Good Will Hunting Rant

Will Hunting’s rant at his NSA interview in Good Will Hunting is, without a doubt, the most concise yet thorough distillation of liberal idiocy there is.

The emotional impact of this 2 minute rant for lefties is in the situation. The NSA (National Security Agency) are the “they” of every bed-wetting liberal’s nightmares. And “they” want our golden boy because of his genius for math which is so off the page it makes his M.I.T. professor sponsor look as analytical as Kim Kardashian at a Sudoku competition

They want to corrupt our Will and bring him over to the dark side. The scene opens with the NSA interviewer reclining complacently in his spacious office, confident of securing the services of what he sees as a very malleable savant.

But the suit is in for a shock. Our hero, Will, is not only a math whizz. Through the course of the film we’ve seen him best judges, elite college students and a cabel of psychiatrists. Will has mastered multiple fields of human endeavor in a way that has been impossible for mere mortals for hundreds of years.

More than that, though, Will is from the wrong side of the tracks and has heart. He may have a brain the size of a planet but he prefers to work as a janitor and hang with real people like his idiot buddy, Chuckie, rather than emotionally incontinent corporate stiffs.

So, at last one of the faceless Nazis of the military industrial complex gets to hear the voice of the people. It’s Daniel thrown into the lions’ den, and this Daniel shows them up for the bunch of pussies they really are!

  

Here’s Will’s harangue in full.

Enjoy.

Will: Why shouldn't I work for the NSA? That's a tough one, but I'll take a shot.

Say I'm working at NSA and somebody puts a code on my desk, something no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it, maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels are hiding. Fifteen hundred people that I never met, never had no problem with, get killed.

Now the politicians are sayin', "Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cause they were all pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie over there takin' shrapnel in the ass. He comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And, of course, the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon.

And they're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, of course, and maybe they even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs. It ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work, he can't afford to drive, so he's walking to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids.

And meanwhile he's starvin', 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. I figure fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard. I could be elected president.

The scene ends there because there’s nothing more to say. We don’t see the reaction of the interviewer, but it’s pretty obvious that he has been struck dumb by Will's eloquence. What could he say after Will has shattered his carefully crafted world of deception?

However, little known outside one particular cutting room is the fact that this scene is not all that it seems to be. The fact is that the whole thing was originally cooked up as a fly-on-the-wall real life documentary exposé. Unlikely as it may seem, the guys at the NSA really thought they were going to be interviewing a genius when Matt Damon walked in.

Another thing I can exclusively reveal is that the interview did, in fact, go on long after “Will Hunting’s” devastating tirade.

So here for the first time on the net, the whole story. Let’s call it:

The Stiff’s Retort

Condescending NSA Stiff: Er. Thank you, Mr. Hunting, Will, for shedding some light upon your interesting worldview.

Will, (correct me if I’m wrong) the basic thrust of your thinking  is that imperial America invades poor benighted countries to steal their Aladdins' caves of resources.

You might find this interesting. We conduct regular polls of college students to keep a finger on the pulse, so to speak. A couple of years ago we asked them why they thought the US and its coalition partners invaded Iraq. When the results came back, we thought there must have been some sort of statistical anomaly. The proportion coming out with the answer “It's the oil, dude” exceeded their agreement on any other point. Even, if I recall correctly, their support for lowering the drinking age to 18!

This is, however, one of those occasions where 10 million students can be wrong.

If we invaded Iraq for the oil, then why didn’t we actually take it like the Brits did in their golden age of empire. We didn’t even topple the mad dog of Bagdad. Instead, after the president went wobbly, we called off hostilities after just a 100 hours.

The argument, then, that “it’s all about oil” is, despite its having attained the level of received wisdom among our finest minds, as those same Brit empire builders say “bollocks on stilts”.

No matter how much you hate your country, Will, the simple fact that we didn’t in fact take their damned oil should lead you to some other, perhaps equally Machiavellian, conclusion.

And while we’re on the subject. I mean those 1500 rebels that “you never had no problem with”. What if they have a problem with you, Will? Or your country?

As regards the charge that it’s the poor that fight America’s wars, once again the reality tells a different story, Will. In the 60s the differences in income between the races were much greater than they are now. So if more poor were being drafted you’d expect blacks on generally much lower incomes to be doing more than their fair share of the dying.

As it turned out, though, the combat deaths in Vietnam by race show Americans dying pretty much in proportion to their skin colors’s proportion in the population as a whole.

Oh yes. Then there’s your theory that we fought the war to install a government that would “sell us oil at a good price”. Sorry, Will, oil is an internationally traded commodity and its price is determined by demand and supply. Just as we don’t pay over the odds to the mad mullahs of Iran for their crude, so the Canadians are not inclined to take any less than the market rate for theirs.

Will, as the world’s greatest living polymath, I’m surprised that a basic grasp of the market place escapes you.  

And then there’s those coolies on fifteen cents a day. Well, first off they are not on 15 cents a day. OK, sure. They’re also not on $30 an hour. But those workers in our transplants around the world are not herded there at gunpoint. They work there because the conditions are better than at the locally owned firms and much better than working the paddy fields back home in their village.

Then, Will, you touchingly mention how while we invade countries to get cheap oil your “buddy” ends up paying $2.50 a gallon. Hey, genius, that’s called having your cake and eating it. Make up your mind! Either we’re evil bastards that bomb dog patch for cheap oil or we want to “scare it up”. Which is it?

Now, Sonny. Nobody who owns a multi-million dollar super tanker containing millions of bucks in crude is going to take any unnecessary risks with it. If the careless wasting of billions of dollars is your beef with the world, then look no further than here at the NSA or the CIA. But don’t quote me on that.

Not sure I see the connection between your buddy’s shrapnel in the ass and his case of hemorrhoids. May I suggest, Will, that your diagnostic skills are on a par with your manners.

Well, I guess that about covers it, Will. Thank you for finding the time to be here today.

We’ll let you know the result of your interview, shortly.

But Will, I have to say, I think we’re probably “gonna hold out for something better”.

Cut

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I can’t imagine why this second half of the scene ended up on the cutting room floor. Maybe it was the lighting guy’s comment about Matt’s sickly pallor.

Incidentally, just like a broken clock is right twice a day. One piece of sense did actually emerge from Will Hunting’s mouth. But it’s buried so deep in all the childish, liberal bilge that it’s tricky to spot.

It is, however, a truth that deserves to be told, and retold.

More on that in my next post.


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