first thoughts on Academy Awards

excerpted from a letter I just wrote my father:

I just got back from my neighbor's, where we were watching the Academy Awards. I go to a lot of movies, so the Oscars is fun for me, to see what mainstream Hollywood is all about. My overall impression of the politics: This year was a liberal love fest. An amazing number of speeches championed one liberal cause or another. 

That's fine with me, of course, because I live on that end of the spectrum, but still remarkable. I think back to Marlin Brando, who sent an Indian activist to refuse his Academy Award in 1973 in support of Wounded Knee and because he was protesting the portrayal of Native Americans in Hollywood movies. Or I remember Michael Moore, picking the Dixie Chicks over the President, denouncing Bush's build-up to war as he collected his Oscar. There have always been a few voices now and then breaking through the din to deliver a message to power or the people. But those voices have usually been islands on the sometimes hostile sea of celebrities. 

Tonight was different. Every cause was represented and roundly cheered by an approving audience. It was Liberal America, sending a unified voice to the world. Perhaps it was rallying the troops, an opening salvo in the approaching political season. But at one point, as always, they were announcing how many countries the broadcast was going to, and how many viewers they were capturing, and I found myself thinking "Yes, we do hold certain truths to be self evident, and it's about time somebody was standing for something besides drones and mayhem." It's the difference between being the bully on the playground, or being the leader, based on solidarity.

But at any rate this is as good a time as any for me to tell you the story of when I went to the Oscars. Years later I held Michael Moore's Oscar, but that's a different story. This is from when I still marched with the radical veterans. 

It was 1978, the year The Deer Hunter was up for--and won--several Oscars. My marching buddies and I felt that the movie was an attempt to reverse the verdict on the war against Viet Nam. What later became known as the "Viet Nam Syndrome" was a long chain dragging behind American politicians who wanted to be free to take the country to war against any other Third World countries at will. 

The movie was sneaky. Many people saw it as an antiwar statement. But it certainly was not, in my opinion. For instance, instead of showing Americans throwing grenades into the foxholes and hiding places of peasant families, it showed the Viet Cong doing it. Instead of that famous image of the Saigon Police Chief shooting in the head a suspected VC prisoner, the movie showed the VC holding the pistol to an American head. It alluded to things the American public knew had happened, but portrayed the mirror image of those things. As soon as the movie came out, our vets chapter wrote up a leaflet and started passing it out to the crowds at theaters, calling the film out for twisting history. 

We weren't supposed to protest at the Academy Awards, but we did anyway. Getting inside to disrupt the proceedings was hopeless, of course. But we used good tactics, driving around in some vans, then jumping out like we were coming out of an APC, forming up on the run, then ducking through a labyrinth of passages, double-timing our way past the security perimeter to emerge on the street, just up from where the red carpet entrance was. Next to the carpet there were bleachers, facing into the street. We ran for a position centered opposite the grand entrance, on the other side of the street. 

As we appeared, so did plain clothes cops. The guys in front ran right by them, deflecting their efforts to stop us. But the cops fell right into step beside us. The guy running alongside me pulled out a leather-covered blackjack from somewhere and started hitting me with it. It hurt, but he didn't hit anything vital, so I fended him off, and just kept running. The cops faded away as we ran into the field of view of the cameras, so we were able to get the banners up and start our chants. It was not at all disruptive to the program inside, but there were TV cameras everywhere and lots of people in the stands, and along our side of the street, on the sidewalk behind us. The plain clothes took up positions in the crowd behind us and every once in a while bopped somebody from behind with what looked like a telescoping swagger stick. We had some vets holding them off while others lined up with the banners to make a presence. 

I have a photo around here somewhere that has me in it, standing alongside a banner, chanting. I was working at the copper smelter back then, and had flown down for the occasion, representing our Tacoma vets chapter. Mostly, in those days, I saw myself organizing a rank and file radical caucus in the Steelworkers local at the smelter, but every once in a while there was a job the vets needed to do, and this time I'd answered the bugle call. 

That year, Coming Home was in the running for its own set of awards. That movie, if you remember, starred Jane Fonda as the wife of a guy returning from a tour in Viet Nam who was suffering some PTSD, and she has an affair with another vet, crippled from the waist down, but more sensitive to her needs. It's a powerful movie, with scenes of the wheelchair vet chaining the gates of the base shut in protest.

In contrast, The Deer Hunter was trying to erase from popular memory the bitter lessons we learned in the course of that war. The Deer Hunter, while intense and well done technically, is a good example of how art can play a political function, in this case, one I didn't like. So here we were at the artistic awards ceremony for film, causing as much ruckus as we could get away with. 

At a certain point in our protest outside the Academy Awards, it was time to be done and leave. There was an uncomfortable number of cops around us. Our plan was to form up, do a left face and march out as quickly and quietly as possible. It all went fairly well until we crested this little hill and marched down toward our vans, waiting for us just beyond the security perimeter. I looked back and mobbing down the hill toward us were all the uniformed cops in the world, billy clubs raised overhead, storming our retreating line. We had a few seconds so some of us formed a rear guard to try to hold them off as best we could so the fellows who really couldn't be arrested could get away. I was part of the rear guard, fending off baton blows from several directions, agitating as loudly as I could, dancing around dodging, fending, but taking blows until I went down. A whole bus-load of us were arrested. I was bleeding profusely from my scalp, as I sat cuffed in the bus. I would be charged with assaulting a policeman's club with my head.

I'll tell you, that LA jail is no place to be. It's huge, chaotic, and they only feed you a sack lunch twice a day. When I heard you were going to the County, I worried you'd only get fed like that. I've been in other county clinks and bad as the food always is, at least it comes 3 times a day. 

I got bailed out, so I was told, by Lt. Sulu, that is to say George Takei, the Japanese American actor who played the helmsman on Star Trek. It just so happened the police attacked us right in front of the parking area where the limo drivers for the stars were waiting for the event to be over. They witnessed the whole thing and reported it to the movie stars, some of whom bailed us out. Jane Fonda, I remember, bailed out at least one guy. There were others as well. It just happened that I was the guy George Takei bailed out. Up until then I didn't know anything about his politics, but it turns out he's about as liberal as you'd expect from a gay guy who spent time in the internment camps as a child. 

I flew home with a head full of stitches, and was on shift just a few hours later. The next issue of the Local 25 Smelterworkers' newsletter had a cartoon one of the brothers drew of me, limping back to work with bloody bandages on my head.  Eventually the charges were dropped and it's now just an old man's memory, a line in my radical resumé.

You can tell I'm older now, and not so fiesty. This year's contenders for Academy Awards included American Sniper, based on a sniper who served 3 or 4 tours in Iraq, including in the siege of Fallujah. Clint Eastwood directed the film, and politically it reminded me of The Deer Hunter. American Sniper is not nearly as overt as Deer Hunter in it's effort to reverse the popular verdict on the US invasion and war in Iraq. But the film shows the sniper, credited with 160 kills, as always carefully considering targets and only shooting combatants. It's war, but without context; no missing weapons of mass destruction, no Abu Ghraib, nothing but a good clean "war is hell" message, that it's terrible to have to kill people, but necessary in war sometimes. 

My problem with all that is that back when the sieges of Fallujah were going on, we had our little TV show, and we aired three videos about Fallujah. I reviewed them all a couple weeks ago, to refresh my memory, after having seen the Hollywood version in American Sniper. We aired one piece that came out of Iraq, made by an Iraqi. Called "Testimonies From Fallujah" it was mostly interviews with Iraqi survivors. We made two other videos. One was based on the reports of Dahr Jamail, a Texas A&M graduate who was in Fallujah as a journalist, embedded not with the US troops, but with the Iraqi civilians. We called that piece "Eyewitness In Iraq." We also did a separate short video based on the reports of a British activist, Jo Wilding, who was riding in the shot-up Iraqi ambulances in Fallujah during the first siege. 

All three sources said the same thing, that Fallujah was a free-fire zone, more "shoot-em-all" rather than carefully selected, only combatant targets. In fact, in the Jo Wilding piece we also used actual quotes from US snipers, bragging about how good it made them feel to "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out." The reports also claim that the citizens of Fallujah suffered through white phosphorous attacks and flechette bombs. The photos were unsettling, and one of the things burned into my brain about that war. Then here comes along the Clint Eastwood's fantasy Sniper Saint, a down-home, honest American, just doing his duty. Audiences are imprinted, almost subliminally, in American Sniper with a different memory of the Iraq war than portrayed by our PepperSpray Productions pieces, which were done at the time, based on actual sources, with documentary evidence. 

Personally, I would have loved to see a bunch of "never again" vets protesting American Sniper, but if that happened, I certainly didn't hear about it. But that's just me. Perhaps I'm focused on this after taking a number of clubs to the head during my own trip to the Academy Awards. It beats the perspective into my memory pretty strongly. At any rate, though it was nominated in several categories, American Sniper ended up empty handed in all but sound editing. The evening was not allowing any of that sort of thing to mar the high road celebration of civil rights, women's equality, gay rights and marriage, the cause of Mexican immigrants, whistle blowers, and more. This year American Sniper, which took in more money at the box office than all the rest of the Acadamy-nominated movies combined, was the outlier, no vets protests needed.