In a mirror, darkly

[selenak]

Last week I noticed that several of our major news media - the FAZ and the SZ, who are our equivalent to the Washington Post and the New York Times, basically - did major stories about the My Lai Massacre, due to the anniversary. Whereas I didn't see anything in my admittedly limited look at the US media, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, it's entirely possible that I missed several articles.

Now, given all that's happening in the US in the present, I'm aware there's no lack of stories about current day calamities. However, I couldn't help but feel reminded of something someone in my circle observed a while ago: the sense that the Vietnam War, which used to be very present in (American as well as non-American) pop culture when I grew up in the 80s, seems to have all but disappeared. And I can't help but speculate, and connect it with a couple of things. 9/11 being one of them. (Which reminds me: the NY Times last week also had an enraged opinion piece by an Iraqui writer on it being the 15th anniversary of W's invasion of Iraq. Someone in the comments observed on the depressing fact that according to current day polls, a lot of US citizens seem to think Saddam had something to do with 9/11. This despite the fact this was one lie too big even for Dubya and his neocons, who stuck to non-existent weapons of mass destruction back in the day. It's not like Saddam is lacking in villainous deeds to be blamed for, but not this one.) And because in recent weeks I finished my Star Trek: Enterprise marathon, my brain made some weird connections, to wit:

1) The Xindi arc in s3 of ENT was an obvious attempt to grapple with 9/11 in fiction. (And the result was, err, less than stellar storytelling.) S4 offered something a bit more nuanced in the form of the the Vulcan three parter. By which I mean that wereas the Xindi arc started by Earth attacked out of the blue by a previously unknown race (who, as it turned out, themselves were manipulated into doing it) , and our heroes deciding that the Jack Bauer way of morality was the way to go, the Vulcan trilogy, written by the Garfield-Stevenses of many a TOS novel fame, had the Vulcans Command dominated by a guy who clamed that the Andorians were in possession of a weapon of mass destruction and that totally asked for a preemptive strike at Andoria. Rather satisfyingly, it ended with the guy in question being deposed and Vulcan society undergoing a moral reformation. But then, it was clearly fiction.

2.) Another attempt to deal with the emotional impact of 9/11 by then ongoing genre shows that I can recall were, of course, the rebooted Battlestar Galactica (the scene of the pilots touching the photos of people who died during the Cylon attack on the colonies was meant as a direct evocation, for example).

3.) And then there was the (in)famous review of the newly released The Two Towers in TIME Magazine by Richard Schickel which read the movie as basically Saruman = Osama bin Laden, Aragorn's speech to Theoden = directed at nations unwilling to back the US in its Iraq venture, which enraged Viggo Mortensen to no end. (He wrote a letter of protest to TIME and showed up in every public appearance he had to promote the movie wearing a T-Shirt saying "no blood for oil".)

What all these attempts and interpretations have in common is this: in all of them, the society coded as "us" (as in "the US") is the attacked-by-overwhelming-forces plucky little guy. I mean, technically you couild argue the humans of the twelve colonies on BSG outnumbered the invading Cylons, but the Cylons, at least at this early point in the show, were presented as technically superior and as the relentless hunters whereas the humans were on the run and fleeing, definitely outmached in weaponry. Not a single one of them has the society/group the audience is supposed to identify with as a superpower outmatching their attackers in weaponry, numbers and economic strength. And most definitely not as a superpower with a history of invasions of its own.

Partly I suppose this is because everyone wants to see themselves as the little guy, the plucky rebel/victim of injustice, and not as The Man defending the status quo. But part of it... well, this brings me back to where I started, the My Lai Massacre and all it symbolizes, the Vietnam War. Because my current interpretation is this: the story the Vietnam War told for a while, in the 70s and 80s, was unbearable post 9/11. It amounted to: the US fought a war which not only it did not win but lost both in the moral and the pragmatic sense. None of the aims it set out to achieve was in fact achieved; the end result was Vietnam as a Communist state. In the process, the image of "defender of the free" etc. was torn to shreds; instead of GI's storming the Beach of Normandy, the enduring iconic image was of a naked little girl running because she got bombed with Napalm, instead of flags being put into the sand of Iwo Jima, you got "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" as a summary of US military strategy, between Johnson and Nixon, both parties in a two party system were tainted by leading this war (and lying about it to the public). It was all for worse than nothing. The US soldiers killed for nothing and were killed for nothing. They got addicted to drugs and committed massacres for nothing. Now you can do the Rambo thing and get a still pleasing to to conservatives story of a brave soldier/brave soldiers let down by their government during and after the war in question, yet good by themselves. You can try the "a few rotten apples" explanation for the likes of My Lai. But by and large, you're still left with: the war was lost on every level it could be lost, and nothing good, no grand final justification came out of it. And that's just completely alien to the narrative US Americans are taught about themselves.

Mind you: there's a sci fi saga created at the time in which the narrative "we" and "us" are in fact a superpower, involved in a conflict with what appears to be an inferior foe under false pretenses, a republic which is rotting from within though there are also people in it who do live according to their ideals. A story with heroes who make moral compromises which end up making everything worse, not better, and with a central character who might start out as an innocent thinking the task of his chosen profession is to free people but who ends up committing massacres....why yes, I'm thinking of the Star Wars Prequels. Which have their flaws, sure enough. But in this, they have a bit more narrative honesty than all those other reflections. (Also more than the sequels who avoid the inconvenience of having to depict main characters defending a functioning state and the status quo by destroying the new Republic off screen and presenting its heroes in a brand new rebellion against a superior foe.)

And since I'm ending on a Star Wars note anyway: my favourite WIP has been finished as of last week. I've reccommended it here before, despite usually avoiding WiPs, because it's that good an AU, encompassing Prequel and OT era alike. It uses its time travel element at the start not as a cheat but as a great way to explore the characters, because Vader regretting Padmé's death and his own physical state and wanting to change this isn't the same as Anakin being redeemed, the way Anakin later, at a point when he thinks he's escaped his past, gets confronted with what he did in both the original and the altered time line is enough to satisfy the strictest critic, Leia-as-raised-by-Anakin-and-Padmé is both intriguingly different and yet recognizably herself and has a heartrendering, fantastic arc once she finds out about certain things, Luke is the most humane character as he should be, there's Ahsoka to make my fannish heart happy, and while I'm usually not really into the EU bookverse characters, the way this story uses Mara Jade is awesome. (Especially an angle which the novels she hails from to my knowledge didn't consider, to wit, that she and Anakin share the experience of being groomed by Palpatine from childhood onward.) In conclusion: it's a long tale, but so worth it.


Out of the Dark Valley (324646 words) by irhinoceri
Chapters: 53/53
Fandom: Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rise of Empire Era - All Media Types, Star Wars - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, Mara Jade/Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa & Luke Skywalker
Characters: Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Padmé Amidala, Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, Ahsoka Tano, Mara Jade, Original Female Character(s), Han Solo, Sheev Palpatine | Darth Sidious, Barriss Offee, Yoda (Star Wars)
Additional Tags: Skywalker Family Feels, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Padmé lives!, minor ahsoka tano/barriss offee, Canon-Typical Violence, Time Travel Fix-It, Time Travel Fuck-It-Up-Again, Family Drama/Angst, Dysfunctional Family, Ensemble Cast
Summary:

15 years after the events of RotS, Darth Vader discovers a way to time travel backwards through the Force, to the moment in his past he most regrets. This creates an alternate timeline where he has the opportunity to change his and Padmé's tragic fate. But reliving the past and making a new future will prove to be no easy task, and the sins of the father will have lasting effects on the next generation. (AU from Mustafar onward. Ensemble PoV featuring Anakin, Padmé, Obi-Wan, Luke, Leia, and Mara Jade. Skywalker family focus with mild Anidala and LukeMara elements. Background Barrissoka. Rated T for violence and dark themes.)

Comments

[muccamukk]

Mom says that Democracy Now covered it quite extensively. Nothing on our national news that I saw.

[selenak]

*googles Democracy Now Vietnam*

Ah, found it. It's a good report, though I note the only Americans interviewed are a) Seymour Hersh, and b) one of the few guys who were trying to save people instead of killing them. The article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, by contrast, interviewed (in addition to Vietnamese survivors just like the Democracy Now report) a Veteran whose attitude basically was "the Vietcong killed my buddies, we knew the villagers hated us, they had it coming, war is tough, I did what I had to". Which alas is the far more prevalant attitude not just then. (I remember when news about Abu Ghraib got out there were also polls asking US soldiers what they knew about the Geneva Conventions. With the result being "what Geneva Conventions"?)

[ratcreature]

While listening to various NPR shows I've encountered several segments remembering My Lai, though one was entirely a portrait of some soldier who objected and recently got a medal for that or something, so that fit the heroic narrative. The other was about some opera that also featured that guy. And actually the more standard 50 year anniversary thing had that guy as narrative perspective hook in the opening too. Though it also noticed later US massacres of women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan and mentioned how the punishments for those weren't very harsh. (Apparently the only conviction was a plea deal with no prison time.) So there was a kind of desperate grasping for a heroic military angle going on.

[selenak]

Whereas the Süddeutsche's article in addition to Vietnamese survivors featured the very unrepentant Kenneth Hodges, who, I fear, is far more representative of the (not just) US military then and now.

I mean, I'm all for honoring those who refused to "follow orders" and show by their example there was a choice, but nobody would have focused a 50th anniversary of - no, must not use particular German example - so let's say an anniversary of the British troops shooting down a peacefully protesting Indian crowd at Amritsar by focusing on a British Gandhi sympathizer, now would they? (Then again, the Daily Mail probably would have.)

Anyway, the need for a heroic military figure even in this story is really quite telling. Mind you, the US movies from the 70s and 80s who do tackle Vietnam and present it as something rotten have those, too, it's just that the decent heroic US soldier usually dies (a la Platoon and is not the main character but the friend/mentor of same.

[maia]

everyone wants to see themselves as the little guy, the plucky rebel/victim of injustice, and not as The Man defending the status quo

Yes.


Also more than the sequels who avoid the inconvenience of having to depict main characters defending a functioning state and the status quo by destroying the new Republic off screen and presenting its heroes in a brand new rebellion against a superior foe.

EXCELLENT point. (I love The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, but this is something that bothers me a LOT.)

[selenak]

I like the new movies, too, but right from the start this struck me as a big and lazy concession to the way audiences supposedly and/or actually want their heroes to be eternally pure rebels and not tainted by the compromises of actually governing, and how "standing up to the Man" is just the easiest position to sympathize with, as opposed to "facing the fact that you now ARE the Man and supposed to do a better job at it than your precedessors". In a way, it's a constant refusal to grow up. And by indulging it, the sequels also rob the OT heroes of having achieved something of lasting significance, alas.

[elisi]

Dammit, just lost my comment. It was re. the Star Wars prequels, quoting this:

'Star Wars has always had its finger on the pulse of the cultural fear of the moment. In the original trilogy in the 1970s and early 80s, it was The Man– an evil establishment that needed to be purified by a younger generation. In the prequels of the 90s, it was evil corporations secretly colluding with a corrupt government to create endless war.

Now, in early 21st century America, the villain is an unstable young white man who had every privilege in life, yet feels like the world has wronged him. Unbeknownst to his family, he finds and communicates with a faraway mentor who radicalizes him with a horrific, authoritarian ideology. By the time his family finds out, it’s too late, and now this unstable young white man has this horrific ideology, access to far too many weapons, and the desperate desire to demolish anything that he perceives as a threat– or is told to perceive as a threat.'

ETA: I think the current films are very much seeing the establishment as the evil that has to be fought. The Rebels are Black Lives Matter, #WalkForOurLives, and all the other young people protesting. The First Order is [very loosely] white, male privilege - every Make American Great Again hat, every Confederate Flag, the Babyboomers who didn't care that they were ruining the world for those that follow.

I don't think it was deliberate, but the destruction of the new republic by The First Order can be seen as Trump's electoral victory - the Republic allowed the hate to blossom and was scared to speak out against it. And paid the price. :(

/Hey, I have a lot to say about this, I keep meaning to write a post.

[selenak]

I think the current films are very much seeing the establishment as the evil that has to be fought.

In startling and breathtaking contrast to every other American movie ever, especially the original SW trilogy. Not that I'm disputing the young man gets radicalized/white privilege interpretation, but I maintain it's also good old laziness and not wanting to bother depicting heroes defending a state as opposed to fighting one, because STICKING IT TO THE MAN is always the easier thing to root for. And note: this isn't just true if one is inclined to the left. State and government = evil evil evil is an US Republican credo ("liberal establishment", "want to take our guns", etc., etc.), even when they themselves are in government (then, as we currently see, it's the "Deep State" and they themselves are somehow still the rebels.

Last year, I had a conversation about something else entirely with a German literature critic who then mentioned that as a young man he saw Star Wars - A New Hope and no other SW movie, and then recently he got cajoled to watch "The Force Awakens" with his grandkid, "and wouldn't you know it, they're STILL making the same movie, because they still can't imagine rebellion any other way. Or themselves, no matter how rich and powerful they are. Good lord. Americans." Now that's stelling the entire SW narrative a bit short, but I could also see his point.

[sovay]

the story the Vietnam War told for a while, in the 70s and 80s, was unbearable post 9/11.

I think it was being displaced out of American popular culture/consciousness even before then: Vietnam references were normal when I was growing up, including in transposed forms, but they were fading to gone by the late '90's. September 11th, 2001 offered much of the country, especially the parts in power, an excuse to leapfrog back in time and pretend that particular war had never happened.

On that note, I assume you've seen the very good comic about how the War on Terror reified the myths of World War II? Mike Dawson and Chris Hayes, "The Good War."

[selenak]

Yes, I've seen it, and it's excellent, though I'd debate Saving Private Ryan and generally the WWII worship in the 90s being that much of a shift in terms of US popular consciousness and how it treated WWII. I mean, when I first visited the US as a teenager in the 80s during Reagan's reelection campaign, I was among other things struck by the entire "Greatest Generation" worship and the way WWII was treated as basically the most perfect of role playing games, complete with truly evil villain, clear goal, impossibility to compromise. Something like Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 was definitely not on the radar of any US teenager I ever talked to, or their parents.

Now don't get me wrong: I can the appeal, not least because I, too, sometimes yearn for villains to unreservedly boo and hiss at, and heroes working for something unquestioningly good. And no compromise with a Hitler-ruled Germany (or for that matter not Hitler (had he personally been removed but no one else) but Nazi ruled Germany, to cover all the angles) would have been possible. But it was still striking, especially since the 80s were the very time where the fruits of a reverse cultural shift in Germany were reaped, to wit, my parents' generation who grew adult in the 60s questioning their parents and the general 50s silence/denial got into teaching positions in the 80s, with the result that that my generation grew up being taught about the evils of nationalism and the terrible results they wrought quite thoroughly, with a deep distrust towards flag waving of any kind.

To return to the comic and its general thesis of how the War on Terror fed on (US) WWII iconography - this, I entirely agree with. Especially "every dictator is always Hitler, and it's eternally Munich in 1938 if you suggest something other than war", because do I ever remember Dubya's endless "Saddam = Hitler" comparisons.

Vietnam references fading out in the late 90s - you're probably right, though I remember in the early 90s, "draft dodger" was still something used against Bill Clinton (though the fact that it didn't work as intended when his opponent was Bush the Elder, aka the last US president to actually have served in WWII probably was telling about the early 90s versus the later ones). Still: Bush the Younger & friends predicting "hearts and flowers" in Iraq - and no one (other than Errol Morris and Robert McNamara talking about it in "Fogs of War") thought about the less than cheering Vietnamese?

[sovay]

Something like Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 was definitely not on the radar of any US teenager I ever talked to, or their parents.

I'd read the novel by high school—and it was my parents' copy—but I believe you did not encounter any.

And no compromise with a Hitler-ruled Germany (or for that matter not Hitler (had he personally been removed but no one else) but Nazi ruled Germany, to cover all the angles) would have been possible.

Just to be clear, since it's come up at least once before, I do not assume that by being skeptical of American mythmaking you are automatically declaring yourself for Hitler.

To return to the comic and its general thesis of how the War on Terror fed on (US) WWII iconography - this, I entirely agree with.

I agree that the comic oversimplifies the aetiology, but it pulls no punches in describing the symptoms, and I appreciate that. It was eerily, upsettingly noticeable from the start: I heard people my own age speaking of 9/11 as though it were Pearl Harbor, as though they knew what Pearl Harbor had been like. They must have caught it from the news. I did not hear that language from my grandfather.

Vietnam references fading out in the late 90s - you're probably right, though I remember in the early 90s, "draft dodger" was still something used against Bill Clinton

The supporting character played by Tom Waits in Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King (1991) is a Vietnam vet. I believe the Broadway version of Miss Saigon opened around the same time. I'm sure other examples will come to mind. I wonder what it was about the Clinton years that phased that awareness out.

[selenak]

Just to be clear, since it's come up at least once before, I do not assume that by being skeptical of American mythmaking you are automatically declaring yourself for Hitler.

Thank you; making these disclaimers is a habit recently intensified because we now have obnoxious people in parliament for the first time since 1945 who indulge in WhatAboutIsm all the time, so I suppose I've grown a bit extra as a counter reaction.


The supporting character played by Tom Waits in Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King (1991) is a Vietnam vet. I believe the Broadway version of Miss Saigon opened around the same time.

Completely irrelevant but hopefully amusing anecdote of me visiting a performance of "The Three Penny Opera" in the 1990s in Los Angeles: couple in front of me, commenting about a third in: "Well, it sure is not Miss Saigon".

More seriously: I think there's something to the comics' theory that the 1990s were the first era, where, after the end of the Cold War, the US lacked an external foe in the general consciousness. And this after a decade of Reaganism with Evil Empire and Shining City rethoric. Otoh, I just checked when exactly The Fog of War got released, and it was in 2003 (right in time for the second Iraq war), because I remember that reviving some Vietnam War debates at least to some degree both from the conservative and the liberal side. But in retrospective, these revived debates were carried out in articles and online in forums, not via fiction created to reflect them. Incidentally, to me, one of the most striking moments in Fog of War was when McNamara talked about working for Curtis Le May as a very young man in WWII, how the fire bombing of Tokyo killed more people than the nuclear bombs did and how it would have qualified as a war crime had the war ended another way. This was the very first time I had heard a US politician say something like this in a WWII context.

[jesuswasbatman]

In 2004, though, the Republicans were blatant about using John Kerry's activities at the time of the Vietnam War against him, in ways that were both completely unjustified (the accusations of not deserving the decorations that he won as a Swift Boat commander) and potentially justifiable from one political perspective but extremely unpleasant in their ideological implications (the Dolchstoss treatment of his post-combat opposition to the war).

[jesuswasbatman]

In relation to 9/11 and BSG, there's also the outraged reaction some commentators had to the New Caprica arc in which the Cylons were clearly paralleled with the US in Iraq. And also later on the point Abigail Nussbaum made about how the treatment of the debate on whether the humans should ally with the 2-4-6 Cylons clearly showed that the writers by then were thinking of the humans as a superpower that should be magnanimous instead of scattered survivors of a genocide.

[selenak]

True, both. That's the problem with shifting your analogies in the course of the story. (Though I personally think it worked for the story in question, but I can see Abigail N's point.) (Not that I recall much fandom reacting against it, but I think JMS also shifted his analogies twice in B5 with the result of some unintentional weird subtext. The Centauri start out as Space Romans in s1. Then in s2 and for a large part of s3, they're Space WWII Germans with the references flying thick and fast, complete with "peace in our time" and concentration camps. And then in s4 and after, the Centauri are back to being Space Romans again.)

[jesuswasbatman]

Just remembered: although as early as S1 there was the very pointed scene on occupied Caprica, where a Six and a Five, while human corpses were being bulldozed into piles to be burned, smugly agreed on how the humans needed to go because "they don't value life like we do" - a direct reference to what at the time was a common argument among Islamophobic Iraq-war-promoters who thought that Muslims only understood violence.