Seven yrs ago...

Last night, I had the pleasure of seeing The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Early on in the film, Ellsberg narrates about a moment around 1964 or '65, saying that the Vietnam war would go on for 11 yrs. Of course, this wasn't news to me. But my feeling about that conflict as such a long and treacherous one was what led me to this revelation: it was March of 2003 when I was a film student, in college and actively participating in political activism, civil disobedience, and ultimately one of the first protesters to get arrested on the streets of San Francisco the morning after Bush declared the beginning of the Iraq war. Let me reiterate: 2-0-0-3!!!! It's friggin' 2010 now! Seven yrs ago, I never would've guessed I'd still be here whining about Iraq.

Of course, the film invoked such whining precisely because we're only a few yrs away from surpassing Vietnam. So what would have my experience of seeing Most Dangerous Man been like if it had come out much sooner? Certainly, its content probably wouldn't have differed much since it captures a past event. And the doc would still have been amongst a sea of others this last decade covering American military campaigns old and new. But co-director Rick Goldsmith was in the house and one of the first things he discussed was his team's concern about the film's relevance to the state of the nation by the time the film is released. What if the related problems will have been resolved by then? What if we will have withdrawn all troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq? Well this didn't end up happening, which has been - in Rick's fine terms - "good for the filmmakers, bad for the country."





If I had seen Most Dangerous Man in 2003, that "11 yrs" bite certainly would not have disrupted me for hrs as it did last night. Rather, the doc would've functioned as ammunition for the passion and hope I carried at that time in my life. Although that passion and hope resemble the energy shared by Vietnam protesters in the '60s, I would not have given much thought to the fact that those protesters continued fighting for over a decade because at that point, I couldn't have imagined myself ending up in the same boat. So today, this piece of work has quite a different meaning for me. You can say I'm able to appreciate the history lesson a lot more: the lesson being that if the problems have not gone away or gotten any smaller, there's no reason to assume that the solutions are any easier to come by today than in decades past.

Unfortunately, I couldn't squeeze my thoughts in on the Q&A, so I thought I'd post my rant here. Thx for reading.