https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUdrmndhKT4
Without doubt, beyond playing Captain Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce on the classic TV series, "M*A*S*H", actor Alan Alda had an undeniable impact on the show. In fact, there are some folks out there who say that he ruined the show. Are you one of those people? Watch this video and, then, you be the judge!share
The show stops being a sitcom in the later seasons and becomes quite depressing. So yes, Alda ruined it with his preaching.
shareAlan Alda made MASH. Without him it would not have been as successful.
shareAgreed. That being said I do think as the show remained on the air longer he had more and more control over the show which sometimes had a negative effect on its quality.
shareI don't care much for Alda, but that is the correct answer. The idea that he ruined the show, except for a few malcontents ( and I am not dismissing their opinions, they can think what they want ) who don't like him.
The point is he was the main star of the show from the start, and the show was very popular, for some reason. I could watch M.A.S.H., but I wouldn't say I liked it enough to ever sit and wait for it be on or clear my schedule so I could watch it.
It is so amazing to look back and think about how we had to wait for a given episode to be replayed in reruns instead of just being able to look it up and play it online.
Anyway, I'm not a fan or pretty much anyone on M.A.S.H.. And I think, but I'm not sure they were the first series to just replace an ongoing character with a new actor? That was weird.
Alan Alda was an integral part of M*A*S*H. He certainly did not ruin for me.
shareNo, not for me. Especially since I was never a fan of the show.
shareI never found MASH funny.
shareI'm not a fan of the snarky liberal Hawkeye character. That being said, there's not much point to the show without him. I can enjoy a show even if I hate one of the characters. That's the whole point. Anything else is smarm.
The video is disingenuous though. That guy supports Alda. Classic bait and switch.
Liberal because he didn't like war? Guess that makes me and a lot of other people Liberals. No wonder you hate Liberals so much, you must love war.
shareI'm not a conservative. And I believe every one of the neverending wars fought by the U.S. in the past 60 years have been none of our business.
Hawkeye was liberal. That's just a fact.
Whatever, Hawkeye was anti-war and probably socially liberal, so what.
But I'm interested in the "every one of the neverending wars fought by the U.S. in the past 60 years have been none of our business.".
I don't want to argue that either way, although right now with this Ukraine thing my reading of recent history shows that the the US has been dogging Russia since the end of the Cold War because we expected to be able to dominate Russia the same we dominate so many other countries by money used against their peolpe, or assassinating their leaders, or just all out war against them
Russia was provoked by years of US meddling to take over Ukraine's government and lure them into war. I won't back that up here, but I can with a lot of facts.
My question though is, hypothetical ... ( I'm assuming you are American ), what would you think if it could be proven to you that the US has f4ed itself to the point that if our empire collapsed the US would fall apart and devolve into crime and war like India, or the Middle East. What if you had incontrovertible understanding that the US economy and society would self-destruct without the resources and control we exert over other countries in the world though our massive military hegemony.
Think of it like Rome in distant past. We look back at Rome today and think it was a mighty empire that was the followon to Greek democracy and the forerunner of the whole western world and way of life. Yet it was full of misery, war, injustice, corruption and slavery. If you lived back in the days of ancient Rome, what would you be saying about it?
What do you think of our empire? What do you think would happen to most Americans lives and living standard. It's not a right-wrong answer because no one can say, but I think it's worth considering.
I'm not necessarily against Alda's anti-war stance. I just think he's snide and unlikable.
And we've talked Ukraine before and we both agree that the U.S. provoked this war by meddling in Ukraine. Zelensky is a little crook and he should be strung up by his heels.
I don't think America's wealth and power comes from empire. These wars continually drain us. The arms dealers get rich. But everyone else finances that. We have immense wealth here and we don't need empire to maintain it.
If all the trillions we've spent on war we're kept here to invest in America, we'd have more prosperity, not less.
So we're not like Rome. Just what wealth did we get from Vietnam and Afghanistan? Yeah, Iraq we got oil. But we didn't need to conquer them to get it. We just empowered our real enemy, Iran.
> I don't think America's wealth and power comes from empire.
It absolutely does. The best explanation of this is in the Economic Hitman series by John Perkins. We take a country and find a group of oligarchs, or failing that violent Right-wing guerilla types who like violence, pillage, thievery and rape and send them arms and train them. Then they take over the government, or threaten it
Then we come to their rescue. The basic structure is we set up people in charge with weapons, secret police and media advisors. Then we take their resources at a huge discount - because the people of said country are completely cut out. Usually they will demonstrate, rebel, etc, and we help these governments to kill the rebels. If a government does not cooperate we bribe then - with their own country's money, or kill them.
Since the dollar is the common reserve currency of the world, we can also print dollars and export our inflation to the rest of all those trillions and trillion of corrupt dollars out there and that keeps our inflation rate low, or reasonable.
Without these benefits I am not sure the US could survive.
Vietnam was a mess, but we are in with Vietnam today, and Thailand, and Cambodia, and the Philipines ... so we could let Vietnam go at the end of the war because we had our foothold in Asia. Don't forget South Korea ... the Korean war.
We look decades in advance and if a country doesn't work out right away - we can afford to wait. We are in that waiting state with Afghanistan, and Burma, and even Cuba.
The point is not the capital to invest, it is the ROI, the return on investment, and the US oligarchy goes straight for all the industries, commodities and technologies that have the biggest payoff - that is why they can never be dislodged by vote - they control all the money in the country and the average people in America now are getting the same treatment indigenous people's in our "colonies" get ... that is - NOTHING.
All the people involved with war and the military, and the companies and economic sectors all benefit while the rest of us get fleeced, and disenfrachised and told lies so that even if we did understand what we are fighting and who we have no power, not leverage - but the vote, and I think both sides are right- the system is rigged. Maybe not the voting machines themselves, but the whole media information system.
They talk about the Left, but the US has no representation of the Left - they are spoken of like the equivalent of criminals. Democrats are not the Left. A few of them are, and they get hammered in the media.
We can't live without this system, but we also cannot live with it either without becoming just like the Russians or the Chinese and respressing our citizens.
I haven't seen the show past the point Trapper John left the show. I didn't want to continue watching after that. I feel the show just wasn't going to be as fun without him. It's been over 10 years since I watched it though.
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