{"id":204569,"date":"2020-03-27T07:29:58","date_gmt":"2020-03-27T07:29:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=204569"},"modified":"2020-03-30T07:39:19","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T07:39:19","slug":"america-arrested","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=204569","title":{"rendered":"America Arrested"},"content":{"rendered":"

Linh Dinh \u2013 The Unz Review March 25, 2020<\/strong><\/h1>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Busan<\/p><\/div>\n

Outrageous events are avalanching, so any analysis risks becoming immediately obsolete, and even quaintly so. Just two weeks ago was the good old days. Remember when you could perform extraordinary tasks like loafing in a bar just to shoot the shit, walking down the street unperturbed or saying to a diner waitress, \u201cOver easy, please,\u201d then leisurely wait for the old bird to bring you your eggs?<\/h5>\n
\u201cHere you are, honey.\u201d<\/h5>\n
Is this a bad movie or what? And we\u2019re all just extras, ghostly blurs flitting in the background, with our sickness or death not even a weeny tick in the constantly swelling statistics. Many, though, will insist there is no health crisis, for this is just a trumped-up mirage, orchestrated by all governments, working together.<\/h5>\n
Fact is, half of America is already under house arrest, with the remainder soon to follow, most likely. All of Italy, Spain, France, Greece and India are already in lockdown. As James Howard Kunstler points out, \u201cAt least in wartime, the bars stay open,\u201d so this is an even worse disruption.<\/h5>\n
Growing up in wartime Saigon, I\u2019d go to the movies, like everybody else, and we watched chopsockies, mostly, but also American flicks like Planet of the Apes and the Poseidon Adventure. For a relentlessly optimistic country that always preaches progress, America can\u2019t stop dreaming of collective disasters and dystopias. Deep down, it always knew, somehow.<\/h5>\n
\"\"<\/a>I\u2019m writing this in South Korea. Landing here nearly a month ago, I half expected to find a country in crisis, panic and despair, but it\u2019s much more normal here than nearly everywhere else. In Busan, folks still stroll on Dadaepo, Gwangalli<\/a><\/span> and Haeundae Beaches. Arcaded<\/span><\/a> markets are daily thronged with shoppers. Teenagers play basketball<\/a><\/span> outside, as men lift weights nearby. At rush hours, the suits fill subway cars.<\/h5>\n
Sitting at a convenience store<\/a><\/span>, I can hear two boys goofing around behind me, and see, outside the ample window, cars and pedestrians passing by. It\u2019s an act of grace just to be a zooplankton in the stream of life. Heading for a recycling center, an old woman pulls a cart stacked with folded cardboard boxes, which she has spent all morning collecting. Nearing the end, her juices still flow, so she must exert. Led by his mom, a boy nervously crosses the street on a red tricycle.<\/h5>\n
Are you being sheltered in place, with only a screen for company?<\/h5>\n
The electronic screen hasn\u2019t just defined, but shaped and usurped America, so there\u2019s hardly any country left, just citizens, very loosely speaking, in solitary confinement with their magic lanterns, and that\u2019s what we have now, most concretely.<\/h5>\n
To the rest of the world, America is not just a kaleidoscope of movies, but is itself a film, a road movie launching into space. Mesmerized, they watch from afar and fantasize about being an extra in this greatest of flicks.<\/h5>\n
\"\"<\/a>In Seoul<\/a><\/span> two weeks ago, I spotted an infant-sized Apollo astronaut<\/a><\/span> at a TGI<\/a> Fridays<\/a><\/span>, so had to walk in. Sure enough, the chain restaurant was a mini temple to America<\/a><\/span>. You\u2019re there to swallow myths.<\/h5>\n
On the walls, there were images of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, John Travolta<\/a><\/span> in Saturday Night Live, the Star Trek crew, Batman and Luke Skywalker. Also on display were Darth Vader<\/a> <\/span>and Clone Trooper helmets, a Bart Simpson mask, and signs for Hollywood Boulevard, Bourbon Street and Route 66.<\/h5>\n
Rolling down Route 66, Easy Rider ends with both Fonda and Hopper senselessly killed, just after they had a bad acid trip with two prostitutes in a New Orleans cemetery. The entire movie, though, is pretty much one bad trip, what with them being turned away from a motel, jailed, refused service in a restaurant and pummeled in their sleep, a beating that got Jack Nicholson murdered. The only real fun they had was skinny dipping with two babes in a hot spring. Mardi Gras was like some voodoo rite, with a dead cat by the side of the road.<\/h5>\n
Despite all that, the movie still seduces, because our heroes are so cool (thus quintessentially American), and the landscape looks so sweet and inviting. It is vast, yet not savage, with the only threatening beasts its rural inhabitants.<\/h5>\n
Louisiana didn\u2019t appear too appealing in that movie, did it? Still, Morganza (pop. 610) marked the 50th anniversary of its release. An article about this in the Advocate, out of Baton Rouge, quotes recollections by several locals, including those who appeared in the film, so there is tremendous continuity there. People stay put and remember.<\/h5>\n
Seventy-year-old Elida Hebert Aronstein recalls these Hollywood invaders as \u201cugly, dirty men. They smelled. They\u2019d probably been on the road all week.\u201d Yet the village welcomed and collaborated with the filmmakers, even to the point of slandering itself as a redneck cesspool.<\/h5>\n
For a more sympathetic view of ordinary, salt of the earth Americans, one must turn to another Nicholson vehicle, Five Easy Pieces. This is sort of a road movie, since it\u2019s about escape.<\/h5>\n
Born into an affluent, cultured and musically accomplished family, Bobby can\u2019t stand his sterile and pretentious milieu, or his father\u2019s expectations, so he reinvents himself as just some Joe Sixpack. Bobby works on an oil field, bowls and drinks with his best friend Elton, shacks up with a waitress and beds women. Still, he\u2019s never satisfied, concludes his girlfriend, Rayette, superbly played by Karen Black.<\/h5>\n
Devoted to Bobby, Rayette can\u2019t help but compulsively play Tammy Wynette\u2019s \u201cStand by Your Man,\u201d a song he\u2019s so sick of.<\/h5>\n
Already bored and often short with Rayette, Bobby becomes enraged when she got pregnant. Elton gives him the news.<\/h5>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s all torn up about it, too, which I hate to see. Well, hell, isn\u2019t it something you just have to face up to? I\u2019ll tell you, somewhere along the line, you even get to liking the whole idea. When Stoney first give me the news, I could have shit. Ha, ha, ha, ha!\u201d<\/h5>\n
Bobby\u2019s response is telling, \u201cIt\u2019s ridiculous! I\u2019m sitting here listening to some cracker asshole who lives in a trailer park compare his life to mine. Keep telling about the good life, Elton, because it makes me puke!\u201d<\/h5>\n
Elton, \u201cWell, if you\u2019re saying you think you\u2019re something better than what I am, now that\u2019s something else. But I can\u2019t say much of someone who could run off and leave a woman in a situation like this, and feel easy about it, and that\u2019s all I have to say.\u201d<\/h5>\n
This, Bobby eventually does, and that\u2019s how the movie ends. Free, he\u2019s moving on.<\/h5>\n
America, too, has defined freedom as a self-sanctioned license to ignore consequences, or even disasters, but suddenly, that easy ride has come to an end.<\/h5>\n
Emma Lazarus calls the Statue of Liberty the \u201cMother of Exiles,\u201d and America has been certainly been an unprecedented refuge for those escaping, well, just about everything: king, poverty, debts, religious persecution, Communism, Fascism, criminal convictions or war, including many started by America itself. With your house burning, you run towards the arsonist. America has also been a beacon for many who just want more wealth, glamor or space, but what all exiles have in common is a rejection, whether anguished or ecstatic, of their homeland, which is all they have ever known.<\/h5>\n
Come and reinvent yourself, an American specialty, and this enticement is also dangled to the native-born, for it\u2019s practically an American imperative to turn away from home, hometown, home state and especially your geeky or doofy self, so embarrassing in that high school yearbook. Outgrowing everything, you\u2019ll tatt up, dye your hair, get a new wardrobe and move to, say, California. Though you may end up sleeping on a pissy Tenderloin sidewalk, you\u2019ve made tremendous progress, buddy, for you\u2019re on your own!<\/h5>\n
As the richest advance their careers and increase their wealth by networking, the poorest are constantly told they must help themselves, as independent loners, for that\u2019s their freedom.<\/h5>\n
Lately, this escape creed has been ramped up to include even an apostasy against your own anatomy, but nature, though, has her own rules and tyranny, and disease, episodic or final, has always been her way of reminding us who has the last laugh.<\/h5>\n
Linh Dinh\u2019s<\/em><\/strong> latest book is Postcards from the End of America<\/span><\/a>. He maintains a regularly updated photo blog<\/span><\/a>.<\/em><\/h5>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Writing in Busan, South Korea, Linh Dinh reflects on some American movies from what is now a bygone age <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=204569"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204609,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204569\/revisions\/204609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=204569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=204569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=204569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}