A PRAYER FOR A WAR MACHINE: A CONVERSATION ABOUT OLIVER STONE’S “UNTOLD HISTORY”
By Matt Zoller Seitz
October 21, 2013
GIÒ: I find the content of this website, both in general and in regards to both of you specifically, always fascinating and food for the mind and soul. So although I haven’t seen Stone’s series, as I do not own a TV, I can’t help but comment. I am a citizen of two countries. I believe America’s ideals are utterly inspiring and provide a great blueprint for the course of a nation. We as a nation are never better than when living up to our ideals.
Of course, we too often have not lived up to them. We do ourselves no favors by being anything less than honest about that, and acknowledging that truth does not make us less American. I think one of America’s greatest characteristics, as noted by then President-elect Obama in his first election night speech, is its ability to change. What appears to be one of the main sources of motivation in Obama’s harshest right-wing adversaries is their inability to accept that quality of our nation. Hell, the Democrats changed so much that their signature achievement of the Affordable Care Act is essentially an idea that, as stated in a primary debate by eventual Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, was born in a right-wing think tank. That’s change; moving from an initial blueprint in domestic policy that, as we saw with Hillarycare, had no chance of becoming law, to taking the closest idea the opposing party had to offer, and adapting it.
Someone who one hundred fifty years ago would likely have been a slave, today being elected head of state is change, and perhaps a nation that is only around 240 years old doesn’t see how lightening-quick a change that is. The end of slavery was a hell of a change, which the geographical home base of the Tea Party fought a war against the United States to prevent. Making them traitors, i.e. un-American. And Ted Cruz has the brass to say who is an American and who is not - he of the state whose Republican governor mentioned secession (erroneously) as a viable option for that state. But I’m piling on.
I would go out on enough of a limb to say that it is both crucial and American for us to own up to the moral failures of our past while having comfort in the fact that we probably are the most benevolent superpower in history. -- Now just listen. We, like every nation on earth, protect our own interests first (yes I agree with you: But whose interests are those necessarily? The world sure is complicated, I grant you that). But I don’t believe we’ve conquered in a truly historical sense new lands and territories for around a hundred years. Japan did not become part of the U.S. Neither did Germany. Nor Iraq. Those countries do not speak English as their language as conquered peoples...as most Latin Americans do with Spanish; how interesting that those is what is not an indigenously Latin hemisphere embrace Latiness as a proud and unifying aspect of their culture (forgive me, I’m Italian...Italy being the birthplace of Latin culture). We have, instead, though in different measures of success, rebuilt nations we have gone to war with, though as a New Yorker at Ground Zero on September 11th, 2001 I sure as hell believe we were wrong in the first place to attack a country that had nothing to do with that. The world is not usually black or white. From your conversation it seems to me that a project like Stone’s helps us to face facts that tend to be left out of the narrative. The point is to get better. I think America largely has and does. That is one thing that separates us from the rest.