The final scene in Stanley Kubrick’s dark classic, “Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” ends with Slim Pickens as Major “King” Kong, hooting and waving his cowboy hat as he rides a nuclear bomb straight into the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Peter Sellers — in three brilliant roles — plays a general, a president, and the mad Dr. Strangelove, who calmly explains how bunkers filled with reproductively gifted women will repopulate the Earth after the nuclear dust settles.

Sixty-one years later, that satire feels eerily current. The world hasn’t stopped warring since.

If it hasn’t been the U.S., it’s been Russia. Or Iran. Or Iraq. Or Israel. Or some other flashpoint flaring with fire and fury — and always, with someone insisting they’re the “good guys.” It’s the old NRA trope gone global: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

But that thinking almost always leads to more gunplay — and more death.

War rarely gets to the root of violence. Bombs destroy buildings and bodies, but not ideologies, not grievances, not desperation. As one American musician put it: “You can bomb the world into pieces, but you can’t bomb it into peace.”

Yes, there are exceptions — World War II foremost. But most modern wars leave devastation without resolution. Just in my lifetime: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq vs. Iran, Gulf War, Iraq War, Afghanistan, Russia vs. Chechnya I and II,........

© Santa Clarita Valley Signal