Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Since then, I've read this review, which makes a lot of good points. It sounds like the movie does a good job at showing some hard truths about the effects of the war on our soldiers. It's too bad that Eastwood fictionalized things to avoid other hard truths.

It's a movie. And Clint's last movie bombed. He's in his mid-80s. Nobody wants to go out on low note.

Art is necessarily misinterpreted by a large percentage of the audience. We're a nation liberally polluted with shitheads seeking easy, angry narratives. That's not Kyle's or Eastwood's fault.

You have to feed the demographic that buys the most tickets.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

He reminds me of some of my dear sweet squirrel-eating relatives.

The squirrels near your Cousin Eddie's place being manatee sized, gestated in a womb filled with a blend of bacon grease and ranch dressing.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch

IMHO most people are repulsed at the thought of killing, and even NRA jackasses are a lot of big talk. When we specifically train a person to overcome that repulsion, we owe him or her a duty of compassion because I doubt you ever see the world in quite the same way again. Weirdly, even though we live in a world of talk-it-out therapy, the healthiest war vets I know say things like “I saw a lot of terrible things” but refuse to go into details. They swallow it all, and other than waking up in pools of sweat a couple of times a month, they seem to lead normal lives. I wonder if we’ll one day realize that you can’t talk-therapy your way out of PTSD, and that denial and repression are actually legitimate tools of healing.

But we want this fantasy that Mr. Rogers was once a death-dealing badass, and it’s probably true that if you give your youth to the military, we should have an option for staying in your whole life on a “we broke it we bought it” theory.

Well said, though I wonder about the "denial and repression as therapy" statement. Maybe, maybe not -- people respond differently to all kinds of therapies, particularly mental health-related ones.


I knew one Vietnam vet pretty well, who had the same response -- but that response was to me and others who didn't share the experience. He went to a support group of guys who did talk about stuff in detail. He just didn't like people mining him for stories based on their own agendas, whether those were political ("see, all you guys did horrible stuff!") or pornographic ("oooh, cool, the guy's head came right off?!?!")


eta: With WWII vets, I think people are more reluctant to ask. My father-in-law landed at Normandy shortly after D-Day. Never talks about stuff -- but holy shit, the memoir he wrote (for himself and his family) has some scary details in it. My father was of prime soldier-age in WWII (born in 1924), in Italy, and to this day I have no idea what he did in the war, whether it was fight (and which side?), hide, or treat wounded.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

Really? Back before there was a FRCP, do you think it would be hard to hand Sidd a spear and convince him to go kill a guy across the field that was encroaching on our hunting grounds?

Throwing weapons are for pussies. Can I crush his skull with a rock?




I mean, the horror, the horror.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

100,000 years ago we needed to kill other tribes people. Coltrane argues that 3,000,000 years of walking upright isn't enough to fix our spines. How could so many fewer years create an aversion?

Of course it creates an aversion -- that's what civilization does. 100 years ago it was very normal here to hate anyone not from your "tribe," now most of us (everyone here) have a strong aversion to racism and racist thoughts. 200 years ago, it was natural to think women inferior, to beat your wife, beat your children, etc. Now, civilized people have an aversion.

With soldiers -- particularly those whose job is to kill, not to guard or lay down cover fire or whatever, and especially to kill people they can see (meaning, for example, a sniper vs a bomber pilot) -- we get them to cross that line that civilization has created. For some it's easy, they are killers -- but I suspect that those people are actually pretty shitty at the job, because they don't have to think very much before pulling the trigger. For others, it's harder, and they need to have justifications (I'm protecting my men, mine is the greatest country in the world, they are evil, etc.)

And then, we ask them to come back.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally Posted by Sidd Finch

Of course it creates an aversion -- that's what civilization does. 100 years ago it was very normal here to hate anyone not from your "tribe," now most of us (everyone here) have a strong aversion to racism and racist thoughts. 200 years ago, it was natural to think women inferior, to beat your wife, beat your children, etc. Now, civilized people have an aversion.

With soldiers -- particularly those whose job is to kill, not to guard or lay down cover fire or whatever, and especially to kill people they can see (meaning, for example, a sniper vs a bomber pilot) -- we get them to cross that line that civilization has created. For some it's easy, they are killers -- but I suspect that those people are actually pretty shitty at the job, because they don't have to think very much before pulling the trigger. For others, it's harder, and they need to have justifications (I'm protecting my men, mine is the greatest country in the world, they are evil, etc.)

And then, we ask them to come back.

For some reason, this entire thread is giving me the following ear-worm: "Kill the pig, kill the pig..."

[taxwonk]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

Ah, the mountain top. A fine trope. Sorry to insult you by calling you a clever lawyer. I take it back.

I'm going to confess, my views of his behavior have a lot to do with thinking about the people who deal with the fall out from crap like this. I really think, more than anything else, he smacks of a wartime mental health case, as I've noted before, not a friend of the devil who was born to kill. I think you're mushing up what I've said and what Ty has said about various elements of him, and we have two very different (if both negative) views. I think Ty is also much more invested in hating the guy, while I just find this a more interesting subject than Brady's Balls and a less interesting one than Netanyahu's campaign for the 2016 GOP nomination.

Maybe some of his lies, even the ones told point blank and carefully in interviews, were the product of drunken exaggerations, an overactive imagination, difficulty processing -- there are such a range of them, and they go from the mindbogglingly outrageous to the merely stupid, they probably fit along a wide spectrum from little fib to intentional aggrandizement to substance-induced hallucination (though I've seen a couple interviews where he denies drinking much). Old war stories from retired soldiers are not a new thing.

But all of that goes toward his credibility. You say the movie is clearly fictionalized - I say it's likely much of the book is fictionalized, too, even parts he claimed are true. A lot of his interviews are fictionalized. It's really pretty pitiful in a lot of ways, but I am just not sure how you do much of anything with his stories, how you separate fact from fiction. Sure, some of it's not made up. But how do you tell what?

But besides all these rather sad and disturbing mental health issues, there is a very real military problem created by the guy - a special ops guy bragging about his kills in public and publishing a book of the braggadocio is a real bad thing from the perspective of the military and other soldiers. That puts other soliders at risk, that sets up all kinds of opportunity for ISIS or aQ propaganda. That's bad.

Luckily, there's some snow coming though, and this mountain is going to be great for skiing.

It's funny. When you hold his legend up to the light, it breaks into a Million Little Pieces.

[taxwonk]

Originally Posted by Sidd Finch

I don't think that the stupidity on the right, about Kyle or the movie, justifies the reaction on the left. He is not a stand-in for the Iraq war, and I really have difficult when people cast judgments about a person -- judgments that largely appear based on what people say that person has said or done, filtered through various levels -- without recognizing what he went through and was put through by and for his country.

I was proud that the anti-war advocates in this country, this time around, did not take that view out on the soldiers who fought for the US but focused on the policy-makers, and even when soldiers committed heinous acts we looked at the individuals, and at the leadership, without taking the "baby-killer!" tone that happened in, say, the Vietnam era.

Overall, I think the guy deserves a little more respect. Not worship, not blind adulation (i.e., not the response on the right), but respect. And perhaps some sympathy, for what happens when we intentionally turn people into killing machines.

He wasn't a machine and that's why he broke. Machines are the Predator drones operated by some grad school geek with a joystick, while he's eating Doritos 4000 miles away.

[taxwonk]

Originally Posted by Adder

Are you old enough to actually remember this tone yourself? I'm not, but I have a strong suspicion that it's largely apocryphal.

I am old enough to remember and the stories weren't apocryphal. Of course the police and National Guard aren't out beating and killing people in the streets now like they were back then. At least not white middle-class people.

[taxwonk]

Originally Posted by Sidd Finch

Definitely not asserting that there is no line. Some people (Calley being the classic example, and a number of US soldiers in Iraq) are way over that line. Others are closer to it.

A war like Iraq makes the line very hard to find, and I believe that makes the situation much more traumatic for soldiers.




I remember seeing a little on the news (I was in grade school when soldiers were coming home), but hearing much more about it directly from people who were participating on both sides -- people my oldest brother knew, people I met over the years whose kids were in the war, and both vets and people very active in the anti-war movement who I knew in college (I took a few classes, including a class on the Vietnam war, that had a lot of older students -- including one woman who was married to a former Weatherman, which was interesting.... especially when vets visited that class). I think the tone was different, and more hostile to soldiers, and certainly the "hero" fetish wasn't there (not saying that's a good thing).




I think a lot of the concerns about the film and the guy are driven by reaction to the whackiness on the right, that want to make Kyle and all soldiers "heros" and extend that "heroism" to the entire stupid clusterfuck of a war. But I think a better response to that hero-worship isn't "he was a bad guy, a pathological liar, a child-killer..." is "watch the movie, and look how screwed up he and others got. Do we really want to do this to our own people?"

I will add that I'm very glad I saw the movie in a place like SF. I would guess that, in a number of theaters, people cheer and shout when Kyle shoots people, including the woman and kid he shoots in the beginning of the movie. (Sort of the way I heard soldiers cheering, in the theater where I saw Platoon, when a US soldier beat a Vietnamese teenager to death.)

It's different this time, sure. There aren't people chanting "baby killer" at soldiers, but soldiers are still killing babies. Whether we lionize them or demonize them, we are wrong. These soldiers are, for the most part kids, who were trained to do awful things and then sent to do them. It's no more their fault than it is of the innocent people killed because an ISIS target is hanging out in a mosque.

The beef we have is with the people who own the people who send these boys off to kill and die.

The thing about movies like this, or Platoon, is that it glamorizes the heroism our soldiers display and it marginalizes the human and economic cost on the other side. The people and the soldiers never see the real enemy.

[taxwonk]

Originally Posted by Adder

That one is even more galling in that they could have just left the torture out.

Silly boy. That was the point of the movie. Torture is acceptable because look what it gets us.

[taxwonk]

Originally Posted by Sidd Finch

Is "douchebag" a Yiddish word?

I think "schmuck"* is the closest analog.



* Leo Rosten many years ago sparked a controversy by claiming that in real Yiddish, the "sch" should be an "sh." I think he's being a pedantic little pisher on that point,

[taxwonk]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

It's a movie. And Clint's last movie bombed. He's in his mid-80s. Nobody wants to go out on low note.

Art is necessarily misinterpreted by a large percentage of the audience. We're a nation liberally polluted with shitheads seeking easy, angry narratives. That's not Kyle's or Eastwood's fault.

This movie is right on point for Eastwood. Consider it a sort of conceptual prequel for Gran Torino. Eastwood got rich and famous in Hollywood and Italy pretending to shoot all kinds of people.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by taxwonk

The thing about movies like this, or Platoon, is that it glamorizes the heroism our soldiers display and it marginalizes the human and economic cost on the other side. The people and the soldiers never see the real enemy.

Compare Das Boot, or perhaps the first half of Full Metal Jacket. And then there's Apocalypse Now.

[taxwonk]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Compare Das Boot, or perhaps the first half of Full Metal Jacket. And then there's Apocalypse Now.

I could also cite to literally hundreds of movies that glamorize the soldier as killer, but that's also history. We're talking about two dramatizations of events that happened in our lifetime.

We have the option of saying "we can do better than this." We won't exercise it, but we do have the option.