rather than of questioning and blurred cultural vision. Childers’s ‘‘old ballgame’’ refers to the type of world that today’s American conservative movement wants to protect and reassert— a post–World War II America, built upon a selective historical memory of events and sweeping time periods, purged of many of the American experiences of the 1960s and 1970s. According to the conservative movement ’s narratives, America is a nation on a historical trajectory toward greatness and under divine guidance. The nation was founded more than two hundred years ago when European settlers came to a wilderness and virgin land to build a new civilization with a new political system that improved upon the broken one that was left behind in the Old World. The nation was founded upon clear principles set forth in texts that are considered to have taught, regulated, and protected men: the Bible, the Ten Commandments, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Together these texts are seen as having designed an ethical system that outlines the values of the citizens’ duty to a JudeoChristian God, commitment to moral conduct, and devotion to life, liberty , and the pursuit of happiness. The texts were employed in the framework of a political system that stresses the ideals of fairness, equality, justice, limitations on government, and the rights of the individual in society . Therefore, these texts are referred to as the foundations of the ideologies of Western democracy and capitalism...

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