Why is nobody on Barbelith talking about Billy Jack?
Why?
Are you that alienated from your revolutionary counter-culture roots? (After all, the credits officially list "the Cast and the Committee" as writers, and, as this poster reminds us, you might have due process and Mother's Day, but they've got Billy Jack.)
Have you bought into the "bad movie" hype?
Or is it the hat?
OK, OK, in the early 70s, everybody had heard of Billy Jack, but that might not be the case any more.
It's a simple story -- there's this guy, Billy Jack, who we're told was a decorated Vietnam vet who turned his back on the outside world to go and live on his reservation. He's the law there. But the deputy in the next town over, he's bad news.
So when his daughter gets knocked up and runs away to the "progressive school," a theater collective full of pacificist hippies Billy Jack allows on his reservation, things go from bad to worse. It's like Rambo with social consciousness.
Things to love about Billy Jack:
* One guy takes on seven other guys... using his bare feet as weapons. He tries to be a pacifist, but he just GOES BERSERK!
* Then he goes and does a medicine man ritual where he trips on rattlesnake venom and death and starts channeling.
* There's a major For a Few Dollars More-style shootout with, like, the National Guard and people showing up.
* The "rock" DJ from WKRP in Cincinnati, Howard Hesseman, does improv theater in the streets.
* Some of the worst folk singing ever to grace a school cafeteria.
* He wears the hat.
I mean, this guy has the right idea:
I've been living the biggest mistake of my life for the last nine years and I think it's time I finally got it off my chest. You see I didn't vote for Billy Jack for president back in 1992. I can only attribute that to my ill-spent youth, seduced by the saxophone playing, Gennifer-laying, brief-wearing (ewww!) sleaze, Slick Willy. Oh sure, I voted for him again in 1996 and wrote him in back in 2000 (yeah, that's against the Constitution, but so is every smelly fart ripped by Ashcroft and his pal W. lately), but that was because it was like renewing your favorite TV show, not because I thought the dude could get things done that mattered. We all know this country runs itself for the most part and survives in spite of the parade of whores we put in there every four years. But Tom Laughlin who played the half-breed non-violent ass-kicker Indian whose main job was rescuing the freaks, hippies and minorities that made up the Freedom School, walked the walk. I mean, he wrote and directed these Billy Jack adventures and if you've ever visited his web site, you'll see that he's really serious about consciousness and living right and all that good stuff.
Wait, wait, you say. Billy Jack has his own web site? On which he discusses Jung, Oprah and American politics?
Oh yes, children. He most certainly does. |
