Word: napalm
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Moreover, “Ride of the Valkyries” is played during a violent early morning napalm attack, led by a sadistic commander, on a bunch of innocent villagers. In its eagerness to display more patriotism than its rivals, Fox Sports seems to be suggesting that it will lead ordinary Americans to support of random attacks of indiscriminate violence as reprisal for the, well, random attacks of indiscriminate violence against Americans on the 11th...
...Although there are no reliable numbers, it is not numbers but images that give "collateral damage" incidents their power to affect the course of war: the young Vietnamese girl, her skin burned away by napalm, running down a street; the corpses of Iraqi women killed in a bomb shelter; bodies strewn around a Yugoslav passenger train struck by a NATO rocket, and so on. Already Al Jezeera, the only TV network with a bureau in Kabul, is carrying images of the broken bodies of civilian casualties. And on the Internet, ordinary citizens are able to see the latest photographs posted...
Walter Shapiro, columnist for the USA Today, sunk to the depths of condescension in his piece about growing campus activism against the impending war. He used to be anti-war himself, he wrote, when he was a student and the US was preparing to carpet Vietnam with napalm and bombs. Then he grew up and lost his innocence. “Nothing my generation has done in life could prevent the human tragedy of last week.” True, but get ready for the quantum leap in logic. Because we couldn’t stop the terror attacks...
John Milius, the author of the original script, thought of Apocalypse as a modern Odyssey. He gave it a modern Cyclops (Robert Duvall's demented surfer stud Kilgore, who thinks napalm "smells like victory") and a group of Sirens (the Playboy Playmates who entertain the horny troops). Coppola, deep into his own Big Muddy in the Philippines, was calling his film "the Idiodyssey." He soon felt himself devolving from Willard to Kurtz--from the man on a quest to the madman at its end. But he was enough of a showman to release a picture of Academy-consideration length...
...Americans tend to accelerate at unnatural speeds toward absolutes and sort themselves into fierce tribes to defend the absolute they've chosen. It's a moral video game. The fact that the combat is virtual (no physical danger) only adds to the gruesomeness of rhetoric--the flaming with verbal napalm...