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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Published Letters: 329 Editor's Choice: 37
Heh...I work with a bunch of guys, and our lunchtime conversation now is more about mpg than engine performance.
Seriously, though: for women, whether they have children or not, the biological imperative is more about stability and security than possessions. There's a great Susan Tedeschi song with the lines-- "Your love is all right, but I need a little more, honey--I can't spend your love at the grocery store..." She's not talking about 2-carat diamond rings here. A guy who drives a fuel-efficient vehicle is sensible and rational and thinks ahead, long-term. He won't blow the grocery and mortgage money on a Mustang GT. That's the kind of guy I'd want to pair up with (and I did), and I suspect I'm not alone.
I was all set to shake my head sadly at Spike Lee too, because I absolutely love Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima movies and have a lot of respect for him as a director. But the fact is that there *were* 900 Black troops on the ground there. They were not Stateside doing supply and munitions work (as many Black troops were made to do) but in combat, and while 900 is around 3.5 percent of the total number of troops on the ground there, it's not an insignificant number. Not 5 or 6, not 25 or 30. 900.
But what gets me is this October 2006 Guardian article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/oct/20/usa.film
The Black marines they interviewed felt like they'd been erased from history. They described how cameras had been deliberately turned away from them--in 1945, apparently, no one, apparently, wanted Black and White soldiers to be seen working and fighting together. All these veterans wanted, apparently, was just a couple of Black extras to represent them, to provide some public acknowledgment of their existence and experience. No main characters, no multicultural re-imagining of the flag-raising frieze, although one of the veterans points out that it was his scrap metal that was used for the pole.
What makes a good war movie or book is less the story it tells than the accuracy with which it tells it. It needs to honor, respect, and above all not gloss over the soldier's experience. Anything else is propaganda. That was the whole point of "Flags of Our Fathers," wasn't it? To show the reality behind that historic, incredibly photogenic, literally too-good-to-be-true moment and how it could be distorted, mutilated, and reshaped for official purposes without regard to the people who took part and risked (or gave) their lives for it. Anything less is suspect.
I don't think Eastwood deliberately meant to perpetuate this serious inaccuracy, or omit the experience of Black veterans. But if he honestly thought, with all the research he'd presumably done for this movie, that there'd been no Black soldiers on Iwo Jima, then they effectively *have* been erased from history.
I think Spike Lee was right, and I look forward to his movie--but with a critical eye. I want to see *him* get it right and not sacrifice accuracy for ideology.
the Sunshine Family? I had a Sunshine Family! (This would have been mid-1970s.) They came with this cool kind of open-air house made of vinyl stretched over cardboard and a very few articles of furniture, along with instructions on making the rest out of cardboard milk cartons and fabric remnants and other discarded stuff. Oh, and a plastic mold for making dishes out of flour-water dough that you allow to dry and harden.
I hadn't heard of Magic Earring Ken until now...oh, god, that's hysterical, but then, *all* the Ken dolls were kind of closeted-looking.
I had a Barbie for a brief time but preferred to marry her off to GI Joe, who just seemed more...masculine, at least until they shrunk him down to three inches.
The new Strawberry Shortcake (more my sister's generational nostalgia than mine) doesn't seem tarty to me at all, but she does look bland and Disney-fied. Too bad. The cat was cute.
The writer is a novelist. I don't think the article's narrator is the real Sarah Bird.
Figure it out.
In the meantime, I'm enjoying the outraged self-righteous screams. This was brilliant. Jonathan Swift would have been proud.
Making complicated scientific and technical concepts understandable for a lay audience.
Working with male geeks who are very smart and good at what they do but can often be cranky and antisocial.
Sightsinging.
Making other people's writing look much, much better.
Oh, for heaven's sake. Accepting that some people might be gay does NOT TURN YOU GAY, or mean that they will all be hitting on you. Likewise, just because someone somewhere in this world was born female but has a male mind and personality and does something to fix the discrepancy, it doesn't magically turn *you* into a potential transsexual. Gender lines might be more blurred for some people because of some biological discrepancy between body and soul that can be redressed through surgery and hormone shots and cognitive therapy, but for most of us, they're not.
On the other hand, if, because a female-to-male transsexual with a still-functioning reproduction system wanted to have a child with his wife and solved this problem in a very practical way, you're obsessed with worry that your gender identity is suddenly at risk, then it probably already was loooong before you ever heard of Thomas Beatie.
Think about it, boys--maybe you really should have been born women.
Or would you prefer that I referred to you as ladies?
Congratulations, dude. You just came up with a way to make liberal upper middle class white people even more self-absorbed, navel-gazing, neurotic, and self-justifying than they already are.
On the other hand, I haven't had this much fun since I read Fussell's "Class." This is the sequel. I'm surprised no one's mentioned it, but the X class that Fussell describes at the end of the book (and identifies himself as a member of)? That's exactly who Landers has nailed to the wall.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
