History I

I became completely obsessed with Vietnam. I am sure it goes back to Father issues of having to stop idolising an institution that simply serves a function rather than being a solution. School, the church, marriage, kids and government are not going to fulfil my sense of being just like my Father’s blessing does not save me from myself. Vietnam is the first time American civilisation lost and it is also the only time we decided that we were the bad guys. Every movement in American education that decides that America was the antagonist instead of protagonist has its beginning in the disillusionment with America over our failure in Vietnam. 

This was the war that we lost. This was the last draft. American Revolutionary War. War of 1812. Mexican War. Civil War. Spanish War. World War I. World War II. Korean War. Skip. Gulf War. War on Terror (ongoing). Big winning streak and all of these wars can be studied with a positive lens of how to win a war. If we had won Vietnam it would have simply been another chip off the old block of socking it to those commie bastards. We didn’t win so then comes two positions to take and one is if we had simply let our military win instead of letting it become a political football and the other position is what in the heck were we doing there in the first place?

There is not much of a reason to ask the big “why” question unless something fails or has a very big chance of failing. If its a sure thing then people don’t ask why. Simplified, if someone offers you a cheeseburger to eat when you are hungry then you don’t ask why but if someone offers you a live fish when you are hungry you may ask “why”? Unless you are a country boy or girl then you could laugh and ask if they have a pocket knife or take your own out. When asking the question why of the Vietnam War the intellect opens up like a black hole and takes down the entirety of history and dimensions into itself. It is a massive topic.

Eventually when a person is trying to study Vietnam or the assassination of the Kennedy’s, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcom X as a conspiracy the scholar has to either tap out or cling to some illogical conclusion. Of course if the person has enough curiosity or fascination they will return and learn about the topic from another angle before tapping out again or latching on to a conclusive fallacy. So with all of the suspense, terror, confusion and blood contained in the Vietnam question I turned my studies to a more peaceful theme, the Panama Canal. This being another project that the Americans picked up from the French that seemed just as implausible and impossible looking back as the Vietnam War. The only difference being we succeeded.

So I ask the question “why did we win” Panama in context to the great mystery of why we lost Vietnam. Isn’t it strange that if something is successful it has a beginning, middle and end and if something fails the story can go on ad infinitum.  The story of the football team that won is that the guy got the girl and the girl gave him confidence and that confidence spread throughout the rest of the team and the coach was able to manage that great spirit against a weaker team while the crowd supported on the sidelines and the practices made perfect. The story of the losing team is well Jerry’s Dad is abusive because Jerry’s Dad’s Dad was abusive and it really didn’t help that … 

My essay ends here because me talking about my own confusion and obsession over the Vietnam War and the solace I found in Panama is in fact more entertaining than any essay I could write on the Panama Canal. For balance to make this paragraph the same size as the other paragraphs I will say that I have been reading quite a bit on Theodore Roosevelt, Panama Canal and the Industrial Revolution and may actually write a scholarly article on the gilded age eventually. I am not making any promises though because my erratic behaviour is just as unpredictable to me as anyone else. I am completely capable of scribbling five incoherent paragraphs that might as well have been found in a bathroom stall with multiple phone numbers as produce a scholarly article after researching tens of books and tapes. 

Film IV

 Welcome to my most uninformed and least informative piece of writing yet. Here I am going to tackle movie companies. I did a piece on actors where I ran through my favourites and then directors where I bitched about none of them being alive or on their game. Then I went into producers admitting that I knew nothing about them. Here we are with the movie houses so get ready to ramble. 

Lets just go after Miramax just to get it out of the way and do the hard things first. This was Harvey Weisntein’s company. Recently Harvey’s guilty verdict was overturned by appeals court. There was another guilty verdict apparently, so says Ma, that still stands so he is just being transferred from New York Prison to California Prison. Miramax according to the Frontline documentary I watched about Weinstein’s victims was viewed by the industry as a movie house that produced hip, chic and avant-garde films. This is where we get Quentin Tarantino films, Clerks, Wayne’s World, and other bourgeois favourites.

Focus features.

A24.

More hipster things.

Disney/Marvel.

Pixar.

Dreamworks.

Icon. Which was Mel Gibson’s gig.

There are massive ones without a niche that I am not mentioning.

Stuff like 20th century Fox, Warner Bros. etc that produce anything.

Then we have the streaming services producing their own material:

Netflix.

Apple.

Amazon.

Hulu.

Maybe Apple for a streaming service has their own style out of the bunch as being very well done and wholesome elitist rather than populist takes. I mean they don’t produce as much riff-raff as Amazon and Netflix. Netflix is known for producing stand-up comedy and other films that other companies are scared to get backlash or canceled for. See Dave Chapelle.

I think we live in a Disney/Marvel pornographic metaverse. Now that may seem revolting to put a movie production company that is concerned with making films that are appropriate for kids and families around the world side by side with the word porn but I think that is where we are. Porn is accessible to anyone who doesn’t have adult content controls on their device. Everyone and everything created seems to need to abide by the precedents set by societal regulator companies like Disney/Marvel while much of society is also shaped by the inadvertent influence of pornographic content and consumption. Some kind of lust-crazed polite society schizophrenic meta verse. Or maybe it’s just me.