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    Thoughts: Forrest Gump, Porn and Falcon and the Winter Soldier

    The movie Forrest Gump popped in to my head recently. There's a scene, after having been wounded in Vietnam, where Forrest Gump's lieutenant, Dan, refuses to move or engage anything while in the hospital. He comes back to the United States and is homeless, wandering around, and, by the time him and Forrest set out on starting on a fishing business together, he's close to insane.

    We had an extensive war in Afghanistan, the longest war in US history. However, the large majority of American men didn't fight in it. However, we do have a lot of the things that the Vietnam war was supposed to have produced - wayward, lost young men (see the popularity of Jordan Peterson or books like "The Boy Crisis"), a homeless crisis in west coast cities, social unrest and even a similar brew of reactionary and progressive politicians.

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    I watched Falcon and Winter Soldier on Netflix and absolutely loved it. There is a big conservative backlash against it, with a host of angry faces on YouTube upset at the "blatant" embrace of Black Lives Matter narratives. In the final episode, the US Agent character goes after a terrorist responsible for his partner Battlestar's death. Battlestar's real name was Lamar and after the terrorist denies having anything to do with it by saying "we only hurt people who matter to the cause," US Agent declares "so Lamar's life didn't matter?!"

    The show is excellent because it synergizes multiple eras of Captain America. There was a series in the 1970s called "Falcon and Captain America" in which Cap was paired with a black partner during a very similar social climate. The absence of Captain America reflects a storyline during the 2000s, after "Civil War," where Captain America was assassinated and was subsequently replaced by his old partner Bucky, AKA the Winter Soldier. During that same storyline, Cap's friend Sharon Carter was revealed to be a double agent for the secret sect Hydra.

    The US Agent character was most prominent in the 1980s and 1990s, a time when comics were filled with overly aggressive and steroided superhero knockoffs. Fusing all of these differing characters together took a lot of initiative and creativity, and a mind for how such characters written during very different times could merge together. Sam Wilson, The Falcon, becoming Captain America at the end of the series also reflected a recent series in which just that happened.

    There is a conservative element of comic book readership and that element has been driven insane in recent years by various experimentation in ethnicity and gender. "Respect the Source Material" is a mantra of such readers.

    What conservative comic book readers really want, however, is a repeat of the same tired origin stories, retold like Bible stories or a David McCullough biography. Neither Stan Lee or Jack Kirby created these franchises with such a mentality, so it makes no sense to tell their stories with that mentality.

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    One of the big tragedies of the millenial generation is that hardcore pornography got beamed in to their minds on a daily basis. Many of them likely didn't watch it because they were perverted but simply because it was there. If they belonged to a prior generation where it was much more difficult to get, they may have never sought pornography out at all. The lack of marriage and relationships among that generation isn't necessarily caused by that but it is not unrelated.

    I once talked to a feminist who said that many women in porn are on drugs because "they literally cannot perform the work sober." A good deal of pornography depicts serious sexual crimes and it's simply an article of faith that it is just a depiction and not an actual sexual crime being committed.

    It's more possible than one would think to be able to censor and regulate pornography, and I think many people would support doing so.

    Comments

    I found Forrest Gump hugely insulting to the South, and didnt get much of the humor. A mother with disabled child trying to get medical care she can't afford so bangs the doctor while her kid listens out on the swing - quite the laugh. The South emblemized not just as a folksy kind of stupid but charming Gomer Pyle or a quasi-mysterious rootsy Chauncey Gardener but as a congenital idiot who has all these things fall in his lap, but can't recognize when his girlfriend's cheating on him - what should be heartbreaking has audiences howling. I was befuddled by a foreign father - very successful business type -who gleefully recounted watching it with his 10-year-old, wondering how they handled the masturbation scene. The "run, Forrest, run" is great for a film, but in real life the kid just gets the shit beaten out of him. Again. "Sometime you just don't have enough rocks" - yeah, that was the only line i liked to the movie.


    thlnk some more, we're beyond the looking glass here:


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