Most recent public comments by Raquel de Alderete https://nowcomment.com/users/17205 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36342?scroll_to=408597 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36342?scroll_to=408597 Do all people love to hear war stories? In Viet Thanh Nguyen's essay, it seems that he expects most people do. With entire industries banking on the response of the American population towards war, it seems he might be in the right. The action figure "G.I. Joe" has been successful for several generations. Comic books became popular at the height of the second World War - just as there were soldiers overseas, Captain America was beating up Nazis. But is that what the American people really want to see? Or is it instead that what people seek is just an escape from the boring - the very thing that the author suggest war might just be? Perhaps what the American people are looking for is not a good war story: it's a good story of moral triumph. When the American military is painted as being always in the right, there is something comforting about the idea that a story about a soldier will feature the defeat of evil. What's more, it's the defeat of a certain enemy in the real world. War stories seem to be the fantasy of good triumphing over evil in the modern day. People don't want to hear about the boring because they already live through it. They don't want to hear about the rape which occurs, nor the number of women who are fighting for their nation and are raped by fellow soldiers as a result. They don't want to hear about the duality of war, and how even "heroes" are not free of sin. It isn't because they seek a good story of war: it's because they seek a good story, one where things sort themselves out. The world is a complicated place where it seems chaos reigns. People like to hear war stories where, in the midst of that chaos, human beings are able to fight their way towards "order." That's why the stories aren't boring or angry or uncertain: people need to think that everything is okay in the end - even if, on a grand scale, it really isn't. Thu, 12 Nov 2015 00:07:33 -0500 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36344?scroll_to=408590 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36344?scroll_to=408590 Bee Vang in this paragraph sums up through language one of the most prevalent problems of the war: too many things were lost in translation. There were too many things that "had no English equivalent." The Hmong witnessed themselves rewritten from human beings into nonexistence - simply because there was no room for them in the American lexicon. Although perhaps "Gran Torino" had the best interests of the Hmong people at heart, it does not speak of all the untranslatable parts of being Hmong. In creating Hollywood-appropriate characters, it erases many of the issues that the Hmong people faced. Perhaps because the struggle of the Hmong people is so beyond the language of the American layperson - perhaps because it challenges majority ideas of minority cultures - history has been written in such a way that the people have become invisible. "Gran Torino," despite including the culture, does not seek to translate all elements of it: only those that are familiar and comfortable for the average person to digest. There is no translation for suffering, nor should there be. The Hmong shoulder a burden entirely unknowable to the American people. Wed, 11 Nov 2015 23:55:39 -0500