Black Gold: The Story of Oil, Giant

"One passage in the book conveys its general approach, as well as that of the film. Swofford relates an incident, also depicted in the film, in which reporters from the New York Times and the Boston Globe interview members of the squad in Kuwait. Prepped in advance by their officers, the soldiers repeat patriotic clichés: “This is about freedom, not about oil. This is about standing up to aggression, like the president says,” and “I think this mission is valid and we have all the right in the world to be here and the president has all the right to deploy us and we are well trained and prepared to fight any menace in the world.” Swofford writes: “He [the reporter] wants to look at the psyche of the frontline infantryman, and I can only offer him processed responses.... I wish to speak to him honestly and say: I am a grunt, dressed up in fancy scout/sniper clothes; I am a grunt with limited vision. I don’t care about a New World Order. I don’t care about human rights violations in Kuwait City. Amnesty International, my ass. Rape them all, kill them all, sell their oil, pillage their gold, sell their children into prostitution. I don’t care about the Flag and God and Country and Corps. I don’t give a fuck about oil and revenue and million barrels per day and US jobs.”Left as is, and that is the book’s (and film’s) modus operandi, this “hard-hitting” talk is simply an apology for ignorance and backwardness. Swofford’s responsibility, and Mendes’s, is to make something of the experience, to bring out its truth, not simply to record its surface or the unthinking impressions of a 20-year-old youth with no conception of the war’s significance. What use is that? source: www.wsws.org Black Gold: The Story of Oil Modern America depends on a steady source of petroleum and petroleum by-products to satisfy its ever-increasing and voracious appetite for fuel. Oil, the “black gold” of the ground, is one of America’s most precious and abundant commodities, and yet America still need’s the oil exports of Arab nations to fill its need. Black Gold, The Story of Oil chronicles the birth and rise of the oil industry in the United States, from its fledgling beginnings, through the days of John D. Rockefeller and the robber barons, to the Gulf War and the present. source: www.history.com "Meriwether Lewis did not have any kind of gold in mind, of course, when he toured the valley of the river he called Maria's, and he certainly could not have imagined that beneath its questionable soil lay vast pools of wealth, a black bonanza--petroleum. The market for petroleum products in America and Europe emerged during the 1850s, when crude oil was first distilled into kerosene to become the favored lamp fuel, replacing sooty animal fats such as whale oil. Natural seeps from oil shale were discovered at several sites in Montana in the 1860s, and an oil boom within the present boundaries of Glacier National Park had a short life between 1890 and 1910. With the advent of the automobile after 1900, the demand for gasoline and lubricating oil expanded proportionately, and so did exploration. In 1910, the Great Northern Railroad began converting some of its coal-burning locomotives to oil, which encouraged further efforts in northern and northwestern Montana". source: www.lewis-clark.org "The movie, of course, was George Stevens' oil epic Giant, and the movie people included Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. Five weeks later, they left Marfa a lonelier place — and the inspiration for Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean — but Reata, ancestral home of the fictitious Benedict clan and the film's central image, remains. After 41 summers — and several hurricanes — its skeleton stands on Evans' 47,000-acre ranch, attracting only the occasional pilgrim or wayward steer. James Dean's last film (he died eight days after wrapping), Giant still generates heat for its survivors. ''We were so silly on location. There was a competition,'' remembers Carroll Baker, who was 24 and played Dean's love interest. ''Jimmy decided he was going to take Liz away from Rock. There was no sex involved; [Dean] was just, like, 'Ha, ha, ha! I may have third billing, but I'll show you who gets the most attention from the leading lady!''' James Dean... behaving like a rebel? Some legends always endure". source: www.ew.com