Just watched "Hearts and Minds"....incredible sense of Groundhog day...

What a powerful movie - is a documentary on the BS/whitewash that was our involvement in the Vietman war - compelling was the lies driven down the throats of Americans by Five presidents. So, here we are 30 years later, and we are no better - a constant flow of lies by our so called pResident and his cronies, bolstering remarkable support (any support should be considered remarkable) for the situation in Iraq. All we can do is shake our head - why do so many people mindlessly follow and believe such crap?

it was deja vu to the 60s. it's a powerful documentary.

Incredible film.

because it always lets the interviewed subjects do the talking. (Unlike a Michael Moore film for example where Michael does a lot of the talking)

You can see our whole (eternal?) national problem played out between the narratives of the two pilots. Both think of themselves as technicians of death. One has thought some more about the moral dimensions of what he's done and has tried to learn something from the defeat and the deceit. The other one not only doesn't show the ability for introspection or reevaluation but is actively engaged on behalf of the government in propagandizing the people: the public crowds, the children in Catholic school, and the moms who're breeding the next generation of cannon fodder. It's like Jeff Lebowski and Walter Sobchak--except if anything, Walter Sobchak is a mental giant and a chevalier of intellectual honesty next to this Navy aviator guy.
So there they are the two halves of the American male psyche or character. The one fleeing inside himself having been swept up in the horror of his country's war fever, the other with the arms of the state wrapped around him as long as he goes around saying what a great war it was and how we should all be ready to do it again just like he is, without a thought for the destruction he caused and nothing but contempt for the people he was supposedly liberating.
Then, because the second guy is literally being put forward on news media and held up as an example to small children, poor dumb assholes like the two airmen that the camera follows around Saigon drinking and banging whores will say "if we don't fight them here we'll be fighting them on our own streets". They say that right on camera in Hearts and Minds (1974) and you know that they're saying it bars in Baghdad tonight too. Just like confused and upset Americans are repeating in front of their televisions tonight.

That's what they're told and what they tell themselves to justify what's being done to them and what they're doing to others. It's like an eternal cycle of vicious stupidity. Except there's a method to this madness. We're deliberately taught and conditioned to think this way and to be receptive to these messages, which means that it's more than a horrible defect of nature. There's less in the film that delves into that "Matrix" side of American society, but it's also a theme that is present in the football halftime speech for example as well as the speech by the Navy aviator to the preschoolers. It's not just by accident that Americans are so malleable to stale cliched formulas like the Bush Administration seems to eat and breathe and exude from its pores. Some of us ARE that dumb, but a great many more have dumb obedience drilled into us.