{"id":3136,"date":"2017-07-13T22:31:03","date_gmt":"2017-07-13T22:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattralston.net\/?p=3136"},"modified":"2017-07-13T22:35:56","modified_gmt":"2017-07-13T22:35:56","slug":"espys-pat-tillman-award-missing-mark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/politics\/espys-pat-tillman-award-missing-mark\/","title":{"rendered":"The ESPY&#8217;s Pat Tillman Award Could Be Missing The Mark"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/S2dkv0sCHbI?ecver=1\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><br \/>\nIf you&#8217;re not completely ridden with diabetes you might question why the ESPY&#8217;s exist. Why do we need an award show for sports? We already have an award show for sports. It&#8217;s called the trophy presentation, and it&#8217;s televised directly after you beat everyone else at your sport. This isn&#8217;t the movies. It&#8217;s not subjective. Nobody cares if the Philadelphia 76ers have a progressive social message while going 10 and 72.<\/p>\n<p>The Academy Awards aren&#8217;t necessary either. In fact they&#8217;re completely absurd. No movie is socially important. Not anymore. People go to see movies for entertainment. If they want their minds blown they&#8217;ll look up Bohemian Grove on Wikipedia.<\/p>\n<p>In recent years, the following shitty films have won Best Picture: <em>Crash<\/em>, and\u00a0<em>Moonlight<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>What these films have in common is that they deal with social issues, such as police brutality, homophobia, racism, and sexism.<\/p>\n<p>What they also have in common is that they suck.<\/p>\n<p>The year that <em>Crash<\/em> won Best Picture, the highest grossing film in America was <em>Shrek 2<\/em>. Last year, when\u00a0<em>Moonlight<\/em> won Best Picture, the highest grossing film was <em>Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>You could argue whether or not <em>Rogue One<\/em> was better than <em>Moonlight<\/em> based on artistic merit.<\/p>\n<p>I would opine that <em>Rogue One\u00a0<\/em>was a far superior film. Much more manpower went into it. Better production value. Better plot structure. Better acting. Better cinematography. And no awkward hand job scenes.<\/p>\n<p><em>Rogue One<\/em> made half a billion dollars at the box office.<\/p>\n<p>Even after being nominated, <em>Moonlight<\/em> made $27 million.<\/p>\n<p>So, a lot more people wanted to see one film instead of the other one.<\/p>\n<p>Probably because it&#8217;s better.<\/p>\n<p>Granted those people are all mouth breathers who don&#8217;t appreciate fine art.<\/p>\n<p>Also granted, certain people in the entertainment industry, who vote on Best Picture, if you talk to them, are amongst the dumbest fucking people on earth.<\/p>\n<p>So, I guess we&#8217;ll just have to go with what people want to watch, because movies are an industry, and though there are many mitigating factors, the movies people want to watch make the most money, and the ones that make the most money are the most successful at the entire point of making movies, which is to get people to watch your movie.<\/p>\n<p>There are no handouts here.<\/p>\n<p>Clearly a 97 hour documentary about the plight of gay farmers has a much deeper social message than <em>Rogue One<\/em>, and while many of your friends would lie about having watched all 97 hours of it, the fact is that movie would not be pleasurable to watch.<\/p>\n<p>So, I have an idea, instead of watching a boring ass pretentious movie such as <em>Moonlight\u00a0<\/em>in order to enlighten yourself,\u00a0read a fucking book about the struggle of gays in America, and then watch fucking <em>Jaws<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Back to the ESPY&#8217;s:<\/p>\n<p>They are so fucking dumb, but I&#8217;d like to focus on one issue in particular.<\/p>\n<p>After exploiting a bunch of mentally disabled people, the ESPY&#8217;s presented an award to a, not sarcastically speaking here, very impressive man named Israel Del Toro, who was brutally maimed by an improvised explosive device while patrolling the country of Afghanistan as an occupying force.<\/p>\n<p>I was already questioning why there was an awards show about sports, but it&#8217;s not that weird.<\/p>\n<p>I now became perplexed as to why an award show about sports would give awards to people who are not athletes, but members of the armed services.<\/p>\n<p>(The armed services have their own awards, they&#8217;re called Medals.)<\/p>\n<p>The tenuous connection is that the award is called the Pat Tillman Award, named after Pat Tillman, an NFL player who voluntarily joined the Army to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n<p>(All but one of the 9\/11 hijackers were Saudi, an ally of the United States which shared many close business relationships with the Bush family as well as the Bin Laden family. Invading Saudi Arabia was never discussed, nor was it ever publicly suggested to discuss with Saudi Arabia why their citizens rammed airplanes into the twin towers.)<\/p>\n<p>The saga of Pat Tillman is too long to get into here, but Tillman was killed by friendly fire (meaning someone he knew accidentally shot him.)<\/p>\n<p>As Tillman was a high profile soldier, perhaps the highest profile soldier in recent history, the US Army didn&#8217;t like the fact that he was shot by another member of the Army, and engaged in a vast <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2007\/POLITICS\/04\/24\/tillman.hearing\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">coverup of the incident<\/a>, devising a propaganda scheme in which Tillman was actually killed by Afghan insurgents, like in a movie.<\/p>\n<p>They then used their completely fabricated story, signed off on to the very top, by the head General in Afghanistan Stanley McChrystal, among others, to recruit young poor people to join the Army.<\/p>\n<p>Eventually it was acknowledged that the people in charge were engaged in North Korea level propaganda, they admitted they lied, and the story went away.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s why I found a wounded soldier receiving an award named after Pat Tillman to be rather unsettling.<\/p>\n<p>Tillman certainly died for his country, but what that means is unclear.<\/p>\n<p>The gentleman receiving the award, Israel Del Toro, rehabilitated himself, survived against all odds, and spoke on the virtues of persistence, of never giving up despite the odds against you.<\/p>\n<p>He didn&#8217;t address the ongoing war in Afghanistan, it was very all-encompassing.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, the reason Del Toro received the Pat Tillman Award is that he actually went back to the war, becoming the first combat-disabled Air Force member to reenlist.<\/p>\n<p>The whole thing rubbed me the wrong way, because Pat Tillman was used as propaganda, and what I was watching amounted pretty strongly to propaganda, and nobody mentioned it.<\/p>\n<p>To clarify, I thought the message of &#8216;don&#8217;t ever give up&#8217; was in pretty poor taste when used in reference to an ongoing quagmire of a war which can never be won.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes it&#8217;s good to give up.<\/p>\n<p>Like in Vietnam.<\/p>\n<p>We should have given up, and saved many, many lives.<\/p>\n<p>We should also give up in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n<p>And give up on a lot of other things as a country.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not true that you should never give up. That&#8217;s shitty advice. If you&#8217;re in a UFC fight and someone has you in an arm bar, and you can feel your tendons about to pop, and you have absolutely no way of getting out of it, you should tap out.<\/p>\n<p>If you don&#8217;t, you&#8217;re a dumbass.<\/p>\n<p>The way the government used Pat Tillman, dead Pat Tillman, for their own agenda, might give pause as to what we&#8217;re celebrating.<\/p>\n<p>I would think it would be more a reason to not return to combat than to return to combat, or more of a reason to NOT glorify the armed forces than to glorify the armed forces.<\/p>\n<p>Tillman was used by the US Army.<\/p>\n<p>Del Toro, because his injuries are so prominent, was carefully selected by a team of executives at ABC\/ESPN, and exploited in a similar fashion.<\/p>\n<p>For ratings.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s what I got out of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;re not completely ridden with diabetes you might question why the ESPY&#8217;s exist. Why do we need an award show for sports? We already have an award show for sports. It&#8217;s called the trophy presentation, and it&#8217;s televised directly after you beat everyone else at your sport. This isn&#8217;t the movies. It&#8217;s not subjective. &#8230;<a class=\"post-readmore\" href=\"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/politics\/espys-pat-tillman-award-missing-mark\/\">read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3137,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3136"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3136"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3141,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3136\/revisions\/3141"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}