Lucas Jackson — “Cool Hand” Luke to film buffs — was the world’s most noted non-conformist ever to flicker on the silver screen. The movie Cool Hand Luke (1967) was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Actor (Paul Newman, who lost to Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night), Best Supporting Actor (George Kennedy), Best Adapted Screenplay (Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson), and Best Original Music Score (Lalo Schifrin). Only Kennedy won for Best Supporting Actor. It was a travesty that Newman did not win for Best Actor.The story begins with Luke cutting off the heads of parking meters with a pipe cutter to “settle an old score.” The crime lands him in an oppressive work camp with more rules and regulations than the DMV. Luke entered the prison camp a hard case, and he would remain hard throughout his brief but impressionable stay. If Luke was a hard case, the Captain was relentless in his pursuit to get Luke’s mind right. If reason didn’t work, there was “the box,” ((Recreated in Toy Story 3.)) the broiling southern sun, sun-up to sun-down road-gang work, acts of dehumanization, and outright cruelty. Nothing worked on the recalcitrant Luke. “What we have here,” the frustrated Captain declared in one of the movie’s classic lines, “is failure to communicate.” Nothing seemed to reach Luke’s non-conformist mind.
The regimented prison camp worked like a vice on Luke’s individuality and nonconformist nature. Luke’s only remedy was to escape. The regiment beat down on him, and he fought to free himself no matter what the consequences. After numerous escape attempts, a last effort is made to get Luke’s mind right:
After a full week of work, Luke is humiliated and tormented by being forced to submit to the authority of Boss Paul. To systematically break his spirit in front of the other prisoners, he is ordered to dig a “graveyard-shaped” ditch on the prison grounds. When he has completed the grueling task of emptying the Boss’ ditch, he is told to fill it back up again—and then after it’s filled to re-empty it again! The men sing “Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down” in full view of his tortured, groveling humiliation.
To symbolize his own death and the genuine end of his ferocious individuality and defiance, the guard slashes Luke across the head at the end of one end of the ditch, and he is tossed backwards into the open “coffin.” Broken and tired, he begs the bosses to accept his cracked will and tarnished pride.
What follows is Luke’s seeming submission to authority and his willingness to conform. He appears to be a broken man. Exhausted from digging and emptying the Boss’s ditch, the scene continues with the following exchange:
Luke: Don’t hit me anymore…Oh God, I pray to God you don’t hit me anymore. I’ll do anything you say, but I can’t take anymore. Boss Paul: You got your mind right, Luke? Luke: Yeah. I got it right. I got it right, boss. (He grips the ankles of the guard) Boss Paul: Suppose you’s back-slide on us? Luke: Oh no I won’t. I won’t, boss. Boss Paul: Suppose you’s to back-sass? Luke: No I won’t. I won’t. I got my mind right. Boss Paul: You try to run again, we gonna kill ya. Luke: I won’t, I won’t, boss.
But Luke does. For a while, Luke plays the role of the dutiful and compliant prisoner who has finally gotten his mind right. But there’s one more act of defiance in Luke. Having gained the confidence of the guards, Luke bolts one last time. It takes a bullet to the head to finally get Luke’s mind really and truly right.
Getting a person’s mind right has been the modus operandi of totalitarian regimes for millennia. The isolated and desolated gulag was the perfect place to get a person’s mind right under the Communists. George Orwell’s 1984 is a relentless tale of Winston getting his mind right. In the end, he loves Big Brother. Getting a person’s mind right is the latest tactic of the oppressive homosexual bosses with a compliant media at the ready to take up the homosexual cause.
Have you ever watched Home and Garden TV, better known as HGTV? Have you noticed how many homosexual couples there are? It’s more like “Homosexual and Gay TV.” The goal is to make homosexuals living together a normal experience. See, they’re just like heterosexual couples. I’m not the only person who has noticed the obvious emphasis.
Consider Rolf Szabo, an employee for twenty-three years at Eastman Kodak. He was fired for giving his opinion in an email about Gay and Lesbian Coming-Out Day sponsored by the company. Kodak’s “diversity group” sent out an email asking employees to “be supportive” of fellow workers who choose to reveal their homosexuality on Gay and Lesbian Coming-Out Day. Szabo replied to the memo telling the company not to send him this type of information since he found it “disgusting and offensive.” The wrong thing to say to Big Brother. The diversity bosses had to make his mind right. If Mr. Szabo would not change his mind, like Luke, the full weight of oppression would be brought down on him. If that didn’t work, the diversity police would get rid of him so he could not infect other employees. Mr. Szabo said Kodak wanted him to sign a letter admitting he was wrong. When he refused, he was fired. So much for “diversity”at Kodak.
Then there was the case of motivational speaker Danny Buggs. It seems that Buggs made some derogatory remarks about homosexuality during an assembly of 500 male students at Stone Mountain (Georgia) High School. “God made Adam and Eve and not Adam and Steve,” Buggs told the students. Of course, Buggs is correct. It was Adam and Eve. If it had been Adam and Steve, none of us would be here today.
As you can imagine, the leftist establishment in Atlanta went ballistic when the story broke. Atlanta’s “gay community” was “outraged.” State Democrat Representative Karla Drenner, a self-professed homosexual, condemned Buggs’ speech. “Children should not have to go to school and be afraid because they are different,” Denner wrote. “As a mother of two, I cannot stand by and be a witness while other people judge or demean anyone’s children, gay, straight, black, white, tall, short, Christian, Muslim, Jew, etc. . . . In the end, no matter how you spin it, hatred is hatred.” At the time, sodomy was still a crime in Georgia. Buggs was censured for his remarks and was put on probation. If sodomy is a crime, and a crime violates the law, how is what Buggs said a violation of any law? It seems to me that the school system that reprimanded him is in violation of the law by endorsing sodomy in the schools.
Second, Denner’s list is interesting in that it compares sexual behavior with physical characteristics and belief systems. Homosexuality is what people do. Being black, white, tall, and short are not behaviors. Religions are defined in terms of what people believe. Just because a person holds certain religious beliefs does not mean that anything can be done in the name of religion. (Does anyone remember 9–11?) Again, actions are what are being evaluated, not beliefs. Sodomy is an immoral and unnatural sexual behavior. It’s not “hate speech” to point out these things.
In 2008, when a group of traditional marriage activists peacefully expressed their displeasure when a court overruled their vote on the marriage issue, homosexuals took to the streets to harass and assault them:
A group of homosexual tyrants surrounded and physically assaulted a 69-year-old grandmother in Palm Springs earlier this week, after yanking a cross out of her hands and stomping on it while it lay on the ground. She can be seen mouthing the words “I love you” to protestors, who in response threaten her, and call her “stupid” and a “Nazi” while shaking their fists in her face with their own faces contorted with rage. Said the woman, “They began grabbing me. It was like a dog pack, actually.”
The latest beat down comes from the wide world of sports. Peter Vidmar, who was named to head the 2012 United States Olympic team in London was forced to resign after homosexual Olympians, in particular figure skater Johnny Weir and softball player Jessica Mendoza, protested because he opposes homosexual marriage, something that’s illegal in most states! Illegal! Vidmar, who is a Morman, actively supported the 2008 California Proposition 8 campaign which a majority of California voters voted for.
Frank Turek is a Christian. He has written a number of books on apologetic themes, some of them co-authored with fellow-Christian author Norman Geisler. In addition to his work in the area of Christian apologetics, Turek also conducts leadership and teambuilding seminars for large companies. Since 2008, he had been a consultant for the California-based software company Cisco Systems. By all accounts, his training programs have been reported to be “excellent.” Then it happened:
Earlier this year, one of the managers in Turek’s session “googled” his name and found out that his trainer [Turek] is also the author of a book entitled Correct, Not Politically Correct: How Same-Sex Marriage Hurts Everyone. The manager, a homosexual, took offense at the book that critiqued same-sex marriages and phoned in a complaint to Marilyn Nagel, senior director of inclusion and diversity for Cisco. Turek was fired soon after.
Nagel later apologized for his firing but apparently did not see the irony in that she is the director of inclusion and diversity. “She refused to admit there was a culture that punished views that were not politically correct.”
Homosexuals are doing what tyrants have always done. Pick out a few offenders and make examples of them. This tactic first was used by the Romans and later copied by military tyrants to keep the troops in line. Decimation ((Latin: decimatio; decem = “ten.”)) was a form of military discipline used by officers in the Roman Army to punish mutinous or cowardly soldiers. The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning “removal of a tenth.” See the film Paths of Glory (1957) for a modern example. A similar tactic is being used today in an attempt to decimate the anti-homosexual lobby. Show the opposition the price they will have to pay to oppose the homosexual regime if they decide to go up against the homosexual bosses.