Hillary Clinton 3am Response on Youtube
posted by Susan Stark
I found this response to Hillary’s “3am” ad on Youtube:
President Hillary Clinton answers the phone….
HILLARY: Hello?
BUSH: This is your Secretary of Defense, former President Bush. The terrorists may be bulding a doomsday weapon. If we drop our nukes now, millions of people will die, but billions of people could be saved. This is the most important decision in all of human history. What are you going to do?
HILLARY: Oh dear… where’s Bill?
BUSH: He’s out playing golf.(long pause)
HILLARY: Well, we’ll have to wait until he gets back.
What is wrong with this response, besides the obvious sexism in it? It seems that since the end of the Cold War, we have regressed into an appalling lack of knowledge of what happens after a nuclear war. The radiation fallout would kill not just the intended target, but any place the wind would spread it to. And then there is nuclear winter, which would finish off more than the targeted millions. I learned this in high school when I was a teenager in the ’80s. What are they teaching kids in class these days? Anything???
The first babies born after the end of the Cold War are now turning 18, and are old enough to vote and start holding political office. How many of them know what happens after a nuclear bomb is dropped? Maybe the teachers today should order from Netflix a coupla movies called The Day After and Threads and show them in class. They scared the pants off of me when I saw them, and they’ll scare the pants off of any kid watching it today. Scary, but necessary.
18 Comments.
Or, maybe teachers should order Atomic Cafe.
Somewhere online there is a Google Maps mashup which displays in concentric circles a plotting of what happens to the surrounding area from the point of a nuclear warhead's detonation. Sobering stuff – I gave a click to downtown Pittsburgh and was informed that since I live ten miles outside the city centre, were a bomb detonated there I would see all of the glass shattered in mine and the surrounding buildings once detonation occurred. In the days following, I could look forward to a slow, painful death due to radiation poisoning. Being near the blast point is preferable, where one is given the mercy of being instantaneously vaporised.
Viggo Morternsen's next film is THE ROAD – based on the book by Cormac McCarthy (so you know there might be a couple of bit parts for women – in this one Charlize Theron)…Netflix does not have the Harry Belafonte/Inger Stevens film, and this generation is so inured to such a reality (by video simulations/tv/movies) that it is a brainwashed Lark/walk in the Nuke-U-lar park for them. Genocide in Iraq is no biggie.
Bill Clinton plays golf at 3am? Damn, that game is like crack or what???
Those movies are great choices. I, too learned about nuclear war from those movies, as well as "Failsafe."
Sadly, the kids in college today were born after those movies were made. They were not taught about nuclear war. They didn't grow up with news of the Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl disasters on the news.
The risk of nuclear winter or nuclear autumn is about more than a drop in temperatures. Even a limited nuclear war, say between India and Pakistan, could result in a nuclear autumn that would result in massive crop failures and massive famine.
I spent two months in Ukraine last year. I can tell you that 20 years later, Chernobyl still weighs heavily on the residents. My translator still contended with skin problems from the disaster. I never drank tap water my whole time there.
My landlady in Kyiv took a guided tour of Chernobyl. She said there are mushrooms the size of dinner plates and mutant fish that have grown to nearly three feet long from their usual eight to 12 inches.
I was also warned against buying antiques, gold and silver in Kyiv because they could be hot. Hot as in stolen and hot as in radioactive. Looters have been known to sneak into the city of Chernobyl and sell that stuff to unsuspecting tourists.
Sadly, the sacophagus around Chernobyl is deteriorating and we could be looking at another disaster there in our lifetimes.
It would be a helluva way for today's kids to learn about the dangers of nuclear war and nuclear energy.
If they can find it, I would also recommend "Testament," with Jane Seymour.
It's about a single mother and her children in Northern California struggling to survive fallout, disease and malnutrition following a nuclear war.
It's not particularly gory, but it will hit you hard psychologically as people start dying off and the survivors find themselves much more isolated from each other and the outside world.
As someone who has taught college classes, I can tell you the response you're going to get: why should we care? Today's American college students are so intransigent to learning that I don't know if these movies would connect anymore than showing movies of World War II or the American Civil War makes them concerned about the potential for either of those things happening.
Furthermore, Americans look at Africa and every time there is widespread civil violence, they say "that's how 'those people' act." There is a disconnect based on nationalism and ethnicity used as divisions which blind us to the reality that we're never more than two steps from Sarajevo.
Rather than hash up old films that were created in an historical and social context relevant to the people of the time. We need to start looking at the here and now, I think. There were a couple recent movies listed in the article, I'd love to hear of any more people might suggest
Brazil. See it now!!! Computer errors leading to arrest and TORTURE of the wrong man.
Testify Aggie Dude.
Though I think you unfairly single out the youth. American adults are just as intransigent to learning about the world around them.
Most of them couldn't care less that W is trying to start an all-new arms race with Russia. We could be in for Cold War: The Sequel thanks to his plan to install a missle shield in Eastern Europe.
Maybe then, movies like "Failsafe," "On the Beach," "The Day After," "Threads" and "Testament" will mean something again.
I used to work for a major daily newspaper. You'd think it would be a stimulating place to be, surrounded by people who are up on current events.
Sadly, I was surrounded by idiots who preferred discussing "American Idol" and kept the newsroom TV tuned to soap operas and Oprah.
Kids today are used to being treatened. Why should it matter when they may not even make it out of class? We had the red menace. We also had the U.S.army to protect us. What do kids today have? Terrorists that may kill them in their study hall. Who will protect them? Why should they care?
I saw "Threads" and it scared the dickens out of me. I saw "When the Wind Blows" and it depressed the fuck out of me. But then I watched "Jericho" and it consoled me with the fact that America has wide, open spaces.
There were a couple recent movies listed in the article, I'd love to hear of any more people might suggest
Start in elementary school. What's to stop Hiroshima survivors from touring American schools? Show some of that classic test footage, and then have the survivors come in the next day. My class would get it. but, then again, they are special.
As for the college kids, just show the scene from T2.
I didn't appreaciate the logical flaws in "the day after".
But Peter Watkins' "The War Game" is an excellent documentary-style… well, documentary, of the very likely consequences of a nuclear strike on Britain. It was so frightening and possibly demoralizing, the BBC banned it from television.
I found it online here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5456831865414078776&q=%22the+war+game%22&total=38&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=9
I think Aggiedude has it pretty right. Although, too often people blame youth for youth apathy, when I think the problem is much bigger, sociologically. An indicative American value has been the idea of the next generation doing better than the generation before it. The previous generation(s) however, have sought to 'give' their kids what they never had, instead of giving them the skills and confidence to achieve/attain these things themselves.
So, we have an entire generation of kids who feel that they are the most important thing in their world, because they have been raised that way their entire lives. Thanks to NCLB, critical thinking has been dissolved in our public schools. What little of history that is present is taught as facts for a test, not concepts. They know events, but not what they mean, facts but not what they represent. Most people from my generation know we dropped nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (even if they couldn't name the cities today) but have no idea the context in which it happened, or the consequences. I have never met a single person from my generation (25) or younger who even knew about the fire bombing of Dresden, which was far worse.
I once met a German woman who was a survivor of Dresden. In one day, everyone she had ever known in the entire world was dead. Imagine, waking up, and everyone who would recognize your face or know your name is gone. She was 14.
That's what children should be taught.
Perhaps, but I also think that there's no silver bullet here by installing it in a curriculum. Public school curricula are forms of state power and control. You may be able to force kids to get 'facts and events' but you simply can't force them to get meanings or concepts if they don't want to. NCLB is entirely about the McDonaldization of education so that mindless bureaucrats can look at audit trails of paper and make decisions with no contextual knowledge.
Deskilled workers who can't think critically accept the argument that they don't deserve a living wage. That's what this is about. This is why politicians and capitalists hate pointy head intellectuals and try to destroy the higher education system.
The Bush Administration started programs to develop new nuclear weapons and most people don't even understand why that act, inandofitself, IS the problem.
This isn't so much about teaching children….it's about getting supposed adults to stop taking us in the wrong direction.
Until the adults can recognize en masse what's wrong with this equation, expecting schools to fix the fact that children can't is ancillary to the problem.
recently a Max Factor line of lip gloss and mascara referenced in a you go girl text the waterproof & enduring nature of the cosmetics, calling them the "Stormtroopers". Turns out the kids writing the copy were referring to Star Wars, being in complete ignorance of any Nazi link to the term.
I didn't appreaciate the logical flaws in "the day after".
But Peter Watkins' "The War Game" is an excellent documentary-style… well, documentary, of the very likely consequences of a nuclear strike on Britain. It was so frightening and possibly demoralizing, the BBC banned it from television.
I found it online here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5456831865414078776&q=%22the+war+game%22&total=38&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=9
Everything Peter Watkins does kicks ass, "The War Game" no exception.
– Strelnikov
Hand2Hand said,
"Sadly, the sacophagus around Chernobyl is deteriorating and we could be looking at another disaster there in our lifetimes.
It would be a helluva way for today's kids to learn about the dangers of nuclear war and nuclear energy."
It would be a better way for our kids to learn about the dangers of state run industry.