|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Behalf Of Justin Schwartz
||
||
|| >
|| >I've become a bit obsessed with the Talk mag images of Carmen
|| Electra on an
|| >M-1 Abrams surrounded by grunts in Fritz helmets. This cheap
|| USO spoof is
|| >emblematic of the easy slide of US popular culture into a
|| one-dimensional
|| >blend of shopping, entertainment, junk food, sex, and warmongering.
||
|| Easy slide? I thought that _was_ US popular culture. Btw,
|| recall the scene
|| in Apocalyse Now where the Playboy bunnies entertain the troops
|| in Vietnam?
||
|| jks
||
Yep, only Vietnam was a here-and-now kind of war, with blood and guts spilling out the TV set all over the pizza - dare I say a "real" war? So the bunny stage show on the Mekong was pretty freaky for then but its freakiness was simply a product of the horrors experienced daily by the audience, amplified by drugs. No horrors, no blood this time. This war is even more unreal than the Gulf War, with CIA joystick-spooks firing antitank missiles from remote-controlled drones at demonized entities. But it's still a stopgap sort of remote-control war while waiting for the deployment of the star wars system, where US Death Stars will zap recalcitrant populations from outer space. The US war machine is transforming war, making it an extension of the financial-technical structure of the US empire, and stripping it of its disruptiveness. The technologically obtained remoteness of the central reality of war - death, pain, destruction, etc. - is why it is so easy to spin & integrate into popular culture. As in Starship Troopers, the country transits from peacetime to wartime with hardly a blink. This is why the awkward transposition of the USO iconography - which belongs to the era of "real" wars - strikes me as so revealing of, well, this new threshold of lunacy that's being crossed.
Hakki