Iggy Pop – "Repo Man" (1984)

I'm a repo man

And I'm looking for the joke . . .

Looking for the joke with a microscope

In 2003, Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright was embedded with Bravo Company of the 1st Marine Reconnaissance Battalion – the unit that was the “tip of the spear” in Operation Iraqi Freedom.  

Wright’s book about his experiences, Generation Kill, was made into an HBO series with the same title.      One of the Marines who is prominently featured in the book is Sgt. Antonio Espera, who portrayed himself in the TV series.  (I would have never guessed he wasn’t a professional actor.)   

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Espera, who grew up in a broken home in Southern California, told Wright that he was a “bad motherf*cker”:

You see, dog, my wife is smart, but she f*cked up big time when she married me.  I was a piece of sh*t. . . . See, I didn’t grow up with no understanding.  My mom tried, but my dad is a psycho ex-Marine Vietnam vet.

Espera’s father abandoned him when he was young.  Several years later, he tried to patch things up by taking his son on a fishing trip.

On the way to the lake, the elder Espera decided to stop off at an X-rated bookstore.  While his son waited for his dad to take care of business in the store’s viewing booths, he got into an argument in the parking lot with a man he thought was trying to cruise him.  Espera ended up throwing a brick through the man’s windshield.

“That was our father-son trip,” he told Wright.

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After meeting his wife – who was a college student at the time – Espera became a voracious reader.  During his time in Iraq, he spent his free time writing long letters to his wife.  

Sgt. Antonio Espera

Here’s an excerpt from one of those letters:

I’ve lost 20 pounds, shaved my head, started smoking, my feet have half rotted off, and I move from filthy hole to filthy hole every night.  I see dead children and people everywhere and function in a void of indifference.  I keep you and our daughter locked away deep down inside, and I try not to look there.

After reading that letter to Wright, Espera asked him, “Do you think that’s too harsh, dog?”

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Before he joined the Marines, Espera worked as a repo man in Los Angeles.  He learned that the ideal time and place to repossess a car was in broad daylight in the middle of a crowded parking lot:

Jump in, drive that bitch off with the car alarm going – nobody’s going to stop you, nobody’s going to even look at you.  You know why?  Nobody gives a f*ck.  In my line of work, that was the key to everything.

Espera told Wright that he ever wrote a memoir of his days as a repo man, he would title it Nobody Gives a F*ck.

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Today’s featured song is from the soundtrack of the 1984 cult movie, Repo Man, which also includes songs by Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, and other hardcore L.A. punk bands.    

Here’s the Repo Man poster:

Repo Man – whose executive producer was ex-Monkee Michael Nesmith – was directed by Alex Cox.  Cox also directed the Sid Vicious biopic, Sid and Nancy.

Click here to listen to Iggy Pop’s “Repo Man.”

Gordon Lightfoot – "Sundown" (1974)

Sometimes I think it’s a sin

When I feel like I’m winnin’ 

When I’m losin’ again

In 2003, Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright was embedded with Bravo Company of the 1st Marine Reconnaissance Battalion – the unit that was the “tip of the spear” in Operation Iraqi Freedom.  

Wright’s book about his experiences, Generation Kill, was made into an HBO series with the same title.  I watched that series a few weeks ago, and found it so compelling that I checked Wright’s book out of the library.

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Wright rides in the backseat of a Humvee commanded by Sergeant Brad Colbert, a fascinating character who doesn’t conform to many of the usual Marine stereotypes – although he can sling profanity and politically-incorrect insults with the best of them.  

Sgt. Brad Colbert

Colbert’s fellow Marines nicknamed him “The Iceman” in recognition of his coolness in combat.  He demonstrates that coolness when his platoon is ambushed as they attempt to cross a bridge in total darkness despite not having adequate night-vision equipment.

In our vehicle, Colbert seems to have entered a private realm.  He fires bursts and, for some inexplicable reason, hums “Sundown,” the depressing 1970s Gordon Lightfoot anthem.  His M4 [rifle] jams repeatedly, but each time he calmly clears the chamber and resumes firing, while mumbling the chorus: “Sometimes I think it’s a sin/When I feel like I’m winning’/When I’m losing’ again.”

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Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown” reached number one on the Billboard “Hot 100” in May of 1974 – which was about two months before Brad Colbert was born.

Lightfoot wrote the song while he was in the middle of an affair with Cathy Smith – a notorious rock groupie, drug dealer, and occasional backup singer.

From a 2014 interview with Lightfoot:

Well, I had this girlfriend one time, and I was at home working, at my desk, working at my songwriting which I had been doing all week since I was on a roll, and my girlfriend was somewhere drinking . . . . So I was hoping that no one else would get their hands on her, because she was pretty good looking!  And that's how I wrote the song “Sundown,” and as a matter of fact, it was written just around sundown, just as the sun was setting, behind the farm I had rented to use as a place to write the album. 

The Lightfoot-Smith relationship was volatile and violent at times – he broke her cheekbone one night in a fit of jealousy – and also quite expensive for the Canadian singer/songwriter.  Smith was cited in Mrs. Lightfoot’s divorce complaint, and the resulting property settlement was the most expensive in Canadian history at the time.

Lightfoot and Smith

Smith later became a full-time drug dealer and courier.  Her customers included Keith Richards and Ron Wood, who hooked her up with John Belushi.  

Belushi died after Smith injected him with heroin and cocaine at a hotel in Hollywood in 1982.  She eventually pled guilty to charges of involuntary manslaughter and served 15 months in a California women’s prison.

After he release, she was deported back to Canada, where she worked as a legal secretary and spoke to high-school students about the dangers of drug abuse.

Click here to listen to “Sundown.”

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Johnny Cash – "The Man Comes Around" (2002)

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers

One hundred million angels singin’

Multitudes are marchin’ to the big kettledrum

In 2003, Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright was embedded with Bravo Company of the 1st Marine Reconnaissance Battalion – the unit that was the “tip of the spear” in Operation Iraqi Freedom.  

Wright’s book about his experiences, Generation Kill, was made into an HBO series with the same title.  Having never served in the military – much less experienced combat – I really have no basis for judging how accurate Generation Kill’s portrayal of life in wartime is.  But the show struck me as almost wholly authentic when I recently watched it.  

I say “almost wholly authentic” because I thought that the depiction of a couple of the Marine officers was a little cartoonish.  (I can’t imagine that those officers could have really been that stupid.)

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The Marines in Generation Kill spend most of their time fighting not the enemy, but boredom and frustration.  Their missions rarely resemble the kind of tasks they were trained to perform, and the command hierarchy does a poor job supplying their needs.  (Batteries for their night-vision optical equipment are always in short supply.)

But they are accustomed to living in a world that is largely FUBAR, and they have learned that the best way to deal with that FUBARness is to joke about it.  The jokes are usually racist, sexist, or  homophobic, but they are as funny as they are politically incorrect.  

Some of the Marines of Bravo Company

Generation Kill does have its share of terrifying moments.  While firefights are relatively infrequent, they are scary as hell when they do occur.  There are a fair number of enemy casualties as the Marines fight their way from Kuwait to Baghdad, but none of the two dozen or so characters who we get to know best in the course of the series die or are seriously wounded.

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The same can’t be said about many of the characters of the sixth and final season of House of Cards.  You would think that being a Marine grunt in Iraq is more dangerous than being a White House staffer, cabinet officer, or Washington newspaper reporter.  But in the world of House of Cards, just the opposite is true.

You’d better sleep with one eye open if you attract the ire of Claire Hale Underwood, the fictional female President who is the dominant character of the final season of House of Cards.  If she learned one thing from her dead husband – who preceded her as President – it’s that assassination can be an effective means of grabbing and holding on to power.  

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I found the ending of House of Cards so unsatisfying that I thought about throwing my shoe at my television.  But big-ass Samsung HDTVs don’t exactly grow on trees, so I left my size 12s where they belonged – on my feet.

President Claire Hale Underwood

Most people agree that House of Cards jumped the shark a long time ago.  But in its last season, it seemed that the show jumped the shark squared.  The sheer implausibility of almost every major event of season six was astonishing.

But I’ve decided that it was wrongheaded of me to expect the show to be realistic.  That never was the show’s intention.

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When I was growing up, I loved political thrillers like Fail Safe and The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May and The Parallax View.  Those movies worked because they had a high degree of verisimilitude.

House of Cards started out that way, but quickly took a very different path.

A number of critics have pointed out the Shakespearean aspects of the series – Macbeth is the play that House of Cards is usually compared to, but you can find elements of Julius Caesar, Richard III, and a number of other Shakespeare plays in the show.

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Macbeth was a real king, but the events of Shakespeare’s play deviate significantly from the historical facts.  

But while Shakespeare fabricated much of the play from whole cloth, his characters act in ways that illuminate human psychology.  Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are very real, even though they aren’t. 

Can the same be said about Claire Underwood?  Maybe . . . although she is such a hyperbolic character that it’s easy to dismiss her as a figment of a screenwriter’s imagination who is no more real than a Marvel supervillain.

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The present and former Presidents Underwood were at least loosely modeled on Bill and Hillary Clinton.  

But Claire Underwood does things that Hillary Clinton’s worst enemies wouldn’t accuse her of doing.  In fact, she does things that Donald Trump’s worst enemies wouldn’t accuse him of doing.

(Actually, I may be wrong about that last statement.)

To me, House of Cards falls short of Macbeth not because its plot is so implausible – President Underwood not only assassinates her enemies willy-nilly but also appoints an all-female cabinet (which is a bit much if you ask me) – but because Claire is about as unsympathetic and one-dimensional a character as you can imagine.  

President Underwood’s all-gal cabinet

At least Lady Macbeth had a guilty conscience about all the bad sh*t she and her hubby did.  Claire Underwood seems wholly untroubled after sticking a knife into an old friend in the Oval Office, and then pinching his nose as he lies bleeding on the carpet so he dies more quickly.

(Oops – I forgot to say “SPOILER ALERT!”  Sorry about that.) 

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While House of Cards may have gone off the deep end in its final season, one could argue that the good ol’ U. S. of A. has as well.

I’m as paranoid as the next guy about how much power our government possesses over us.  There’s no doubt that a lot of people get chewed up and spit out as a result of the malice or incompetence (or both) of government officials.

There have been plenty of other places where governments have kicked over the traces and run roughshod over their citizens.  

(Just because he never said it
doesn’t mean it isn’t true)

We assume that can’t happen here because it never has before.  But I wouldn’t be so sure.  (When it appears that high-ranking law enforcement types were at least talking about how they might nullify the outcome of a presidential election, you have to wonder.)

Let’s face it.  Most elected officials seem to be motivated by one thing and one thing only – winning the next election.  They make decisions based on whether it would help or hurt their and their party’s electoral fortunes.  Principle be damned, and the devil take the hindmost.

Here endeth the reading of the lesson.

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In the final scene of Generation Kill, some of the Marines of Bravo Company sit down to watch a video made by a soldier who brought a handheld camcorder to Iraq.  Click here to see that scene.

That video is accompanied by the title track from Johnny Cash’s 2002 album, American IV: The Man Comes Around – the last album Cash released before his death. 

The song was inspired by a dream Cash had in which he walked into Buckingham Palace and encountered Queen Elizabeth II, who called him “a thorn tree in a whirlwind.”  It’s full of Biblical references – most of them from the book of Revelations. 

Click here to listen to “When the Man Comes Around.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: