Hey Jerks

So, one hopes this will become the standard format, thus saving my three readers from the unmitigated eyestrain of the mutating (thanks, thesaurus.com!) form of this site.

"Best of the Best" was one of the first films I saw (thanks, Michael Hernandez!) in sixth grade, when a fortuitous bus stop connection led my brother and I into the world of action/adventure, i.e., the categorical obligations of being a white man. For the ignorant among us, Best of the Best features an American karate team battling Koreans for the title, and honor, of being the best action heroes in the world; they face some obstacles along the way but are able to Triumph via their indomitable Will, etc .

The film begins with shots of an auto factory, incongruously set in Portland, Oregon, and of Eric Roberts (i.e. the white man) high-fiving his white and black co-workers. Eventually, like any good WWII movie, he joins a karate crew consisting of a hippie, a redneck, a wop from Detroit, and an undefinedly east Asian fella from Fresno.

I haven't finished it yet, but I'm fairly they will go on to victory against the Big Dog Koreans; as everyone knows (i.e. those who have seen 14 minutes of the free netflix version of the film), Koreans train "mentally, as well as physically"; their victory is all but assured until the plucky grit of the Asian and the White Man come together to defeat their nefarious scheming.

Point being - this made me realize that more or less every movie made in the United States after 1975 and before the mid-80s was to do with Vietnam, and the sick scar of defeat in a foreign land. Like "The Murder of Vincent Chin," but moronically, "Best of the Best" shows that the fear and trembling brought on by neoliberalism, the defeat of the unions, and global labor market re-organization ensured that some kind of post-defeat aesthetic redemption* was both necessary and proper.

America, a tolerant land of Italians, rednecks, and others, comes together to defeat a monolithic (save for the eyepatched villain) 'Korean' (i.e. other, i.e. Asian, i.e. gook, i.e. chinaman, i.e. slope, i.e. sick shit) team composed of faceless assholes bent on ruining our good time. Everyone was losing their jobs, and everyone (who was male and had no other priorities [thanks, Dick Cheney!]) had sick visions of the sins of occupation from Vietnam, and everyone was hoping for some redemption. Voila, Best of Best...

Further point being... what are we to expect from this sick shit we've brought to Iraq? Ninja-Muslims (Now, With Bombs!) sacking the streets of major American cities? Levantine Lotharios fingering the skirts of lecherous white chicks? Middle Eastern terrorists poking around in the hearts and minds of Middle Western innocents?


I don't know.


*for upper-middle class white folks, the example was 'letting' little Maya Lin design the Vietnam Memorial; oh, aren't we modern people, with our tolerance of foreign architects and our willingness to laud those who suffered and were brought low and lost their minds and limbs for the sake of our Cold War caprices, whose intellectual weight and moral seriousness were demonstrated by the use of the dominoe (motherfucker!) as the chief illustrative metaphor.