Obviously this is specific to the U.S., but ...

[sholio]

Something kind of random I was thinking about today is how the Vietnam War has almost completely disappeared from pop culture/awareness. I started thinking about it when I was flipping through a table of books at B&N, and picked up a book of war stories I was fully expecting to be WWII (because everything is right now), and opened it up and was briefly thrown to discover it was Vietnam.

And that's relatively rare now! When I was a kid in the late 70s/80s, it was ubiquitous, unavoidable. Most of the war movies were Vietnam. Just about every action-hero character in movies and TV and books had a Vietnam-veteran background to explain how they got their commando skills or acquired a bunch of exotic enemies or ended up living in an out-of-the-way place avoiding the world or whatever.

Which is not at all surprising, because of how thoroughly everyone in my parents' generation (the Baby Boomers) was shaped by the war. This is what makes it so weird and fascinating to me that we never talk about it anymore, because EVERY American male who was a young adult in the 1960s either served in the war or has a unique-to-him story about how he avoided it. There wasn't a single person in the adult generation that I knew growing up who hadn't had their life turned in a particular direction by the war, either through serving in it or avoiding it, through losing the boy they meant to marry or being forced to move to a different place or just having their worldview altered. It drove a whole generation; it's why I grew up in Alaska, and why my parents met in the first place. And 10-15 years after the war, there was a constant awareness of it; I grew up with the background awareness of Vietnam as a THING. And now that's simply not there.

Meanwhile WWII has experienced a resurgence. In the last 5-10 years it's EVERYWHERE, in a way I never remember when I was a kid -- not coincidentally, I imagine, as the generation who actually fought in the war dies off, leaving us to see it through a convenient pair of rose-colored glasses rather than remembering the horror firsthand.

And of course the war that's now used as a convenient backstory for characters in half the books and movies out there is Afghanistan.

I don't really see Vietnam coming back in the same way WWII did, just like WWI didn't. If the pattern held true, then WWI should've been the "nostalgia" war in the media a generation ago, and it wasn't -- probably for the same reason that Vietnam started to fade away, or be erased, once it was no longer close enough in time to overshadow everything. We don't like things that are messy and awful, that can't be reduced to a good-guy/bad-guy narrative (and especially in Vietnam's case, there's also the creeping suspicion that we might actually have been the bad guys). I don't really think the way we view WWII is any more accurate, but it's a whole lot easier to wrap up in a "just war" narrative and package it conveniently for entertainment.

And that narrative vacuum where Vietnam used to be is really interesting to me.

Comments

[ranalore]

Oh my god. Yeah, you and I had the whole conversation about the links between "winter soldier" and Vietnam as well as the Revolutionary War (I can't remember which of us linked the other to a whole bunch of stuff on that, we might have been swapping links, I can't remember, Moi, which of us was holding the brain then), and you linked me to the tumblr when it was just Steve, Bucky, and Sam. I never saw the addition of Nat, but shit, yes. And even more significantly, consider all the ways she's Othered, she's the spy, not the soldier, she's the woman, not the man, she's the Russian, not the American, she is the Red Scare, even more than Bucky with that red star on his shoulder ever was or could be. And yet she came in on her own, came to S.H.I.E.L.D., immigrated, hell, recruited other Avengers, the great American team (and no matter all the nods to the U.N. in the comics, or the far fewer nods in the movies, never mistake this team is American, it's led by the American, whoever wears the uniform). But the idea that she represents the Cold War also really puts an interesting spin on her message to the government at the end of Winter Soldier, both in terms of the MCU and in the analogue with the real world, because the MCU obviously needs its antagonists and its conflict and its underlying intrigues and conspiracies, all those puzzles fans love figuring out even as we know the writers have no idea in hell what they're doing and will never be able to stick the landing. And in the real world, global governments seem to grow more and more entrenched in their factionalizing and their backroom dealings, because that's how shortsighted people keep their shortsighted power and fuck the whole world over oh wait sorry, is my bitter showing. Anyway, the movie framed it as Nat saying the Avengers were needed, superheroes were needed, but it's Nat, so I think she was also speaking double meanings about whistleblowers in the ranks being needed, even as the government rebuilt S.H.I.E.L.D. or something like it, because the government abhors an acronym vacuum and from the pissing contests the other agencies would have over who got S.H.I.E.L.D.'s leftover stuff, you know a joint team with special oversight would arise, and it would soon become apparent that it would just be easier to make the team permanent and the foundation of its own thing than to try to re-allocate the resources, and Nat would know all of that, and was talking about that too, and that business as usual clearly wasn't going to stop being business as usual just because another big news story happened in Washington, look at how standard-issue the whole media circus was, and here they were interrogating her, the woman, the spy, the foreigner, and where was their golden boy who gave the speech to tear the place down? You boys play nice now, bye bye.

And I am the only one who wants Nat to have a turn with that shield in her hand now? I mean, realistically, in the main storyline, I don't think there's any way in hell she'd want it, but as an AR, it could be a beautiful thing.

WWII is all about the Nazis, donchaknow. Even in Utah, where the internment camps were set up in the backyard, or in California, or Oregon. If the Pacific side comes up at all, it's Pearl Harbor, as though that in any way justifies anything, especially the bombs. And nobody talks about the ships full of European Jewish refugees turned away from U.S. ports prior to U.S. entry into the war, ships forced back to their points of origin, where the refugees were gathered up and sent to concentration camps. That's on us too.

[kore]

BELLA (late but I am replying!)

(I can't remember which of us linked the other to a whole bunch of stuff on that, we might have been swapping links, I can't remember, Moi, which of us was holding the brain then)

SUCH A GOOD QUESTION

And even more significantly, consider all the ways she's Othered, she's the spy, not the soldier, she's the woman, not the man, she's the Russian, not the American, she is the Red Scare, even more than Bucky with that red star on his shoulder ever was or could be.

YES, YES YES. SO MUCH. And she's the one who's constantly put down and misjudged, too, and she uses that as a weapon, not other peoples' weaknesses per se but what they think her weaknesses are.

And yet she came in on her own, came to S.H.I.E.L.D., immigrated, hell, recruited other Avengers, the great American team (and no matter all the nods to the U.N. in the comics, or the far fewer nods in the movies, never mistake this team is American, it's led by the American, whoever wears the uniform).

YES! she really chooses her own destiny, after having been so shaped and mangled, in a way I don't think a whole lot of the other characters really do. And she does it over and over again.

the MCU obviously needs its antagonists and its conflict and its underlying intrigues and conspiracies, all those puzzles fans love figuring out even as we know the writers have no idea in hell what they're doing and will never be able to stick the landing.

....//cries

Man, I think like 10% of fandom has probably spent way more time and effort and investment in trying to work out the MCU in both fiction and meta than the white dudes who get paid to fuck it up. ARGH.

the movie framed it as Nat saying the Avengers were needed, superheroes were needed, but it's Nat, so I think she was also speaking double meanings about whistleblowers in the ranks being needed, even as the government rebuilt S.H.I.E.L.D. or something like it

That's BRILLIANT, I love it. I was really sad most people saw Nat as some kind of snitch or even recklessly putting peoples' lives in danger (like she probably wouldn't have censored really sensitive info, she's presented as a brilliant hacker, but anyway) because OMG, it's so clearly an analogue to ED SNOWDEN. And yet I saw very little of that in fandom or reviews -- it was like "obviously this is a reference to Snowden" &c &c but not really any thought about why that character did it, and what it might have meant for her. (Which is another reason why AoU and that "I dreamed I was something more than they made me" crap just does not work for me, but ANYWAY.) Nat, who is like the embodiment of espionage and compartmentalization and Fury's methods, saying no, this doesn't work, not anymore, this was built on lies and this is where it takes you.

because the government abhors an acronym vacuum and from the pissing contests the other agencies would have over who got S.H.I.E.L.D.'s leftover stuff, you know a joint team with special oversight would arise, and it would soon become apparent that it would just be easier to make the team permanent and the foundation of its own thing than to try to re-allocate the resources, and Nat would know all of that, and was talking about that too, and that business as usual clearly wasn't going to stop being business as usual just because another big news story happened in Washington, look at how standard-issue the whole media circus was, and here they were interrogating her, the woman, the spy, the foreigner, and where was their golden boy who gave the speech to tear the place down? You boys play nice now, bye bye.

THAT'S JUST FANTASTIC
YES

(And I've been muttering in comments recently about a canon divergent AU idea where Nat and Maria and some AoS characters take down the remnants of SHIELD and try to build something new, not based on the old, but it would take a lot of research and worldbuilding I probably couldn't do, and I'm not sure if it'd be the best thing for those characters anyway.)

And I am the only one who wants Nat to have a turn with that shield in her hand now?

NO

She already got to kind of hold/fight with it a few times in AoU and I think even in Avengers, but yes! Captain Widow! or whatever it would be, LOL. There's that tiny little comics AU where she picks up Thor's hammer, and I thought maybe they were alluding to that in a sly way in that party scene.

Even in Utah, where the internment camps were set up in the backyard, or in California, or Oregon. If the Pacific side comes up at all, it's Pearl Harbor, as though that in any way justifies anything, especially the bombs.

Yeah, and the Pacific War barely comes up at all -- although it was used in a really interesting way for a character in Agent Carter, I don't know if you saw that ep.

And nobody talks about the ships full of European Jewish refugees turned away from U.S. ports prior to U.S. entry into the war, ships forced back to their points of origin, where the refugees were gathered up and sent to concentration camps. That's on us too.

Did you see that Twitter account that sent out the details about the refugees who were on the St Louis when it was refused entry and sent back? It was absolutely devastating. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/haunting-twitter-account-shares-the-fates-of-the-refugees-of-st-louis-180961955/