Parsley, Sage, Rosenbaum and Time

I read it, scratched my head, and read it again. Suddenly, I saw a flash of lights before my eyes and felt myself hurtling into an infinite vortex, as if the very fabric of space and time had somehow come apart. ... Night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. ... I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown, now green. ... I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changed -- melting and flowing under my eyes. ...

Then I blinked. No, I hadn’t fallen headlong into an H.G. Wells novel. It was merely a very badly worded sentence at the start of a Jonathan Rosenbaum movie review:

I first saw “Winter Soldier,” a 1972 documentary about the Winter Soldier investigation held by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Detroit in 1971, shortly after it was made.

No, fair reader, Rosey isn’t saying he’d seen the 1972 documentary ... in 1971. He just means that the Winter Solider thingy took place in 1971 and the film about it came out in 1972.

I think.

That is, I hope. I don’t want to imagine a world in which Rosey has the power to travel through time. He’d probably use this power to do some really perverse shit, like force us all to sit through endless -- literally endless, like ETERNAL -- experimental Iranian Yak-herding documentaries. We’d have to send a ruthless cyborg back from the future to hunt him down like the dogmatist he is.

Time travel aside, I’m still a bit confused about those Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Detroit. I mean, Detroit’s a pretty crappy place to live, but I had no idea we were actually at war with it. Who’s winning?