linh dinh is a vietnamese blogger i follow who provides essays on his adventures and thoughts about said experiences with historical touch stones attached and here is one for you to consider;

In 1950, only 9% of American homes had a TV. By 1963, 93.1% did. Rigid, they stared.

In Vietnam, the percentage of houses with TV had to be much less. Born in November of 1963 in Saigon, my first memory of television dates to perhaps April of 1968. More audio than visual, it’s a strain of music to accompany scenes of exhumed corpses from the Tet Offensive. Communists had executed them in Hue, with many still alive when buried in shallow graves.

Until I left Vietnam in 1975, television wasn’t a big part of my life. There were only two stations in Saigon, a Vietnamese and an American one, with both broadcasting only parts of each day. All TV sets were black and white, and tiny. If there was, say, a soccer match on, a house with a TV might attract neighbors, standing outside to watch through a window. Most popular were the folk operas.

Not chained to a TV inside, I spent my time, when not in school, on sidewalks all over, and also at the zoo, since I could access it for free through a backdoor at my grandfather’s house. I fed sugarcane to elephants and waited for a python to devour a duck. With the historical museum inside this zoo, I got to look at +2,000-year-old bronze drums and stone statues from the vanquished Champas. I went to swimming pools and was enrolled in a judo class. Its most basic skill is how to fall, even violently, without hurting yourself. Brainwashed by Hollywood, some Americans may be surprised that Vietnamese also entertained themselves, like everybody else everywhere, by playing sports and going to movies, the beach or the stadium, etc.

Attending kick boxing matches with my father was particularly enjoyable. The Viet guys nearly always got their asses booted to hell by the damn Thais, but they were generally better than Laos. Nobody is equal at anything. Most boring were the English rules bouts inserted into the program. They were outright unnatural, an affront against God and man. Just kick that motherfucker! Knee his kidney! Life goes on even during a war, of course.

You wouldn’t know it from Apocalypse Now, though. Inspired by a 1899 novel about the Congo to depict South Vietnam in the 1960’s, its megalomaniac director declared, “My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam.” You might as well make a movie about Indiana based on a Mishima novel. In a review, I have pointed out how written Vietnamese, thus sign of civilization, only appeared for a few seconds in Coppola’s flick.

The Deer Hunter or Rambo is similarly bizarre to any Vietnamese, but hey, these movies have shaped not just the American worldview, but identity, so they will be defended by many Americans on artistic and psychological grounds. As allegories, they feel not just legitimate, but necessary to American mental health.

An American archetype, Rambo must break laws to inject justice into a rotten system, and like a superhero, he succeeds against all odds. Ultimately, though, Rambo reinforces the American culture of constant war. With just enough Rambo in them, millions of Americans have been inspired to kill and be killed in countries they couldn’t find on a map, though many just happened to be near Israel!

Though scrupulous writers exist to bring you closer to the truth, they’re increasingly unread. Visiting Vietnam in 1950, Norman Lewis reports, “In Indo-China the social life of a small town remained remarkably untroubled. The Chinese always ran a gambling saloon. It was quite normal for friends to finish a convivial evening in a fumerie where they might smoke two or three pipes of opium together. The town could well also possess a cinema—even a little theatre staging oriental ballets of great charm and interest.”.......read more........