NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Chris Hedges stitches together so much troubling truth about both the film American Sniper and the book it is based on. It is a sobering reflection on the film, the mythology of Chris Kyle and how those things relate to the soul of a nation. After reading this is does make you wonder, for all those people who feel patriotic or a swell of national pride after watching the film, what type of nation do you imagine you are a part of? The film is incredibly effective at focusing the viewer on the sentimentality and sacrifice of one character, much to the detriment of rest of the ideological universe of the film ultimately being unquestioned or unexamined. One is too busy tearing up or saluting the heroism of Chris Kyle, that few seem able to question the rest of the film and what it is hiding or proposing. People crave someone like Kyle as being the tip of their national spear, but don't think about what kind of nation would want that type of person there. That type of person represen

The film American Sniper has been gaining so much attention lately, because of its new blockbuster status, the ethnic and racial hatred that it is stimulating and also the way it is leading to both a challenging and also a lionizing of the American soldier through the figure of sniper Chris Kyle. Bradley Cooper, who plays Kyle in the film recently came out in defense of the film, noting that if you have problems with the political aspects of war, blame the politicians, the ones who make the decisions to send troops into war. Don't blame the troops who suffer because of those fights. This of course makes sense to most people. The politicians are corrupt, they are the ones you can blame, but the soldier, the self-sacrificing warrior should remain untouchable. They didn't choose to go to war, they just obeyed orders and did what their country told them to do. But this defense of the film leads to the natural problem of dealing with the morality of conduct if a war is not justi