It's a sandwich the size of forever
May. 27th, 2010 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pseydtonneI just realized why I was not supposed to get much sleep last night. I was reading Fark when I came across a PvP comic referencing something I'd only read less than 24 hours ago.
I tutor a friend of mine's son. In theory I'm teaching him calculus. In reality he doesn't need a tutor and I just come over to riff for a while. Oh, and I've lent him a bunch of good books -- the Fagles translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, The History of Narrative Film (a textbook the size of a 1980s phone book with an amazing amount of stuff), et cetera.
Last week he lent me a copy of The Watchmen. Yes, I'm a geek born in the Seventies and I had never read it. I haven't seen the flick either. I wasn't interested in comic books back in the Eighties because my parents had some old Zap issues and they made the stuff in the shops look antediluvian. I had enough bullies in my life -- I was looking forward to smoking dope!
I tried to go to bed early last night. I knew I had a busy day of catching up to do today. Instead I was so full of anxiety that I couldn't sleep and I wound up reading. I got through the part where Dr Manhattan (the blue guy that somehow wins the Vietnam War, but more on that later) is pining in his tent up on Mars. He's so into his pining that he has to lift his tent from the sand as if he were Superman in the Arctic to get out from a meteor shower.
The not-so-good doctor is having a Billy Pilgrim moment. He is unstuck in time and reliving his human life, disintegration, reintegration, messed up sex life and failure to cope with the tabloid press.
I would probably be the right person for the what-if genre, but I'm too well versed about the historical events. There isn't a way the U.S. could have won the Vietnam war unless they'd gotten involved on the French side back in 1952 or so. The Vietnamese had no interest in being pawns of the Chinese and we assumed they were. They hated the Chinese more than they hated the French, hated them for thousands of years. Some tough blue guy shows up and they're not going to surrender in two months in 1971 -- they'll all die first. Whatever nation we'd win would have a population of about 3.
If there is only one lesson to take away from Vietnam, it's the same one the Soviet Union took from Afghanistan: you are not the first high and mighty culture to attempt hegemony and you won't make it out sane. The Soviet Union went bankrupt from their adventure and no longer exists.
Some countries may look completely insane to us, but if they aren't actually attacking us we have no hope in fixing them. We can throw every dollar or euro at the problem and still not solve anything. We're the least likely to win because we think history started in either 1945 or 1776, sometimes as recently as 2001. We think history happened on a fictional planet -- maybe not as much in Boston, where there is a major subway station beneath the Boston Massacre. All you have to do is exit State station, walk around to the short brick wall in front and imagine being a soldier pinned by a giant mob. That still requires guns, triangular sails, horse collars and other stuff we don't even think is technology.
We don't get history, so we repeat it. It's not just about learning the stuff -- it's seeing it with context, understanding that people are never blank slates even if they do watch bad television.
Somehow it's still nice to relate to Dr Manhattan. He keeps Nixon around, which is a fun thought. The premise is simple and the Comedian explains it well: the U.S. would have lost its mind if it had lost that war. People didn't heal from that war until Desert Storm. We finally thanked the vets for putting with hating them because hating the leaders wasn't working. What else explains the Eighties except as a giant spending spree to tune out our emotional exhaustion from that war? Projection, enabling, the works.
Doctor Manhattan is a decent knock-off of many other ideas. I'm hoping I get more out of his character as I keep reading. Don't give it away for me, eh?
-ready to resume typing emails, Ps/d
I tutor a friend of mine's son. In theory I'm teaching him calculus. In reality he doesn't need a tutor and I just come over to riff for a while. Oh, and I've lent him a bunch of good books -- the Fagles translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, The History of Narrative Film (a textbook the size of a 1980s phone book with an amazing amount of stuff), et cetera.
Last week he lent me a copy of The Watchmen. Yes, I'm a geek born in the Seventies and I had never read it. I haven't seen the flick either. I wasn't interested in comic books back in the Eighties because my parents had some old Zap issues and they made the stuff in the shops look antediluvian. I had enough bullies in my life -- I was looking forward to smoking dope!
I tried to go to bed early last night. I knew I had a busy day of catching up to do today. Instead I was so full of anxiety that I couldn't sleep and I wound up reading. I got through the part where Dr Manhattan (the blue guy that somehow wins the Vietnam War, but more on that later) is pining in his tent up on Mars. He's so into his pining that he has to lift his tent from the sand as if he were Superman in the Arctic to get out from a meteor shower.
The not-so-good doctor is having a Billy Pilgrim moment. He is unstuck in time and reliving his human life, disintegration, reintegration, messed up sex life and failure to cope with the tabloid press.
I would probably be the right person for the what-if genre, but I'm too well versed about the historical events. There isn't a way the U.S. could have won the Vietnam war unless they'd gotten involved on the French side back in 1952 or so. The Vietnamese had no interest in being pawns of the Chinese and we assumed they were. They hated the Chinese more than they hated the French, hated them for thousands of years. Some tough blue guy shows up and they're not going to surrender in two months in 1971 -- they'll all die first. Whatever nation we'd win would have a population of about 3.
If there is only one lesson to take away from Vietnam, it's the same one the Soviet Union took from Afghanistan: you are not the first high and mighty culture to attempt hegemony and you won't make it out sane. The Soviet Union went bankrupt from their adventure and no longer exists.
Some countries may look completely insane to us, but if they aren't actually attacking us we have no hope in fixing them. We can throw every dollar or euro at the problem and still not solve anything. We're the least likely to win because we think history started in either 1945 or 1776, sometimes as recently as 2001. We think history happened on a fictional planet -- maybe not as much in Boston, where there is a major subway station beneath the Boston Massacre. All you have to do is exit State station, walk around to the short brick wall in front and imagine being a soldier pinned by a giant mob. That still requires guns, triangular sails, horse collars and other stuff we don't even think is technology.
We don't get history, so we repeat it. It's not just about learning the stuff -- it's seeing it with context, understanding that people are never blank slates even if they do watch bad television.
Somehow it's still nice to relate to Dr Manhattan. He keeps Nixon around, which is a fun thought. The premise is simple and the Comedian explains it well: the U.S. would have lost its mind if it had lost that war. People didn't heal from that war until Desert Storm. We finally thanked the vets for putting with hating them because hating the leaders wasn't working. What else explains the Eighties except as a giant spending spree to tune out our emotional exhaustion from that war? Projection, enabling, the works.
Doctor Manhattan is a decent knock-off of many other ideas. I'm hoping I get more out of his character as I keep reading. Don't give it away for me, eh?
-ready to resume typing emails, Ps/d
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-05-28 03:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-28 04:23 am (UTC)Back during the Cold War, the high-level question was whether American or Soviet hegemony was more corrupting or foundational to civilization. Then again, we all grew up thinking that war would never be solved until nuclear holocaust. Who knew the commies could just run out of cash? (Then again, so have we.)
no subject
Date: 2010-05-29 03:14 am (UTC)