I had to look up "John has a long mustache. The chair is against the wall. " They are explained in this blog post. https://www.housemorningwood.com/red-dawn-code-words-and-wol...

"John has a long mustache" is a callback to the movie "The Longest Day" as a signal to French Resistance.

Now those kids look like my nightmare vision of the American Taliban.

Except if there ever is an incident, and something like those kids save your ass. I've watched many people intellectualize something, and then when it gets visceral, reach for the thing they repulsed or detested before. Sort of what happened during 9/11. I was a middle of the road kind of guy, half dove, half hawk. I grew up in a violent neighborhood fighting when I didn't want to. Four years of military school, and I watched my more dovish friends go total hawk.

Those kids are my cousins kind of, in a sense based on where I come from and the people that I go home to visit. I don't think I have any misperceptions about the good things that those people can do and the hard work that let's say "rural people" do in their lives.

But I also have learned they're pretty much universally believing in things that are not true, from the election being stolen to q&a stuff and an unfortunate fixation on racism. Pretty much they're mostly influenced by Fox News, their elders more than the younger generation, but plenty of people in the younger generation have inherited some kind of white grievance. I see those kinds of people as really unhappy because they see that there is not a good economic future in general for people in farming and rural areas. In my family the people that still have farms call them hobby farms and they have real jobs out in the world doing something.

You're right. Charlie Sheen, not Tom Cruise. I was 20 when I saw it at the movies. My memory is not what it used to be, and I have the old habit of trying to actually write something without always using Google to back me up!

Funny story: I sat at the table for lunch with my 20-to-30-something colleagues, and I purposely brought up trivia or esoterica, to watch them all dart to their thumbs on phones to answer. I said, STOP!. Try and think it out. It's fun, even when you are wrong, because the conversation flows nicely. Disclaimer: I use Google a lot to check myself ;)

Harry Dean Stanton was though, which still weirds me out. Not a very big through line between Red Dawn and Repo Man.

Actually, his character in Repo Man goes on a rant against communists that seems out of place -- unless it's the same person from Red Dawn. So it's probably part of the RDCU (or Dawniverse if you prefer).

The Soviets did not parachute from commercial flights during Storm-333.