A Modern Day Fairy Tale

No. 106

It’s 2025! It’s time to bring it on!

I decided to start the new year with a return to a subject I started writing about in 2024 because of its significance on how we believe things—it seems inescapable from my thoughts. It’s also represented by what C. S. Lewis wrote in the dedication for The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, “someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again… .” I don’t think, however, the modern-day example I’m returning to in this article was what Lewis was suggesting. He died before the events took place. What prompted my return to the subject was of course another movie.

Over Christmas break, I watched the 2017 movie The Post with 3-time Oscar winning Best Actress Meryl Streep and 2-time Oscar winning Best Actor Tom Hanks, directed by 2-time Oscar winning Best Director Steven Spielberg. There was a lot of star power in this film and it wasn’t my first time watching it. The film is set in 1971 and is a depiction of the true story of journalists from the Washington Post hedging to publish the government damaging Pentagon Papers—a set of classified documents that showed the 20-year involvement of the United States government in both the Vietnam War and the earlier French Indochina conflict dating back the 1940s and revealed previously unreported military activity in Southeast Asia from the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations.