Rewriting, Washing, Scrubbing American Culture

I remember this because he accused me of having faux outrage the last time he defended Asian racism.

 

At least he didn’t put her name on a headband.


(Yes, I know)

 

Here's the thing about this, man.... It's really not true. At all.

The New York Post and Fox News and all the other right wing howler monkeys want you to fear that you'll be "canceled" now if you expect someone to show up on time. It's bullshit. There is no one who read the "time blindness" thing and didn't roll their eyes.

No one gives a shit if you inadvertently use a wrong pronoun. Now, if you angrily, defiantly refuse to use someone's preferred pronoun because you're an asshole who needs them to know you don't approve of their gender? Yeah, that's obnoxious.

Just try to be a decent person and you'll be fine. Try to show basic respect to other people. No one cares if you don't use all the letters in LGBTQ+. Most people on the left don't even know what they all stand for anyway.

And again, the origin of this thread had nothing to do with the evolution of language. It had to do with someone comparing world class Vietnamese woman athletes to cartoonish hookers in a movie. If someone called the Haitian team a bunch of N-words it wouldn't be a referendum on "Blazing Saddles."

 

He led his own shunning, in a sense. Banned A Clockwork Orange in UK for the last 26 years of his life.

Not that it matters what I think or what the movie is, but FMJ, to me, is not one of the better Vietnam movies in part because it constantly breaks down the narrative engine for, well, crassness. The Shining is similarly half-cocked but it works on subsequent viewings, in part because it’s Jack and not Matthew Modine, in part because it’s fictional horror and not real war.

 

Look it’s not that hard to be a nice person.

Is that changing culture or just being informed?

Notice how the people crying out about being “cancelled” are the very same people who were “only making a joke”? Enjoy your racism. Alone.

As for “American” culture, yeah I bought that load of sh*t 50 years ago in grade school. You know:

Everyone is equal;
Anyone can be President;
We’re the world’s melting pot.

Yeah no. The last 7 years is how I show my work.

 

Does art have value if we just regard it as something self-contained and not a potential mine for one liners and cross references?

That thought came to me as disposable snark early on in the thread but as I sat with it until I caught up to the last page, it actually strikes me as a valid question. That actually is how the ideas from art spread and live on, by becoming part of the everyday vernacular.

 

Likewise, the English countryside doesn't really succeed as a stand-in for Vietnam, no matter how many potted palms you arrange around the set.

Always interesting to me how much Michael Herr had to do with both Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket.

But the two halves of FMJ - based on two different books - feel like two different movies.

The first half of which is carried almost entirely by the quality and intensity of the performances. But there isn't a signature visual in the whole thing.

Compare it to Paths of Glory. Kubrick had already made his great war movie.

Also, like Platoon, FMJ feels terribly dated now.

 

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yes. hence the binding "I am in a world of shit" monologue near the end. Hey, we have to reconcile two halves of a whole!

 

Time blindness is a thing. It's just not the thing that Tik-Tokker or the clinician who followed up on her think it is.

Or they're trying to make fetch happen.

Psych and clinical social workers use Levi-Straus' kinship labels in ways that differ from their original design as academic descriptors, so I might be speaking out of turn.

Time blindness can happen when one culture's cognition of temporality bumps up against another's. The times-ishness of certain groups in the US versus the exactitude of many European-descended folks is a good example. 'scuse me before I hyphen-ventilate.

[QUOTE="I don't think the vast majority of people who say something offensive strive to do it. Often, it's just getting harder and harder to keep up with what is and isn't offensive to every single group when the definition of what's offensive seems to change literally every week."[/QUOTE]

This. Maybe it will save on wear and tear to not assume evil at first blush?

 

This! This! This! ... Dadgum, Batman, you need to copyright that.
And I've reached a point in my life where I don't give a rat's ass about keeping up with it.

 

I'll take the contra here and refer you back to PC LoadLetter's post.

It's pretty easy not to be a jackass.

 

Not anymore, it isn't.