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May 04, 2005
A Rocky sense of freedom
Last night was the first time in a while that I had watched some TV. A friend has TiVO, so we skipped around between the Sox game and various recorded goodies. If I ever do become a TV-watcher (please no) it seems like TiVO would be the way to do it. Commercial-free, finds the shows you want, when you want, etc…
I got the crib-notes version of Rocky IV, skimming to the best scenes here and there (training scene with 80s music, Rocky’s mourning scene, the fight). I don’t remember the Cold War much other than reading about the collapse of the USSR on a family vacation in the southwest and my dad telling me that I should remember this moment. So Rocky IV makes me think about that older different culture of fear and and the national enemy of the 1980s (back when bin Laden was on our side, kind of). Rocky’s good ol’ American rhetoric is “I’m doing this for myself and my family”. And Ivan Drago, the Soviet muscle machine prototype, calls out in his final moments “I fight for myself” (or something along those lines), a revolt against his fatherland trainers who have been engineering him towards human perfection. To top it off, Rocky tells the hostile-turned-friendly Soviet crowd that he felt them change toward him during the fight and that he knows they are capable of more change.
It’s a fresh reminder of the historical context to current political debates. It sounds obvious, but to people (like me) born late enough that the Cold War was really over by the time young-adult consciousness set in, a lot of the lessons and dynamics of this conflict are not ingrained. For example, Rocky IV reminds me why people have a bad impression of communism (cold, bald men breeding blond-haired human machines for the state) when I think of it as an innocuous localized ideology espoused by my hippy friends. But it’s also a reminder that the freedom that we enjoy here in the US comes from an intellectual and practical tradition of individualist values and self-reliance.
It’s where that individualism turns to self-interest and in turn empire that I start to fall out of love with the ideals of this country.
Posted by nick at May 4, 2005 09:26 AM
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Comments
Don’t fergit, Communism, as it played out, was a bad thing.
Posted by: ze Huntaire at May 8, 2005 06:03 PM