RE: Mr. Cranky reviews "Windtalkers"

["Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

www.mrcranky.com

We cheer at the end of "Windtalkers" not because we know the good guys win
World War II or because Native Americans contributed to the victory and
finally somebody knows about it, but because the film's ceaseless moral
cheerleading is finally over.

Response (JIm C): Well here I have to disagree with "Mr. Cranky". The "moral
"cheerleading" in this movie is not near what the basic facts,
non-revisionist history and realities of Indian Country might dictate.

First of all, some might think that the salacious and titilating focus on
ultra-violence, graphic close-ups of limbs being torn off and decapitations
might be a device to show the reality and horrors of war to add to the
"authenticity" and perhaps even "anti-war" nature of the film. Sadly, this
is not the case. For example, the film shows the Marines in holding in
Hawaii waiting to be shipped out into combat. In one scene, they are told
they are about to go to Saipan where intel shows over 30,000 entrenched
Japanese; they are also told that the capture of Saipan is necessary for
bases to launch aircraft capable of histting the Japanese mainland. Well
anyone who has been in the military, particularly those shipped out into
combat or possible combat, knows that grunts are not told where they are
going until they are under way to prevent possible leaks. Imagine some
Marine on his last pass in Honolulu hitting on some possible Japanese agent
with something like "I'm on my way to Saipan, this battle will be critical
to the overall war effort and likely very fierce and this may be my last
piece of ass so..."

There was one mention by Yahze that he was forced to convert to Catholicism
and there was one mention that he had been tied-up to a radiator for two
days for speaking Navaho and now he is being encouraged to speak it, but
that's all there is.

Recently, some of the surviving Navaho Codetalkers were used by the Bush
creatures as props for one of their extravanganzas; it was sickening. Along
the lines of my classroom exercise in taboo questions by journalists that
would either get them killed or their careers totally destroyed imagine the
following:

Gentlemen [to the Code Talkers] As former Marines who saw a great deal of
combat, how does it feel to shake the hand of a pampered preppy punk who
promoted war [Vietnam] while at Yale and yet took extraordinary steps and
daddy's influence to make sure his precious skin came nowhere near combat or
grunt work or any work in a combat area? And further gentlemen, how does it
feel to shake the hand of someone whose wealth was partly responsible for
his being able to steal an office for which he is clearly intellectually and
morally unfit and also with consideration that that wealth was partly the
result of compound interest from wealth built-up by his grandfathers
Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker financing Hitler from 1924 onward
and by selling the securities of nazi Germany and fascist Japan, used to
build some of the armaments and terror you faced in the South Pacific,
through Brown Brothers Harriman and the Union Banking Corporation well after
Pearl Harbor and throughout World War II?

Now if some of that had been in the movie or a follow-up trailer, coupled
with some real examination of the miserable conditions on the Reservations
from which they Navaho came and to which they returned, perhaps a note on
what happened to many of them after they returned in terms of the ugly
racist laws and genocidal acts and policies to which they were subject, it
could have been a hell of a movie. But it wasn't.

Jim Craven


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