Week 5 - A01 - Jarrod Baniqued

Week 5 (3 February 2019)
Jarrod Baniqued (914629580)
Today I read two essays, one dealing with the connections between the military-industrial complex (and its role in American imperialism and military interventions in Asia and Latin America) and the proliferation of serial killers of Asian American women, and the other dealing with how the military-industrial complex (and its aforementioned role) interacts with the university.
About the former, I can definitely see the connections between the Pentagon's tentacles in war and the messed up psychologies of these serial killers. In the 20th century, especially during the late stages of the Cold War and the turn of the millennium, you'd see Pentagon funding and advice on big, bombastic action movie franchises, and if it wasn't there, there'd still be that lingering Pentagon influence and fetishization of guns. First Blood, for example, was actually a really good anti-war exploration of the traumatized Vietnam vet psychology the author describes, until it became an all-out glorification of violence against Vietnamese people as a way of resolving the POW/MIA issue and a poor depiction of the rather extremist Afghan mujahideen as ultimate war heroes. Thus far, film and TV are the only media to which I can connect the influence of the Pentagon; I may be vehemently opposed to the Marxist-Leninist way of thought, but I can definitely see that the racial dynamics in those kinds of media reflect those of the proliferation of veteran serial killers.
About the latter, others have noted the militarization of campus police and how they have been deployed to protect institutions of higher ed rather than their students or professors, but I do want to stress that most of the introduction is about the connections between the military-industrial complex and the university. Now even though intimate cooperation between the military-industrial complex and our universities has brought us immense technological and social benefits, or at least power (including the Internet as we know it, the nuke, statistics' role in operational research, mathematics as we know it, GPS, airplane navigation before GPS, food for disaster relief, and Project Apollo), there has also been a sidelining of the anti-war voices who protest this cooperation at key universities. The essay mentions eminent historian Charles Beard, McCarthyism, COINTELPRO and left-leaning public intellectuals Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis (the latter was recently denied a prestigious Alabaman civil rights prize on account of her support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement), Zionism, Project Camelot and the 1973 coup in Chile, the rise of the ADL, the rise of neoconservative voices in the culture wars debate and their allies in academia (of note are Roger Kimball and Allan Bloom, the latter of whom has produced required reading in my POL 4 class that most would consider the definitive translation), the USA PATRIOT Act and post-9/11 government suspicion of Muslim youth, the Occupy movement, and the student protesters at Davis and Riverside; and explains how Beard, Chomsky, Davis, the other side of the culture wars, and Occupy and student activists were dealt with by the university connection with the military-industrial complex. This sidelining is an indubitably egregious and startling historical trend, and I commend the authors for being exhaustive in their research. Ultimately, I agree with their conclusion that solidarity in ethnic and gender and sexuality studies, and exposing and rethinking imperialism, genocide and settler colonialism, is the best way forward for dismantling this trend. I remain skeptical as to their approach to dealing with stereotypes of them that have been bandied about the Internet (indeed, they've listed none), but I do think digital narratives that embody what they say in their conclusion are the vessel of hope to start with.
Questions: How can we supplement digital narratives in achieving this solidarity and rethinking?
Are there more examples of the Pentagon's influence in media that we can think of? 

Image: One of my favorite depictions of American exceptionalism when I was young. "Columbia's Easter Bonnet", on the expansion of the American Empire.

Sources:

Chatterjee, P., & Maira, S. (2014). Introduction: The Imperial University: Race, war, and the nation-state. The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, 1-50. 

Erhart, S. D. (1901, April 6). Columbia's Easter Bonnet. Puck, XLIX(1257), 1. Retrieved February 3, 2019, from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Puck_cover2.jpg

Hamamoto, D. Y. (2003). Masters of War: Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence. New York, New York. Routledge.

(You know what, I can't be bothered to put the URLs in APA format. Here's my websites:)

TV Tropes (Film section): First Blood, Rambo: First Blood II, Rambo III; TV section: JAG

Know Your Meme: Trigglypuff

Amazon.com: Sales page for Plato, & Kirsch, A. (2016). The Republic of Plato (3rd ed.) (A. D. Bloom, Trans.). New York, NY: Basic Books.

Wikipedia: Digital storytelling, ARPANET, Manhattan Project, Abraham Wald, John von Neumann, Global Positioning System, Inertial navigation system, Meal, Ready-to-Eat, Wernher von Braun.