Patriots Day: This is What Makes America Great

I saw an advance screening of Patriots Day, the dramatization of the Boston Marathon Bombing and the hunt for the young Islamic terrorists who perpetrated it. I must say that this is a movie that ALL Americans need to see when it is released. Put it on your calendars and keep an eye out for opening weekend December 21.

You Need to See Patriots Day.

With Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon, and now Patriots Day, Peter Berg is fast becoming the official great all-American movie director in my book, along with Mark Wahlberg as the great All-American actor. Berg seems to understand the courage, sacrifice, and exceptionalism of American heroism, and he is unafraid to tackle the most important villain on the earth today: Islamism.

(We must forgive him for Battleship, as that was a studio monstrosity that I am sure he only did to be able to make the movies he really wants to.)

The movie’s first act introduces us to some of the lives of the victims and heroes of that fateful day, and gives us a taste of their desires, their loves, their hopes for life. We are made to care for these everyday people and first responders before we see them go through the horrendous attack and aftermath. Wives, families, parents and lovers, all, with dreams and plans. The emotional power in this story is thick and human and deeply moving.

He even gives us a glimpse into the Tsarnaev brothers “everyday life” that leads up to their Islamic everyday terror. Though not with the kind of typical Hollywood “terrorists are people too” moral equivalency.

Mark Wahlberg plays a character who represents a composite of a couple different homicide detectives for narrative flow. But the attention to accuracy and detail outside of the necessary creative license is strong. This movie is true to the facts, but more importantly to the spirit of this important historical event.

And that spirit is the American spirit of banding together, something we desperately need right now in our country.

After the bombing, the hunt for the two brothers illustrates the true potential of Americans working together to fight evil. This is why it is so necessary to see this movie. We are coming out of a decade of division and hate, a bizarro White House-led and media-fed war on the cops of this country, as well as a suppression from those same influencers of the most significant evil we face as a civilization: Islamism.

Now it’s time for us to put those false narratives and fratricidal political violence behind us, band together and fight real evil that really exists.

It’s time to get down and do the work. Which is what Patriots Day embodies. It inspires us by example, with role models of everyday Americans doing what’s right. From the first responders rushing into the bomb blast area, to the cops rushing the bomb throwing terrorists, to Bostonians gathering together under the calling “Boston Strong,” this movie depicts the real good of this country in the face of the false narratives of anti-Americanism so prevalent in our culture of left wing political and racist conspiracy theories.

Suck on that, Americaphobes.

A Note on the Villains

Berg handles the Tsarnaev brothers, no doubt with meticulous documented accuracy, since cries of “Islamophobia” always launch like Palestinian rockets from the Left whenever you speak the truth to Islamic power. There are moments of such profundity when we hear the insanity of what drives so much of Islamic delusion (and the Left that feeds it), whether it is the 9/11 Truthism that the brothers are so convinced we are all deceived by, or their selective moral hypocrisies, condemning Martin Luther King Jr. for being a fornicator while they fornicate themselves. Oh, and they’re cop-killers, who engage in the kind of activity that Black Lives Matter has inspired throughout this country. But here, we see the evil for what it is.

But the truly most frightening moment was the interrogation of the homegrown Islamic convert wife. Her cold, heartlessness toward death and mayhem for the very country that gave her freedom and life. This is the most insane evil of all. But it is not surprising in a country whose educational system and media has indoctrinated a generation with the same false narrative of America-hatred.

She quotes the Muslim joys of being mastered by men and going to hell for not submitting to her husband. (And one cannot help but think of the frustration of feminists trying to avoid this real threat to their well being while spewing their hatred on the Christian West for imagined oppression).

But Berg also depicts the soullessness of the modern college Millennials, who felt no moral compulsion to turn in their evil terrorist fellow student. This is what colleges are creating in this country, and it will take us down long before Islam does.

What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Berg’s intent is not to enflame hatred for Islam, as he reaffirms through the main characters that “All we have to fight back with is love. We can hunt them down, catch them and kill them. But we’re not going to be able to stop them.” They will keep coming at us. “But the power of love is what they can’t touch.”

Now, outside of the context of this movie, I would consider that a rather weak liberal response. You know, a generic meaningless binary opposition that covers the lack of a real world program of action.

But in the context of this story, it rings true. What love is in this movie, is not backing down and apologizing for offending, it’s not denying Islam as a real threat because of Islamophobia-phobia.

What love is in this movie is loving one another, supporting our cops, banding together to fight evil, and most of all, love is a well-targeted shot on evil.

In a deeper sense, it really should be our love for our neighbor and for the innocent that drives us to destroy the evil, because if we are motivated by mere tribal hatred, we have become the enemy.

Love of justice requires killing evil.

Let those who love the LORD hate evil, for he guards the lives of his faithful ones and delivers them from the hand of the wicked.  – Psalm 97:10

Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work? – Proverbs 24:11–12

Godawa’s Quibble Corner

My quibble is not so much with the actual movie, but with a specific aspect of what really happened in the days before apprehending the fugitive brother.

At one point in the manhunt for the second brother, all of Boston is shut down and people told to stay in their homes. The aerials of the city and suburbs looked like something out of The Walking Dead. I can’t remember for how long they did this, but it was really pathetic that an entire city was shut down and a kind of martial law imposed just to find one man. It’s the kind of police state actions that terrorism unfortunately pushes a free society toward.

And in a way, it’s one of the best arguments for a well-armed populace.

They wouldn’t have had to shut down any town in Texas. And that pretty-boy monster would probably not be still alive, waiting for an appeal to a death penalty as justice is delayed by politics.

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