Untamed Heart

Untamed Heart

I believe the best movie ever made by Christian Slater and Marisa Tomei may be the obscure 1993 Untamed Heart. He was 24 and she 29 when it was made. He played a quiet, questionably intelligent young dishwasher who was an orphan with a severely damaged congenital heart problem. She is a working-class young woman who works as a diner waitress, trying to better her position and who has her share of boy-problems despite her dark good looks.

I have learned that the producers of this movie struggled over the title for this movie, being somehow ambivalent about the title Untamed Heart. What exactly is an untamed heart? Is it a good heart or a bad heart? Should a heart be tamed, or should it be left to roam free?

This morning I am listening to Donald Trump talk about the U.S. military operation in Syria that this morning brought about the death of the ISIS Caliphate leadership in the persona of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the supposed founder of ISIS. Trump has obviously spent the past twelve hours with a vocal coach practicing the pronunciation of the name al-Baghdadi, which he has repeated dozens of times during the press conference. Suddenly, his whole being was supposedly focused for three years on the capture and killing of al-Baghdadi. Every golf shot and every tweet obviously had him chanting “get al-Baghdadi” in rhythmic fashion under his breath. And then it hit me, when he said that al-Baghdadi “died like a dog” and followed that with the mention that no U.S. forces were killed or injured except for a dog that was a K-9 Commando sent into the dead-end tunnel where al-Baghdadi finally blew himself up with a suicide bomb vest, I suddenly thought that this was the real untamed heart of America.

Trump was in his full draft-dodging glory talking about watching the whole spectacle of the attack and beat-down “like it was a movie” that he could describe to his base with great blood-thirsty glee. He says that we should publicize the dying scene of this ISIS nasty for all our children to watch because they would see what a weak and simpering leader al-Baghdadi really was. He must have repeated his interpretation of the ignominious end of this man of conviction (as misguided as it was) about ten times, relishing the shoot-em-up nature of the killing. He somehow feels that there is a lesson that would resonate with young people in helping to keep them from being recruited by this weak and simpering Caliphate. I wonder if anyone even once said to him that the truly presidential action might have been to report the event and leave it as a successful yet regrettable act that had to be done to help defeat terrorism. The act of dancing on the grave of any man and then making fun of his dying moments is a true sign of the heart (or lack thereof) that Donald Trump has to offer the American electorate.

When we were in Turkey recently, we visited the ANZ Beachhead at Gallipoli where in WWI the Australian and New Zealand troops under the direction of the British, attacked the entrenched Turkish troops on the steep hillside and were subsequently slaughtered. Few could debate the righteousness of the defense of their homeland by the Turks, but this did not stop the Turkish leader of the day, Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, from erecting a monument that gave comfort to the survivors and families of those Australian and New Zealand boys who gave their lives. He said that they died bravely and that their souls would forever be tended in great honor by the people of Turkey because we are all part of the imperfect human race. This is a tamed heart of a great man.

Donald Trump is now using the lives and death of these ISIS fighters to denigrate the basis for their beliefs and their very humanity. I don’t care how awful these men were, they still deserve better than to have a true coward like Donald Trump calling them cowards to the end and describing their deaths in an embarrassment to American ideals. It is amazing to me that neither Trump nor his advisors see the value in compassion. In the movie The American President, Michael Douglas berets an aide who declares that his approval of a retaliatory nighttime attack on a Libyan defense building (costing the life of a janitor) was “decisive, proportionally appropriate and presidential”. His response was that it was the least presidential thing he had ever done. That exemplifies what we should want and need in a president. Someone who is capable of making well-informed tough decisions, but does not relish in them.

Donald Trump has the original untamed heart. Untamed means feral, savage, uncontrolled, untrained, brutal, barbarous and uncivilized. That’s a fair description of what we saw the president do this morning as he whipped up his base by playing on their baser instincts. As I ponder the problems that we face in this country, I’m pretty sure that any attempts to change a certain narcissistic and barely educated seventy-three year old balding and crass man would be wasted effort. The problem as I see it is in our electorate. While I am incredulous that 30% or so of the voting public favor Mr. Trump, I should be non-political and say that ALL of our electorate needs to be educated in the quality of mercy. As Portia says in The Merchant of Venice:

The quality of mercy is not strained.

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

It is the duty of a leader, and especially the leader of the entire free world that they be at least as wise as Shakespeare and that they recognize the value of a fully tamed heart.