The amount of thinly-veiled racist excuses for Hunter's murder
on this board are really astounding.
That is all.
thx
shareagreed
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MovieChat Forums > Gimme Shelter (1971) Discussion > The amount of thinly-veiled racist excus...
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Were the angels targeting him because he was a black dude with some flamboyance and did he pull out the gun because he felt threatened by them? If he wasn't threatened at all and pulled out the gun and waved to be a tough guy then he was foolish. If he did it to try and ward off possible danger from the angels then I can understand. Does anyone know the full story of the lead up to this?
shareWhen you're threatened by a large group of people who outnumber you and have the potential to get violent and nasty, you do not pull out a gun or threaten them unless you want some sort of bodily harm to come your way. It doesn't really matter whether Hunter was being threatened by the Angels, whether he was trying to shoot Mick Jagger or whatever, he shouldn't have been waving that gun around. If he was being threatened or intimidated by the Angels, he should have backed off and at least tried to get away. As Richard Pryor said, "Why get killed when you can RUUUNNNNNNN!!!!?"
shareI guess. This was Woodstock gone awry. The dude was 18 and probably not thinking with a mature level head on his shoulders.
shareAs has been stated elsewhere, he brought a gun to a knife fight and lost anyway. This is not racial, this is people who are anti-stupid, commenting on a guy who did a stupid thing, and died for it. How is this racial? Please explain. Would it have been better to let him shoot someone, like say, Mick Jagger?
"It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's LIVING!"
Captain Augustus McCrae
Anyone? Didn't think so.
"It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's LIVING!"
Captain Augustus McCrae
McRae,
I tend to be "progresive" in such matters, and have no fondness for the Hell's Angels, who clearly behaved very badly at Altamont.
But Hunter pulled a gun, did not appear to do so as a defensive measure, and in fact was waving it in such a manner that it could have gone off at any time, likely killing someone. It was tragic, unfortunate, and all that. But racist? Really?
No. It was not racism.
Thank you kenny164. Yours is the correct answer. To paraphrase the OP-
The amount of lame rationalizations of Hunter's stupid and dangerous behavior are really astounding.
"It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's LIVING!"
Captain Augustus McCrae
Agreed, but also think that hiring the Hell Angels to do security was an incredibly stupid act. Even before what happened with Meredith Hunter, the Angles were beating up on people...including some musicians. It's a case of a collision between a stupid guy and a stupid gang,both very dangerous.
shareYes, hiring the Hell's Angels for crowd control and security was a rather stupid and fucked-up act. The Hell's Angels created the kind of atmosphere that made it possible for that kind of concomitant violence to occur.
shareThe thing is, using the Hell's Angels as security had worked before, worked many times. Before this, they'd been happy to be paid in beer and the chance to be on stage, and it had worked, and I don't know what went wrong this time. But whatever went wrong apparently started and finished with the Hell's Angels, they had been picking fights and beating people up for some time before it ended in murder. And once things started to go sour, there was no stopping the concert, you just don't disappoint tens of thousands of chemically impaired people in an age of riots.
Hunter was just some innocent bystander who was to close to a group of violent thugs. If he went and got his gun, wouldn't you if you were that close to a group of violent thugs?
The 1960's, which was supposed to be an era of people really coming together as a community, was really not that kind of an era at all. That idea was clearly a mirage, and it ended quite badly, as we know, and helped give us the present overall atmosphere that's now in this country overall, if one gets the drift. Everybody has the idea that the people at the original 1969 Woodstock festival were super-cool and nice, but that wasn't the case; there were a lot of bad drug trips, a lot of violence, a lot of sexual assaults that went unreported, as was how that was handled back then, and there were several deaths, too; one kid who slept in his sleeping bag to get out of the rain was fatally mowed down by a tractor, another one died of a burst appendix, another from falling off of a scaffold, and one or two others died of heroin overdoses. That was at the Woodstock 1969, and all that was deliberately cut out when it was made into a movie, in order to make it seem like it was special, gentle, and non-violent.
The rolling Stones concert at Altamont, like Woodstock 1969, was the beginning of the end, if one gets the drift. I believe that the Woodstock 1969 festival helped lead to the fiasco at Altamont.
The fiasco at Altamont was generally called "the beginning of the end" of all the fun things about the sixties. The end if flower power and the illusion that hippie culture was peaceful and non-violent and a better way to live, but as far as I can tell things had been going sharply downhill since "the summer of love" in 1967. Rioting, violence in the streets, drugs and overdoses, the Manson Family, the political assassination, frankly, I suspect it wasn't the beginning of the end but the end of the end.
It must have been a hell of a scary time, not that I'd know from personal experience. I've just read about it.
Good points, Otter. Sure, things had started to go downhill in the late summer of 1967, but 1968 was when things really did start to go downhill. Jules Wittcover's book, "The Year the Dream Died: 1968 Revisited Here in America." is an excellent book that provides a great deal of insight about that period.
The years 1968-1971 were one of the nadirs ( points when the quality of life here in the United States, overall, was the lowest) here in this country. The Russians also invaded Czechoslovakia, as well.
You got to be freaking kidding me. While it was a stupid idea to have security be done by the Hells Angels, who were unnecessary violent towards pretty much anybody, the guy created this situation himself by waving a gun and possibly even shooting it. Your excuses for calling this murder and racism is actually quite openly racist.
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