THE A-TEAM: 'Sex and the City' for Dudes?

BY MZ. MANNERS, VIGILANTE GUERILLA

If you're in trouble and no one else can help, you might as well contact us here at a2ethics.org. The A-Team returns to the cultural slopbucket, part of a delicious trough of strange summer entertainment. A group of veterans who are part of an elite unit go underground, become a mean, clever band of vigilante pranksters, and solve the major problems in society. The A-Team, ethically speaking, is problematic.

If our government continues to short-change veterans with PTSD, they will continue to concoct strange and violent lives for themselves. Most veterans are facing issues like depression, anxiety, anger, and throughts of suicide. Most veterans are not souping up old vans, stockpiling weapons, and pulling large-scale non-lethal revenge acts against drug dealers and pimps. Not that I am opposed to this kind of entrepreneurial spirit. People have to take matters into their own hands. And as long as the justice system allows the bad guys to get away with oil spills and economic crimes agains The People, we might need the A-Team.

An episode on the original series usually began with a situation. Imagine a woman who is engaged to a guy who had some indirect ties to big drug dealers in the Los Angeles area. He's trying to get clean, but they pull him back in for one last job, and she just wants her man back where he belongs. She calls in the A-Team.

There is the sleazy Face, a pretty boy type who is in charge of the charm department. His weapon is his ability to get any woman in the sack with a porn-like precision and charm. He is the one who doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of them. With his Ivy-League air and his clean clothes, he is the one who could get killed off first, if that ever happened on the show, which it doesn't. There is B.A. Barrackus, the mean black one. The muscle of the group, B.A. is surprisingly sensitive, and has no idea how to control his emotions or his hulk-like rage. And then there are the two controversial ones:

Murdock and Hannibal are America's worst nightmare. Hannibal is the war-addicted commanding officer, dying to get his hands around a Viet Cong throat. And Murdock is about as PTSD'd as it gets. He is a wildman, a goofy, funny sociopath, and the least likeable of the bunch.

All together, the A-Team is like a Sex and the City for dudes. Four guys. Face is the Samantha type, the total slut. Murdock is Miranda, the neurotic one who can't get it together, and needs as much space as possible. Surprisingly, B.A. is Charlotte, the sensitive, childlike emotional tornado. This might feel like a metaphor being stretched a bit far, but if you watch The A-Team back to back with Sex and the City, you will see that they are the same person, give or take a few gold chains. And Hannibal would be Carrie, the ultra-self-assured smart-alleck leader of the group who loves it when a plan comes together.

The problem with the Sex and the City girls is that they sleep around. They are hung up on men and clothes and relationships, and they really need to get a break from it all to become healthy humans again. And while Face is the only sex-addicted member of the A-Team (many PTSD victims have sexual dysfunction, FYI), their hang-ups have always been due to their addiction to anger and violence. When Hannibal says "I love it when a plan comes together," he is really saying "I love killing people."

If the military is willing to put the money into training these young people for combat, they need to figure out a way to untrain them too. Re-entry back into society is hard for traumatized soldiers, and it's no wonder that these guys turn to violence once they return. They give up all the good things that the Sex and the City girls take for granted, like booze and one-night-stands. They sleep with their rifle, instead of sleeping with every guy in town. But it's the same thing, isn't it?

Isn't it?

Society, man. SOCIETY! The culture that leads attractive young men off to war, abandoning the aging, pathetic, still-attractive women, this is the same story going back for GENERATIONS, man! Whether they are running around in trenches and smoking cigarettes in Europe somewhere with flat helmets that look silly and don't protect the head, or running around the jungle looking for Charlie and nodding out on the scag, these young men in combat are really, really in need of a hug when they get back. If they will let you touch them, which they probably won't. They are in need of some real-deal understanding. Just like the Sex girls. The remedy is the same. They all need some time on the couch. They all need some medication. And our refusal to recognize it is the problem. No one understands them but me.

I spent this morning at breakfast with my three sex-addicted best girlfriends, and man, it's like the same old story. Sex, bad relationships, dumb-ass men. Thank god I have a blog, and I don't need any of those things. I have to tell them that they are fooling themselves, and that things won't change until Society recognizes that we're all hurting inside.Later tonight I'm getting dinner with my dumb-ass guy friends, who can't wait to see The A-Team on the big screen. I have to tell them that they are fooling themselves, and that things won't change until Society recognizes that we're all hurting inside. It's the same remedy, I think. And it's a grand societal problem.

If you need help, and no one else can help you, then maybe you should re-evaluate the problem that got you into this situation in the first place, you poor, needy thing.