Despite all the right wing's complaining about Hollywood's liberal bias, this home of the US film industry is a powerful mouthpiece of US capitalism, a major source of American opinion, coupled with one of its main outlets, the television industry, this is where idaes are made and distributed under the heading "entertainment".
A foreigner's first impression of the US through watching this entertainment would be that there are more people working as cops in the US than in all other jobs combined. The presence of guns on US television is alarming. People get guns pointed at them, see people die every day and don't bat an eyelid. And then there's the car chases. Crime, violence and gun use are undoubtedly alarming issues in the US but I have lived here for 36 years years and have yet to see cop cars driving down the sidewalk knocking over fruit stands as they chase a robber; but if you watch US TV, this is an almost daily occurrence over here.
I used to live in a pretty high crime area and there were killings of youth, primarily wars between drug dealers for control of turf, but the average person was generally outside this activity and safe from it except for accidental incidents where a bystander might be killed by a stray.
The past week, as I flipped through channels here and there I was reminded how manipulative their media is with regards to molding foreign policy also. While surfing I came upon one of the Rambo movies and watched about 15 minutes of it. People may remember these movies about some individual who could have defeated the Vietnamese single-handedly if the US government had let him. The scene I caught had Rambo, played by Silvestor Stillone talking to his former commander, the one who taught him how to kill. The commander is trying to convince Rambo to cease his violent behavior here at home. Rambo is mad you see because of the way he's been treated by the people at home. First he complains that he did what the was supposed to do in Vietnam but "someone didn't let them win".
This is phrased this way, is the source of and gives credence to the argument I often heard from some workers that the US didn't try to win. You must have heard it too. The US didn't put its full effort in to it, was restrained in some way either through public opinion or its humanitarian nature. This is US imperialism's version of history that denies the Vietnamese people their due in the heroic struggle they fought to repel the world's most powerful military. They lost some 3 million people in that struggle.
It's also to obscure the role the US soldiers had in this defeat recognizing as many of them did that they were thousands of miles from home fighting fighting a senseless war; killing someone is not easy for normal human beings, its not like Hollywood. The degeneration of the troops was a major factor in the US defeat also. Rambo goes on about how he only did his job but when he returned home he was met by protestors and was spat on by people for his work. This is a common story we hear about this period. Vietnam vets have been mistreated alright, but by the bastards that sent them there in the first place. The documentary Sir No Sir, points out that there is no evidence that any Vietnam vets were spat on at airports.
Then last night I watched an old Clint Eastwood movie, Absolute Power. It's decent enough entertainment but again, it's not just entertainment, its propaganda too. Eastwood plays a robber who robs this old billionaire philanthropist and in the course of this robbery the philanthropist's wife comes home with her lover and is murdered by him; the robber witnesses this.
Anyway, that's not the point. At one point the old rich man, who is friends with the US president, is talking to a cop, played by Ed Harris. The rich man is considered a "great man" by this cop who talks to him as if he's god. The billionaire tells the cop that his dad was a miner who died of black lung. He describes how he became rich (just like that) at the age of 25 and the first thing he did was go and buy that coal mine, close it down, and, give every worker there $50,000 to retire on. Sesame street is more accurate than that.
Every minute of every day they produce this propaganda and inundate us with it. It adds to the depression and alienation so many people feel because their history doesn't correspond to our objective reality. What an insult Rambo's character is to the hundreds of thousand of US workers that were sent to Vietnam and those 70,000 or so that died there. And the character is played by a tiny little man who was lucky enough to avoid being sent there and who spent some of those years working at a girls school in Europe from what I understand.
The civil rights movement saw and increase in "ethnic studies" in this country. But history of even the most specially oppressed minority obscures the role of the working class of that community.
It is working class history of all nationalities and specially oppressed minorities that is suppressed.
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