Christina’s Common Sense

If you’re an avid reader of this blog, or if you know me personally, you can probably tell that military stuff is very important to me. So when I first saw the trailer for Stop-Loss over Christmas break, I immediately knew I was going to despise it. Not only did I have suspicions about its political leanings, I also hate MTV and Kimberly Peirce. However, because it’s important to know what the enemy is thinking, I forced myself to watch it last night.

I tried to keep an open mind. Since I like military movies, I wanted to like Stop-Loss. And as much as I love those who protect my freedom, it’s the truth that sometimes the brass makes mistakes and the GIs suffer. Maybe this movie would help bring awareness to something that needs to be changed.

And it started out pretty well, with soldiers singing Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue,” which is one of the most-played songs on my iPod (shocker, I know). And then it all went to you-know-where.

Political statements aside, Stop-Loss wasn’t a good movie. It just wasn’t. It lost my interest after the homecoming parade and never got it back. I have to say, Ryan Phillippe showcased some pretty significant acting talent in his 180 from Navy Cross recipient John Bradley to simpering deserter Brandon King. It was particularly amusing that he spent most of the movie running from the Army in a pair of BDU pants and a green T-shirt. Not conspicuous at all…

Stop-Loss also makes its main characters into some of the most unlikable characters ever to appear on the silver screen. They look like weak, manipulated wimps. It really should be pathetically easy to drum up sympathy for a PTSD-stricken soldier, yet Stop-Loss managed to render me completely uncaring toward King’s struggle.

The movie’s worst offense is taking the soldiers running from their duty and making them look like heroes. The ones who follow orders look like villains. The only thing that kept me from destroying the screen in front of me was that it happened to be my computer screen and I’m not ready to part with it yet (though it would give me an excuse to buy the Panasonic Toughbook I’ve been lusting after).

So yes, Stop-Loss was a terrible movie and a terrible disservice to America’s heroes. After the movie was over, I ran a Google search for Kimberly Peirce and discovered that she got the idea for the movie when her brother joined the Army after 9/11.

He must be so proud.

In today’s world, everyone wants to be a victim. It’s the cool thing to do, especially if you’re gay, black, or a woman. If you’re all three, it’s even cooler. But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about history becoming subordinate to victimology.

Spike Lee (black guy, film director, victim extraordinaire, and Yankees fan to add insult to injury), has recently taken issue with Clint Eastwood (white guy, film director, and conservative) for not putting any black guys in his 2006 blockbusters Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.

Lee might have a legitimate case had there been black guys on Iwo Jima. Having spent most of the spring semester researching this epic battle, I can attest that I did not run across a single book, chapter, paragraph, sentence, or footnote addressing black Marines on the island. The military was segregated in 1945, so to have blacks and whites fighting alongside each other would have been a big fat deal. Would nobody have written about it? Would those books nobody has written not be unbelievably famous? They would, because back then it would have been unprecedented. The lack of documentation is, to my mind, proof that no black men fought in this battle. That’s not racism. It’s just the truth (which, of course, is racism these days).

If you think that’s laughable, let’s address Lee’s beef with Letters from Iwo Jima, which recounts Iwo from the Japanese’s end. Do I really need to say anything here? The Japanese are the most homogeneous population on the face of the earth. What does Spike Lee want to do, dress a bunch of Kobe Bryant lookalikes in Imperial Japanese battle garb and try to pass them off as authentic Japanese men?

What’s next? Should we alter the famous photograph (over this Marine lover’s dead body) to show a few women raising the flag? Let’s Photoshop a ponytail onto Harlon Block’s head! That’ll make the professional victims happy! Hey, how about a Japanese guy jumping out of his bunker to help the Americans stick the flag on Mt. Suribachi? Then we can be really fair to everyone.

Spike Lee is revealing himself and those who agree with him to be horses’ derrieres. However, he may shut up and retreat back to his millions of dollars soon enough—the Italic Institute of America has accused him of being anti-Italian.

If I may boast a bit, I made it myself :).

I promise, this is my LAST non-post. Finals are almost over. 

When a baseball team wins the World Series, it has two options for next season: win again or do worse. And everyone will be comparing its performance in the next season to its performance last season. Such is James Bradley’s predicament in Flyboys: A True Story of Courage. Having hit a grand slam with Flags of our Fathers (which is really awesome, and it’s a good movie too), he can either repeat that performance or not quite hit the mark. And all his readers are watching his every move wondering if he can do it.

He can’t. Flyboys is not all bad—in fact, most of it is quite good. Bradley’s way with words leaves nothing to be desired. It’s no small feat to keep your readers interested when narrating the ins and outs of a battle. If you didn’t know it was real, you could be tricked into thinking Flyboys was a novel.  And Bradley does repeat some elements of his epic Flags of our Fathers performance. He does a marvelous job of showing the stark differences between the Americans and the Japanese and why that made the Japanese such a vexing enemy. How do you fight an enemy who doesn’t want to get out alive?

Unfortunately, Bradley also takes some pretty serious pitfalls. The first few chapters of the book are various moral equivalency arguments that the Americans were just as guilty as the Japanese. He does point out legitimate things that our side did wrong, but the idea that they are equal to the Japanese’s treatment of POWs—heck, their own guys—is patently absurd. Bradley poses the question “how do you fight an enemy who wants to die?” and then argues with how it’s done: killing the lot of them. He should know better, especially considering that his father was a Navy Cross recipient on Iwo Jima. 

Bradley’s second pitfall is his completely blatant bias. When he refers to the Japanese he interviewed, he attaches the suffix “-san” to their last names. This is a Japanese sign of respect. However, when referring to Gen. Curtis LeMay, Bradley calls him “Curtis.” One who fancies himself a military historian does not call high-ranking officers by their first names. It doesn’t take a particularly astute observer to see that the Japanese are getting the bigger share of Bradley’s respect allotment. 

However, Flyboys still has plenty to recommend it. I particularly enjoyed getting new insight into George HW Bush’s experience as one of the flyboys. Bradley does have a keen eye for detail and a unique way of telling a story. It’s pretty impressive, especially coming from a guy who, to the best of my knowledge, never wrote a darn thing in his life before Flags of our Fathers. It’s definitely worth the read, as long as you’re not expecting the home team to win another World Series.

And as for my misbehaving layout, I have discovered that this is remedied when I use Internet Exploder Explorer instead of Firefox. So if you have Firefox and my blog looks like a bomb just went off in it, try Explorer. I’m still working on fixing this.

Well.

I didn’t have a high opinion of Time Magazine before. Now it’s so low it would need to go up to reach zero.

In an upcoming issue, Time has ditched the red border in favor of a green one. The reason, of course, is to make green “the new red, white & blue.”

That’s dumb, but really nothing new from the eco-freaks. But what has me en fuego is the picture on the cover, which depicts the famous Iwo Jima flagraising photo with a pine tree in place of the flag. According to the magazine’s editor, “There needs to be a real effort along the lines of World War II to combat climate change.”

Yes. Your monitor is working.

I’m not hopping mad about this just because Iwo Jima happens to be my favorite WWII battle (but I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a factor). I’m not even hopping mad because the idea that global warming is a crisis on par with Pearl Harbor is ludicrous (even though it is). I’m hopping mad because this picture puts environmentalists In the same category as the Marines who fought on Iwo. They’re not, and only a fool would think they are. Time has some nerve belittling the sacrifice that allows them to make such wrongheaded statements. I hope they hear from some Marines about it. But somehow, I don’t think I have to worry.

What do you think of the Vietnam War?

If you’re like most Americans, you don’t think highly of it. And why should you? For over a decade our country was embroiled in a war that was a resounding defeat. Not only that, but the American military flagrantly disregarded international law, engaged in indiscriminate killing of civilians, and committed genocide against the North Vietnamese. Right?

If that’s what you think, you need to read America in Vietnam.

I will not kid you. This book is drier than the Sahara in July. But it is an excellent look into how Vietnam’s legacy does not match up with its reality. It’s really very impressive work, especially considering that Guenter Lewy is a political scientist (at The Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy, no less) and not a historian. Also, unlike most people who dare take America’s side in the Vietnam conflict, Lewy is no apologist for the war. It’s very hard to tell from the book which side he is on, as he spends the first half of the book raking Gen. Westmoreland over the coals and spends the second half pointing out what fools the historians and academics have made of themselves in post-Vietnam years (which, at the time the book was written, was only about 5).

If you want to know the side of Vietnam your overgrown hippie history professor doesn’t want you to see, you should read America in Vietnam. In fact, even if you are the overgrown hippie history professor, you should read America in Vietnam. It will provide a different perspective that has been largely buried for over 30 years.

The Boston Red Sox had their home opener last Tuesday, and I just had to be in Michigan. However, since they were playing the Tigers the game was carried out here, and I got to see the last part after spending 2 ½ hours in Constitutional Law Hell. Unfortunately I missed the beginning and therefore the flyover. It would seem that I missed a very eventful flyover.

It’s been said, “There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.” Into which category does this poor chap fall? You be the judge.

After discussing Patton in my Two World Wars class last night, I stumbled across this on YouTube. It’s an overdub of the flag speech from Patton (which you should really see if you haven’t yet), and done very well. Hold out for the end!

And for those who wish to see the real thing, here it is:

As a piece of worthless information: Reagan got out of Hollywood because he lost the role of Patton to George C Scott. Can you imagine Reagan giving that speech?

Thanks to Katie for showing me how to embed :).

Last week, Hillary Clinton recounted a tale of landing under sniper fire during her 1996 trip to Bosnia . Turns out, the tale was a crock. Big shocker, I know. She says she “misspoke” about the incident, and there actually was sniper fire on the hillside near the landing strip. Good heavens. If this woman confuses sniper fire near her with bullets actually being fired at her, what else will she “misspeak” over? I mean, if the North Koreans batted an eye she’d rapidly turn it into a full-scale nuclear assault or something.

Since then, various military commanders have denounced Hillary’s remarks, saying that it demeans the sacrifices they make. They’re right. Making light of something like getting shot at by snipers diminishes everyone who’s actually been under fire. It’s like schools branding everyone and his brother with a learning disability—it hurts the credibility of those who are actually learning disabled. Not only that, but Hillary’s story makes the military look like they fell down on the job and let the First Lady and her teenage daughter land with a bunch of disgruntled Bosnians on the runway.

So we have two options here. Hillary’s either too dense to properly recall a fairly memorable incident like being shot at, or she cares so little about our servicemen that she’s perfectly willing to make up a story which demeans them. Neither one’s a particularly attractive trait in a potential Commander-in-Chief, is it?

With Barack’s pastoral mishaps and Hillary’s faulty memory, the Democrats look ready to shred themselves this year. For them, that’s bad. Which translates to wonderful for America! And for this blog, as  it means I will rarely be short post topics.

If I were smart, I wouldn’t have blogged about Iraq two days ago because I would have known that tonight marks five years into the deal. But I’m apparently not smart, so you get two Iraq posts in three days.

Tonight will mark five years since I sat on the floor of my living room watching the first bombs drop on Baghdad and watching to a Fox News anchor report over a video phone.

A lot has changed since then, most of which would be included in this post had I not written about it a mere 48 hours ago. But many things remain the same.

One of these things is the anti-war movement, just as strident today as it was five years ago—or 40 years ago, for that matter. While America’s best have been doing us proud in the Middle East, we’ve had such gems as Fahrenheit 9/11 from the erstwhile Michael Moore, with Fahrenheit 9/11 ½ anticipated later this year. Well-known liberal loon Mike Farrell has put to use all that foreign policy experience he gained playing BJ Hunnicutt on M*A*S*H in a documentary Whose War? Cindy Sheehan has crashed the State of the Union and camped out by Camp David. Stop-Loss, a movie where soldiers desert the Army and don’t get a firing squad is set for release in just a few days.

We should always support our troops, but today is an especially important day to do so. Remember them in your thoughts and prayers, and do everything you can to make sure they know the likes of Michael Moore, Mike Farrell, and Cindy Sheehan don’t speak for America.