armistice day

Fake war looked so real: finally saw Ironman on payper view. Lots to like, entertaining, full of wildly implausible holes, but fun. I gives Favereau props for actually using the song "Ironman" in the movie Ironman. Nice.

The first scene is a kind of great, realistic war scene, the kind we love, although we've seen it countless times: Downy Jr's smug, playboy Tony Stark is convoying thru Afghanistan after a big weapons sale, (or maybe Iraq or Beirut or any dozens of like places the US has troops.) Iced booze in hand, casual banter, womanizing comments, we're all laughing, joking, then boom! convoy gets ambushed and the fun immediately turns ugly: soldiers dying, chaos, dust, weird sounds of technology and death. But we know Stark is going to make it, since its the catalyst that drives the rest of the film. Okay, well done Favereau, etc.

So the next day I gets me to my Kronikle paper and there's an interesting article remembering some of the large scale tragedies involving the Bay Area, particularly the assassination of Moscone and Milk (soon to be a Major Motion Picture!) and the Jonestown mass murders (relegated to the more TV docu-drama I think, ("The Guyana Tragedy: The Story Of Jim Jones," starring Powers Boothe, Randy Quaid, Veronica Cartwright, James Earl Jones and Ned Beatty!). (Although there was an excellent documentary on Harvey Milk, The Times of Harvey Milk, which won an Oscar btw, that will have you crying on your couches. We'll see what Sean Penn cooks up with his version. 

Anyway in the one article the Kron has Congresswoman Jackie Speier recounting her "ordeal," and let me     say that is a giant understatement.  She was only 28 years old when she went to Guyana with Congressman Leo Ryan (San Mateo County of all places) to "fact find" what was happening there at the infamous People's Temple.  Just reading her brief account in the paper, no pictures, or even special effects, was approximately 1000 times more dramatic and unbelievable than what I'd just seen the night before in in the film Ironman. The setting, the action seemed familiar though: Speier was also in hostile territory, ambushed and shot up pretty severely: five time in her arms and legs, shattering bones, compound fractures; she pretended to be dead while bodies lay scattered around her, most of them not pretending. How she held it together, gritted through the pain, the terror, made it out alive is the stuff of heroism and legend. Now anyway. First time I'd heard it. And it isn't even told in much detail in the Kron. She could certainly due with a movie...

Of course you saying "skirb, obviously her story is more moving, 'cause its TRUE ya idiot, and Ironman of course is just a dumb movie."

Well I say yes, fer sure, I get that. But (you guessed it) there's something else there that needs our attention. Because there's really no meaning to the phrase, "just a movie" anymore in our culture. Movies are exalted texts and taken very seriously, millions of dollars pumped into their production and marketing -- even the dumb ones, and they inform and reflect our lives. ie they comment on society and change society when life imitates them. And at its blue, glowing core, Ironman is about our collective guilt isn't it? In the global theater the US has been the good guy and the bad guy and 100 guys in between; which adds up to one guilty mother. So its a good ol fashioned American thrill to see the guilty party (Tony Stark, the US, all of us) try to make good. His glowing heart is a constant reminder... But also see how outlandish the set up? How outlandish the process where we atone? But steeped in realism of the ambush scene, ala Jackie Speier, and the countless everyday soldiers who get ambushed exactly like that.  They are individuals, any single person who goes out there and tries to change something with their own two hands. The story of Jackie Speier informs the film Ironman, and the film Ironman informs us today how to read such scenes. Heroism, patriotism, the power of the individual. Speier and Ryan did not show up armed with no billion dollars, no magik inventing powers, no tiny secret power source, probably just cameras and notepads. Yet Speier made it out.  Always watch they way these things get translated into entertainment. Tony Stark vs. Jackie Speier.

This all came on the heels of "Veterans Day" of course on Nov. 11. I can't remember why I looked it up, but I was ignorant of the fact that Nov. 11 used to be called "Armistice  Day" and was designated to be celebrated on the "Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month" said Woodrow Wilson, I'm sure sonorously, over the radio, as the symbolic time when WWI (that's just a ONE peeps) ended with the "Armistice."  (See people had a better vocab back in the day too. "Armistice " just sounded a whole lot better than "Cease Fire," or "Truce" since it comes directly from the French giving the the gravitas that was needed for the occasion. Note it wasn't "War is officially over" day, but just a truce, which can be a temporary condition. Saves us space for WWII and the rest.) It was a day to commemorate peace, no? The young-to-the-international-world USA, stunned and bloodied, celebrating the peace, people! And those who gave their lives, and service to the cause. All good right?

But then... some old dudes out in Kansas thought different. "Yeah, yeah peace," they said "but what about the veterans? They are getting second billing to this peace crap. There would be no peace without the veterans, so Why aren't we celebrating them mainly?"

On the surface they were not wrong, veterans deserve to be honored as much as the peace, the two are of course intertwined. Perhaps there would be a way of intertwining our celebration. But no, the Kansas dudes wanted Armistice Day CHANGED to Veterans Day, and they had their boy, Eisenhower make it so.  And this is when a significant thought-shift snuck into the culture.  Our country went so quickly from celebrating peace to romantizing war.

It has come to pass. How is Veterans Day now celebrated? Parades? Closures? It was barely acknowledged in a significant way here in SF.  In smaller towns it gets more personal. In some countries (who were also in those World Wars, they stop for 2 minutes and pay a silent tribute to the vets.  But what about the Armistice? The peace? Where is our celebration of that?

Hard to do when we are still at war of course. Wars we know about and others we don't. We're everywhere, aren't we, Tony Starks, playing all sides. It would be hypocritical to celebrate peace for us, wouldn't it?

But we gotta start. We have to re-inform our culture that we celebrate Veterans Day but we also celebrate     Armistice Day. We should bring back a national holiday that celebrates the END OF WAR! Hammer home the thought that wars (I say naively say) should not be fought in the first place. That they are not romantic, and that dying or fighting in them is nothing but insanity and TRAGIC! On 11/11 at 11am (I guess it was am?) we stop what we're doing for 11 fucking minutes and promise strive for peace, to do 11 things to honor peace. Or even just one thing I'm sure would suffice.

 

Comments

[Geener]

Jackie, Jackie. I remember her tragic story told on some PBS documentary. Still can't believe she and Congressman Ryan just showed up unarmed and unprotected and thought they could leave easily. Jonestown ...same effect on me even many years later.

Mission Accomplished, G.

[Michael LaVella]

Huge. Massive. Thought provoking.