Sometimes, I Prefer Fanfiction To Canon

Sometimes, I prefer fanfiction to canon

‘Star Wars’ and the Fantasy of American Violence

The real gap is between the fantasy of American heroism and the reality of what the American military does.

On the stories we tell of ourselves. 

"Thirteen years ago, I spent the Fourth of July on the roof of a building in Baghdad that had once belonged to Saddam Hussein’s secret police. Our command had suspended missions for the day, set up a grill and organized a “Star Wars” marathon — the three good ones — in an old auditorium. But George Lucas’s lasers couldn’t compete with the light show playing out across Baghdad, and watching a film about the warriors of an ancient religion rising up from the desert to fight a faceless empire seemed, under the circumstances, perverse.

“So instead of “A New Hope,” I watched scenes from Operation Iraqi Freedom: tracers, helicopters, distant explosions in a modern city under an increasingly senseless occupation. I could see the United Nations compound that would get bombed later that summer. I could see the memorial to the soldiers who had died in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, a giant turquoise teardrop sliced in two. I could see Sadr City, the wire-crossed slum that would give birth to Shiite death squads, and the Green Zone, where American proconsuls forged a new Iraq.

“I was a Bicentennial baby, born in 1976; “Star Wars” was the first movie I saw, strapped in a car seat at the drive-in. The film must have implanted deep in my infant subconscious a worldview, an idea of justice and the desire to wield a light saber, all entangling as I grew older with the Bicentennial celebrating the American Revolution, another story of scrappy rebels fighting a mighty empire.

““Star Wars” managed a remarkable trick. Two years after the fall of Saigon and America’s withdrawal in defeat from a dishonorable war, Mr. Lucas’s Wagnerian space opera recast for Americans the mythic story so central to our sense of ourselves as a nation.

“In this story, war is a terrible thing we do only because we have to. In this story, the violence of war has a power that unifies and enlightens. In this story, war is how we show ourselves that we’re heroes. Whom we’re fighting against or why doesn’t matter as much as the violence itself, our stoic willingness to shed blood, the promise that it might renew the body politic....

"The real gap is between the fantasy of American heroism and the reality of what the American military does, between the myth of violence and the truth of war. The real gap is between our subconscious belief that righteous violence can redeem us, even ennoble us, and the chastening truth that violence debases and corrupts....

"There is another version of America beyond the noise our fireworks make: not military strength, but the deliberate commitment to collective self-determination. Perhaps this Fourth of July we could commemorate that. Instead of celebrating American violence, we might celebrate our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the ideals those documents invoke of an educated citizenry deciding its fate not through war but through civil disagreement. Instead of honoring our troops, whose chief virtues are obedience and aggressiveness, we could honor our great dissenters and conscientious objectors. And instead of blowing things up, maybe we could try building something.

"It’s our choice. We make our myths. We show by our actions what our holy days mean. Forty years after the American Bicentennial, 13 years after I stood on a rooftop in Baghdad, and 10 years after getting out of the Army, I won’t be out under the fire, cheering our explosions. I won’t be watching “Star Wars” either. My America isn’t an empire or a rebellion, but an ideal; it’s not a conquest, nor a liberation, but a commitment."

These hilarious fake magazine covers tap into the experience of having anxiety. 

And maybe you can relate — anxiety is the most common mental illness in the United States, affecting 40 million adults aged 18 and older according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

The USS Indianapolis (and Iron Man 3)

The USS Indianapolis was a heavy cruiser that in July 1945 delivered crucial components (including what was then half the world’s supply of enriched uranium) to the Philippines for the construction of the atomic bomb. Four days later it was torpedoed and went down in open water halfway between Guam and the Philippines. 300 men went down with the ship and the other 900 were left in shark-infested waters waiting days for rescue because their distress calls–sent in the twelve minutes before the ship went under–were not received by Navy command.

On the fourth day they happened to be spotted from the air by a routine patrol, which radioed for all nearby vessels to rescue the men seen in the water. A seaplane in the vicinity was the first to arrive and started dropping rafts and supplies to the survivors. But when they saw men being attacked by sharks, they LANDED IN OPEN WATER ON THE OCEAN in defiance of standing orders, and taxiied around the area gathering stragglers into the plane. When they ran out of room inside they started lashing men to the wings; they wound up damaging the plane so badly that it never flew again and had to be scuttled–but they saved 56 men until ships could arrive to pick them up.

(If, at this point, you are thinking “this sounds like something Tony Stark did in Iron Man 3″: hold that thought.)

The first ship on the scene arrived in the dark, and stopped well short of the debris to keep from injuring survivors in the water. They took aboard the men from the seaplane, and turned their largest searchlight to the sky–making themselves a target for any bombers in the vicnity–to serve as a beacon for other rescuers. That searchlight was the first that most of the scattered survivors knew of rescue arriving.

All told, 317 men survived–two thirds of those who were left after the sinking succumbed to dehydration, exposure, and shark attacks in those four days while they waited for rescue. One of the survivors was the ship’s captain, Charles McVay.

Unlike any other captain of a ship lost in the entire history of the US Navy, McVay wound up facing a court martial, accused of failing to take evasive action and putting his ship in danger. He maintained that he wasn’t at fault and instead asked why it took so long for his men to be rescued; the Navy insisted that no distress call was ever sent. He was convicted but his sentence was remitted so that he could return to duty; nonetheless he was blamed by many of the families of the men who died. He never shed the guilt (and, no doubt, the horror of being one of the men who spent those days in shark-infested waters). McVay committed suicide in 1968 with his Navy-issue revolver; he was found holding a toy sailor in his other hand. In 1975, President Gerald Ford refused to honor McVay with a Presidential Unit Citation despite the ship’s crucial role in the construction of the atomic bomb.

In 1996, an 11-year-old boy named Hunter Scott who heard about the disaster from Jaws started researching the sinking, including interviewing 150 survivors. By then 50 years had passed and documents had been declassified revealing that distress calls WERE received, by not one station but THREE. One station’s commander was drunk, another had ordered his men not to disturb him, and the third thought it was a Japanese hoax. Additionally US military intelligence had cracked Japanese codes by then; they both knew of the sinking from the Japanese side, but did not dispatch a rescue, and knew prior to the sinking that there were subs in the vicinity, but didn’t warn McVay.

Hunter Scott wound up testifying before Congress with survivors of the Indianapolis, and won an exoneration for Captain McVay. A book was written about his efforts to uncover the truth…

And in 2011 Warner Bros bought the movie rights to Hunter’s story… with Robert Downey Jr Who Does Not Know He Isn’t Really Tony Stark attached as a producer.

So in conclusion Hunter Scott is real life Harley Keener and the seaplane rescue of survivors from the USS Indianapolis totally inspired the barrel of monkeys rescue and YOU CANNOT CONVINCE ME OTHERWISE.