Category Archives: Global Issues

Stolen Valor

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

As a Canadian, I know the American military as fictional character. The military is the journey down the Nung River to assassinate Colonel Kurtz; it’s the destruction of a bridge built by British POW’s on the River Kwai; it’s the Kathryn Bigelow film that won Best Picture in 2010 that I never saw but I’m sure was great; it’s Jessica Chastain leading a team to assassinate Osama bin Laden with a plot that was way too confusing for my 12 year-old self; it’s Vincent D’Onofrio doing the Kubrick stare in a communal bathroom while reciting the Riflemen’s Creed.

Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

I have no personal connection to the military, much less the infamous American forces. In Canada, we remember the First World War that happened a century ago for about a week each year. But in America, it’s everywhere, everyday.

I’m fascinated by the universal admiration and unconditional respect granted towards veterans. When I was in Texas recently, I saw dozens of cars, mostly trucks, with stickers indicating that the driver was a veteran, it was something they wanted the world to know. Everywhere we went advertised discounts for veterans. One of the universities we visited, Texas A&M at College Station, is one of six United States Senior Military Colleges. We saw men my age (you could practically call them boys) walking around in the blazing heat in full uniform, equipped with knee high leather boots. When my family went to New York for the first time when I was 12, we took a train from JFK to Manhattan upon arrival. The first person we spoke to was a young man who was on his way to school at West Point. My dad was impressed, I was oblivious.

Military status is so valued in America that there are people who walk around impersonating military office

Apocalypse Now (1979)

rs, and in response, those who look out for this impersonation and call them out. They look for flaws in their uniforms, they ask them detailed questions to catch them in a lie. They film their encounter, and once they’re sure of the accused’s guilt, they yell “Stolen Valor!”, and publicly shame them. Anthony Anderson runs a Stolen Valor website called guardianofvalor.com with its very own ‘Hall of Shame’, a database with pictures, names, and write-ups of men and women who have impersonated military officers. This issue has even been taken to the federal level. In 2005, George W. Bush singed a law declaring it a federal misdemeanour to falsely represent oneself as having any US military decoration. In 2013, that law was adapted to protect freedom of speech, now making it illegal to benefit financially from an impersonation, such as receiving discounts or obtaining money or property.

Anderson has noted in an interview with the podcast ‘Reply All’ that publicly shaming a military impersonator has viral potential.

The Hurt Locker (2009)

“I use this word and – an- and I tell people I hate using it, is–there’s entertainment value behind the video. … it actually caused … representatives, lawmakers to get involved with the Stolen Valor movement. And that one video has, so far, caused five new Stolen Valor laws to be passed in five different states.”

Both Anderson and Nate Bathea, who was stationed in Afghanistan in 2009, have noted the dangers of people going too far in their search for authenticity. Unfortunately, the movement has cause some to go after those who are military, but simply don’t want to be confronted, therefore making themselves look guilty. People with mental disabilities who wear 

Full Metal Jacket (1987)

uniforms as a form of admiration have been harassed and humiliated. Anderson firmly claims that this is not the true intention of the Stolen Valor movement, and he takes action for copycat websites that post these videos to be removed.

Bethea says he wishes the Stolen Valor movement didn’t have to exist. To him, the reason for it is the major disconnect between civilians and servicemen.

“The people who wear uniforms are still people. Because it’s weird when people are treating you like a symbol and you’re trying to say, ‘Hey man, talk to me, I’m a person.’ Like, talk to me as a human being not – not as th- the symbolic representation of what you think the uniform I’m wearing means.”

I’ll never be able to fully understand what it means to work in the military. And I don’t think anyone truly knows until they experience it themselves. The fact of the matter is that I never want to.

Vogt, P.J. (Host). Pinnamaneni, S. (Producer). (2016, July 14). Stolen Valor. Reply All. Podcast retrieved from https://gimletmedia.com/episode/70-stolen-valor/

Can We Be Funny?

Our ASTU Class’s has just read Moshin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a novella told in the style of a dramatic monologue that can be described as a “coming-of-age romantic historical-fiction thriller”. In a very small nutshell, the story focuses around a young Pakistani man who lives in New York City during the September 11 attacks. The whole book, including its ending, is ambiguous and does not aid the reader in putting together any clues. Such confusion is reflective of people’s actual attitudes after the event in question.

Satirical newspaper The Onion’s first issue after the attacks

I’ll never know what 9/11 felt like, I was too young to remember. I can watch movies, read books, ask my parents, but I’ll never know how it felt for something so drastic to occur on such a normal day, and I’ll never know what it felt like to live before it happened.

It’s sad to think about, but it appears that events like 9/11 are becoming more and more . . . normal. Of course an event with so many casualties in so little time hasn’t happened since, but events like the Paris Attacks, the Belgian Airport Bombings, the shooting in the Turkish nightclub, they happen, and they shake us, but we can “move on” in a week or so, blaming the whole thing on how much the world sucks nowadays. I’ll never know what it was like to be so blissfully unaware that such a thing could happen, and then be confronted with an event so catastrophic it changed the world in such massive, unpredictable ways.

People in the entertainment industry, especially in comedy, didn’t know how to respond. It was as if people were afraid to be funny, as if the ice they were walking on could break if they took the wrong breath. The TV show Friends had to edit an episode that aired on October 11, 2001; it contained a scene where Monica and Chandler get detained at an airport because Chandler makes a joke about bombs on planes. A 1997 episode of The Simpsons called The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson, in which Homer declares his distain for the city, and features the World Trade Centre prominently, was removed from syndication. Dozens of other films and TV shows decided to remove scenes containing the towers or to digitally remove them, as if they were never there. Out of sight out of mind.

Lorne Michaels and Rudy Giuliani on SNL’s first episode back

Late night shows decided to acknowledge the event. David Letterman gave an eight minute monologue with humour that didn’t go past self-deprecation and bald jokes, with light laughter from the audience. Letterman praised then New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and New York’s firefighters, which was met with sentimental applause. On Saturday Night Live, folk-rock singer Paul Simon sang “The Boxer”, while Giuliani and show creator Lorne Michaels stood onstage with members of the NYPD and FDNY. 

“Can we be funny?”, asks Michaels.

“Why start now?”, responds Giuliani, with thunderous applause and laughter from the audience.

The 53rd Emmy Awards were held on November 4th, six weeks late. American treasure Ellen Degeneres was the host. She began with some humour that was easy to handle, and addressed the elephant in the room with a joke that finally made it okay for everyone in the theatre to actually laugh again: “Think about it. What would bug the Taliban more than seeing a gay woman in a suit surrounded by Jews?”. The audience screams with laughter, people turn to their neighbours and smile. On with the show.

Regardless of our ability to live our lives without thinking of the event at every moment, it remains something that is impossible to joke about. There are a lot of devastating historical events that people feel safe making fun of, but 9/11 is not one of them. In all fairness, it is a fairly recent event, and there’s no real reason why people should make fun of it. But comics like Marc Maron walked this tightrope. In 2011 Brooke Gladstone interviewed Maron for the podcast On The Media, asking about the possibility of a “ten years later” joke. Here, Maron is referring to an instance where a women laughed at his introduction to a joke in which he almost killed two people.

“And somehow, like I built on it, to the point where I got the Holocaust involved. I said, ‘is that funny to you?’. And then people were still laughing cause I was sort of attacking this woman. And then when I said ‘9/11’ it was like ‘whoa whoa’. So I think it does still represent a tremendous pain in this country’s cultural fabric,”.

I highly recommend this podcast episode, found here: http://www.wnyc.org/story/after-911-nothing-was-funny/

Garfield, B. and Gladstone, B. “After 9/11, Nothing Was Funny.” Audio Blog Post. On The Media. WNYC. Sept. 14, 2016. Web. Jan. 26, 2017.

#hatchimalmademydaughtercry

Recently our Arts Studies class has been studying Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco, a journalistic comic book depicting conversations between Sacco and Bosniaks during the Bosnian War. One of the questions asked by a Bosniak character in the book is “Do they know about Gorazde in America?”.  Sacco responds, “Yes, [I lied]”. (Sacco. 53). This book has reminded me in many ways of the war in Syria, and Americans (and westerners in general) attitudes towards it. Do Americans really know about Syria, specifically the people of Aleppo?

One night, shortly after Christmas, my parents and I sat down to watch NBC Nightly News. As experienced viewers, we knew the general layout of the broadcast’s stories: Global news, national news, medical revelation, wildcard, and heartwarming story about a young child and their brave golden retriever. On this night, the “wildcard” story was one that affected hundreds of families around the United States, bringing tragedy to those who just wanted to have a memorable Christmas. This tragedy was not the result of a severe weather catastrophe and not the result of disease. No, on this night, the National Broadcasting Company ran a four minute story about how Hatchimals, the hottest toy of 2016, were not working properly.

For context, Hatchimals are brightly coloured, cuter versions of Furby’s, with the technological advancement of being able to ‘hatch’ itself out of an egg. That’s the crucial part. There are thousands of fluorescent, noise making toys out there, but when a child takes a Hatchimal out of its box, it’s inside an egg, which the bird will break itself out of with its plastic beak when shaken. I admit, that’s a pretty cool toy, especially in the eyes of an eight year old. But they aren’t cheap. They cost around $50.00 – $90.00 in stores, while desperate parents could pay $250.00 for one on eBay. I can’t exactly remember, but I’m just hoping that I never forced my parents to but me a toy that expensive when I was that age through temper tantrums and the silent treatment.

Back to the night in question. Reports are coming in that these toys are malfunctioning, they aren’t breaking out of their shell, essentially ruining the whole point. Parents flocked to Twitter to share their stories, telling the manufacturer that their child’s Christmas was ruined because of it. One person tweeted: “Hatimal didnt hatch after 14 Hours and now all lights have gone off. How do i exchange a dud ? My 4 year old is gutted” and “# hatchimal ruined my 6 yr olds Christmas. All the effort and it done nothing Christmas day #hatchimalmademydaughtercry” (all typo’s were present in the original tweets).

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen parents blame a toy company for their child’s dependency on material objects, but for some reason, this story struck a nerve with me. While this was happening, an actually devastating event was taking place across the globe. At this time, thousands of Syrian children probably forgot it was Christmas, because they were so concerned with keeping themselves and their families alive, wondering when the next bomb would go off, and how they would get out of the hell they were living in. So many families were broken through loss, and a whole city destroyed by madness and chaos.

I’m never one to tell a person they can’t be upset because “someone else has it worse”. I understand that hardship isn’t a contest. A person living in the safest city in the world with the most loving family and perfect health can be suffering immensely inside, and that pain is valid. But this was different. I myself have been wondering what I, a teenager in Vancouver, can do to help the innocent people of Syria and other countries torn apart by war. The best answer I can come up with is to keep these people and their stories alive. Share them on social media, talk about them with your family and friends, learn the facts. By going on Twitter and telling the world how hard your child has it because their $80.00 pink robotic bird isn’t working, you are displaying your ignorance and disregard for other people’s suffering, and it saddens me how people can waste their time with such trivial things.

I think my passion towards this particular event is a build up of my frustration towards the countless tragedies that have taken place around the world in recent months. Not just the war in Syria, but also the shooting in the Turkish nightclub, the suicide bombings in Baghdad during Ramadan, the mass shootings that now seem to happen everyday in the United States. People have accused westerners of not caring and being ignorant. Of course I thought this wasn’t true, and that people did care but they just didn’t have the ability to help. But that story on NBC, those tweets, made me think that people really don’t care, and I can’t imagine what other tragic events will be pushed aside and ignored tomorrow.

 

Information about Hatchimals thanks to NBC: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/hatchimals-barbie-disappoint-parents-kids-christmas-n700601

When Your Choice is Not Your Own

Hello Readers,

My first blog post is inspired by a plot point in Marjane Satrapi’s Graphic Narrative Persepolis. The veil, whether in the form of a hijab, chador, burqa, or niqab, is a controversial subject that seems to be regulated by all the wrong people with all the wrong intentions.

In 1936, Reza Shah Pahlavi declared that all veils worn by Iranian women, including the chador, were to be banned, and encouraged the use of force to remove said veils from the heads of any woman who chose to wear one. There have been laws concerning female headscarves since Pre-Islamic times, allowing women of certain classes to wear the veil while prohibiting the practice by others. This time, however, the ban, which also included restrictions on traditional mens clothing, was based on an attempt at modernization and westernization. Of course some women had no desire to wear the veil, but many women who did were humiliated by having their coverings torn off by police, resulting in m6a00d83451bfe269e200e54f44a4168834-640wiany women choosing not to leave their house, and some committing suicide. Many wearer’s of the chador compared the ban to feeling naked.

During the Iranian Revolution, wearing a headscarf or chador became a revolutionary symbol. Even secular non-religious women wore it out of solidarity. Once the Revolution had succeeded in removing the Shah from power, things completely changed. Wearing a veil became the law in 1980. As seen in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, young Marji, just ten years old after the Revolution, is required to wear a veil at her now girls-only religious school, while she and her classmates treat them like playthings.

I want to make my position clear, I am not against a woman deciding for herself to wear a headscarf or covering of any kind. The issue as I see it is that too often it is not the personal decision of the woman herself to determine what she does or does not wear. Any user of social media platforms such as Instagram or Facebook is most likely familiar with the “Free The Nipple” campaign, a protest concerning the censorships of women’s bodies on social media and the unequal treatment of female nudity by law enforcement.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, a related issue is currently in the spotlight. Several French cities have banned the wearing of the burkini (a swimsuit which covers the whole body except for the face, hands, and feet, in accordance with Islamic law). The official reasoning for the ban is for public security, a concern brought about by the numerous terrorist attacks that have plagued France throughout the year, but many see the ban as outright Islamophobia. A recent photograph depicting a woman o378d9c9700000578-3754395-image-a-4_1472114721288n a beach being forced to remove her burkini by several French police officers has gone viral. The image serves as visual metaphor for the actual issue at hand. A defenceless woman, enjoying herself at the beach, is surrounded by several heavily armed men who force her to undress in public.

While almost all these laws that either enforce covering up or stripping down are claimed to be for the “protection” of women, they are never created or enforced by the women they are protecting.

Image #1: Illustrated by Marjane Satrapi for the book Persepolis, 2000, published by L’Association

Image #2: Courtesy of Vantagenews.com

F. Mirrazavi. (2013). The Removing of Hijab in Iran. Iran Review. Retrieved from: http://www.iranreview.org/content/Documents/The-Removing-of-Hijab-in-Iran.htm

L. Dearden. (2016). Burkini ban suspended: French court declares law forbidding swimwear worn by Muslim women ‘clearly illegal’. Independent. Retrieved from: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/burkini-ban-french-france-court-suspends-rule-law-forbidding-swimwear-worn-muslim-women-seriously-a7211396.html