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Sympathy For Colonel Klink

Last night, following a hearty meal at a Brazilian restaurant in Philadelphia, I found myself thinking about Colonel Klink. Don't ask me how or why I started thinking about him; the workings of my mind are as mysterious to me as they are to everyone else. It might have had something to do with the stress of digesting a hearty Brazilian meal. But the fact is that Colonel Klink stepped out of the haze of distant decades and into the glaring fluorescent light of my consciousness. For those of you who haven't amassed enough gray hairs to remember him, Colonel Klink was the commandant of Stalag 13, the German prisoner-of-war camp that provided the weekly setting for 'Hogan's Heroes.' That venerable sitcom pitted a plucky gang of five Allied prisoners, led by the unflappable Colonel Hogan, against the ineptitude of portly, good-natured Sergeant Schultz and his neurotic superior officer, Colonel Klink. Schultz and Klink seemed to exist for no other purpose than to be outfoxed, tormented, humiliated and stripped of their dignity week after week, season after season. You could argue that if Hogan and his crew were so smart, they would have escaped from the Stalag and ended the series right then and there. But you miss the point: it's my contention that they stayed just for the incomparable pleasure of tormenting Schultz and Klink.

We've always loved to create straw men for the joy of knocking them down. Straw men aren't real men with hearts and spleens; they're the embodiment of traits we dislike as a culture, made conveniently vulnerable to easy ridicule. The typical straw man is a comically pompous nitwit in a position of power. Think of Ted Baxter on 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show.' Think of Frank Burns on 'M*A*S*H.' Think of the principal in 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' or Dean Wormer in 'Animal House.' Something in our genes loves the spectacle of such men (and occasionally women) receiving their comeuppance. I can't blame the impulse, but I begin to sympathize with the victims. To my mind, Sergeant Schultz and even the bilious Colonel Klink were more likable, more sympathetic, more HUMAN than our own Colonel Hogan with his perpetual cool-guy bravado and his irritating air of smug competence. Ferris Bueller was even more insufferable -- think of Eddie Haskell and the Marquis de Sade rolled into one teenage abomination -- and yet we were EXPECTED to sympathize with him as he drove his  luckless principal to frenzied exasperation and bodily injury. In the original film version of 'M*A*S*H,' Hawkeye and his comrades were positively evil compared to their uptight dullard of a superior officer, Frank Burns -- yet again, we were supposed to snicker as they carried out their diabolical plots against him.

What's wrong with this picture? Can you spell m-a-n-i-p-u-l-a-t-i-o-n? Hollywood is feeding us the old notion that it's justifiable, smart and even exhilarating to make a mockery of authority. Nothing new about that: it's a classic 'sixties notion, though it dates back decades earlier to the cheerfully mad antics of the Marx Brothers. Of course, it CAN be fun and even healthful to rebel against authority, in real life or vicariously through the wiles of Hollywood screenwriters. It's especially liberating for those of us who have to put up with oppressive authority figures in our own lives. But here's what disturbs me about the 'us-vs.-them' comedies like 'Hogan's Heroes' and 'Ferris Bueller': it's the subtle implication that the good guys are good partly because they're underdogs but mainly because they're COOL... while the bad guys are bad partly because they're authority figures but mainly because they're UNCOOL. In the Hollywood of the past forty years, cool always triumphs over uncool, because cool is SUPERIOR to uncool. The Marx Brothers made no pretense to superiority; they merely clowned their way among the starchy socialites and drew them into their own whirlwind of innocent anarchy. Ferris Bueller, on the other hand, relishes his ability to wreak havoc without breaking a sweat; he knows it's what makes him a sure winner in the ancient Darwinian footrace. He courts
disaster and escapes without a blemish. The prinicipal is on to Bueller and refuses to let him win, yet he's as powerless to stop him as a weatherman is powerless to stop a tornado. To make matters worse, we're supposed to cheer as Bueller's middle-aged nemesis sweats and stumbles and ultimately self-destructs. Americans love to watch rigid people self-destruct.

If you think about it, we're looking at Kennedy versus Nixon all over again. John F. Kennedy was the living embodiment of Colonel Hogan and Hawkeye Pierce and Ferris Bueller, the mischievous and insouciant ladies' man who lived on the edge, thumbed his nose at morality and escaped with the reputation of a demigod. He got away with it again and again because he was almost supernaturally cool. Everybody loved him and built shrines in his memory. Richard Nixon, on the other hand, was Colonel Klink and Frank Burns and Ferris Bueller's principal. He was awkward and fallible and very human -- a straight-arrow who chased Communists, perspired during debates and couldn't synchronize his words with his hand-gestures. He committed ONE offense and DIDN'T get away with it. People relished watching him fall, primarily because he was so thoroughly uncool. And that strikes me as sad and unjust. I'll be the first to admit that I'm more of a Nixon than a Kennedy. So are most of us. We bumble, we sweat, we can't get away with swiping a packet of sugar cubes from the local Red Lobster. Why should we be manipulated into rooting for the cool guys when most of us can't chew gum and snap our fingers at the same time? I say it's time we stood our ground and stopped cheering for the Ferris Buellers of the world. Next time, I'd like to see his principal drag him back to school by the scruff of his scrawny neck. But the poor guy would probably have a coronary occlusion on the spot, and the audience would guffaw all the louder. So it goes when everyone roots against you. So it goes when you're uncool.

© 2001 by Bridget Petrella Media Relations. "Some Cynical Guy" appears here by permission of the publisher.

Profile of a Cynic...

Bayan, who claims to be a "kinder, gentler cynic," currently lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His weekly column, "Some Cynical Guy," is published and syndicated by Upbeat Online. 

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