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Every American citizen, in my opinion, should expose themselves to the arguments for and against the wars that they support with their taxes. It is unconscionable to provide the taxes and votes that support a war effort without hearing several sides of argument that include the members of the military, the politicians that command them, the officers that lead them, the intelligence personnel that inform them, and the people whose lives will be disrupted or lost in the conflict themselves. “You didn’t have embedded reporters with the people who were being bombed,” Norman Solomon notes in the course of his argument.
It would be impossible to say that this documentary attempts to convey to us both sides of the issues it addresses. Its producers and narrators are clearly in opposition to the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the War in Bosnia, the war in Afghanistan, and the War in Iraq. But their objections are not focused on the complex issues of these wars specifically. The focus of this documentary is simply on the process by which America goes to war. It does not say that the decision to go to war has always been the wrong decision. It simply argues that the American people have not been well served by those who are responsible for seeing to it that the decision be based on an accurate assessment of the situation.
War Made Easy, unlike Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, is not a political hit-peace that targets a specific president from a specific party. It distributes the footage used to make its arguments to Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, and George Bush Jr. (only Carter and Ford are left out). Fahrenheit relies largely on gimmicks. This is an argument and a compelling one. It should not be the only documentary that a young American sees. It provides little insight into the real and dreadful realities of life under people in places like Saddam’s Iraq, or Milosevic’s Serbia, or occupied Kuwait, or Ho Chi Mihn’s Vietnam. But it does demonstrate quite convincingly that neither Americans or people in these reprehensible dictatorships are well served when we are given only the information to make an easy decision. Not the information to make a good one.
I consider Fahrenheit 911 a liability to a good education about American war and this an asset even if I do not entirely agree with it.
Question for Comment: Do you prefer to have your mind “fed” with information that allows it to make decisions easily? Or do you prefer to be given all the information even if that leads to a practical decision-making paralysis?
Baby For Sale is a well acted tale, based on a true story, but not slavishly so apparently about the problem of “baby brokers” – people who take advantage of the emotions of young women who cannot afford to care for their own children and the emotions of wealthy families who cannot have children. It is a movie about the exploitation of fundamental human instincts – the drive to have children, to care for children, to protect those that one has developed an attachment for. The end? Well, I will just say that it made me cry and leave it at that. Not many movies make me cry but this one did. There were points in the movie where I just had to put it on pause it was disturbing me so much. I know what it is like to have someone playing games with your attachments and it is hard for me to imagine anyone not wanting to murder the villain in this story. To murder him for what, legally, is defined only as a misdemeanor in the law.
It also reminded me that no matter what we have as humans, life always seems to deprive of of something we need. Maybe it is just me but I found myself both jealous and empathetic towards the main characters in the movie. They have so much but they do not have something absolutely fundamental to their happiness. This is the dilemma that many of us face in life I think. We know we are blessed and yet we also know that we cannot escape the pain of some deprivation that we cannot fill without outside help.
Two thumbs up on this one. Nice work Lifetime.
Question for Comment: Do you ever wish that in the chemistry of your soul, the blessings you have in life could neutralize the deprivations you feel?
It is tempting to NOT write a review of this documentary as it is tempting to spare myself the controversy. I am reminded of the old Vermont legislator who was asked if he supported or opposed a controversial bill. “Some of my friends are for this bill and some are opposed to it,” he said, “As for me, come hell or high water, I stick by my friends.”
To sum up the argument in this film is not difficult. To take a position is. Mr. Curtis is arguing that a certain element in American intellectual and political life believes that Americans need to believe that their country is doing the work of God or at least good in the world. Perhaps they believe that this impression is what is necessary to the continuation of tax paying compliance? Curtis argues that these same politicians have no vision of a good or Godly society to offer and so they focus on the mission of defeating evil in the world. “Surely,” as long as the country is fighting something evil, then it must be doing the works of God and goodness.”
Thus, for Curtis, neo-conservatives NEED
a focus of evil that they can say that they are fighting. When communism
existed, that fear could be communism. When Bill Clinton was in office, that
fear could be Bill Clinton. When conservatives were in office, that fear could
best be directed at terrorism. In The
Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, the viewer is given
to understand (and it is impossible to miss this because of how often it is
said) that terrorism is no where near the danger to us that the neo-cons make
it out to be. “Lies became reality,” says Curtis, “They began to believe their
own fiction.” Over and over again he uses the word "fantasy" in describing the threat of Al-Qaeda.
Interestingly, he posits that the same exact phenomenon is what is animating the leaders of the terrorist movements as well. To Curtis, they also have become victims of their own fear propaganda, believing that under every rock is an American or Jewish imperialist threatening to rip the veils off their women and make them eat pork.
Personally, I think fear is a healthy part of a balanced emotional diet. It only damages us when it negates all other emotions and intuitions. Trust and reasons for trust are as real as fear and reasons for fear and it is obvious from any study of history that there are those who understand how to take advantage of human heard instincts to control populations through imaginative fear flogging. What this film offers may not be the actual truth but it is a good question. We generally can see when someone else in the world is manipulating people’s fear. We benefit from those in society that ask us if we too are being manipulated, regardless of whether or not we answer the question in the same way.
Curtis argues that both the Neo-Conservatives and the Islamic radicals believe in the need for “noble lies” – narratives that give societies’ meaning and a sense of social cohesion. Both have constructed imaginary realities that they believe serve people’s interests to believe. And both eventually become believers in the lies that they construct. After all, in telling them so often, they are the ones who hear them most often. I suppose you could argue the reality of this phenomenon by looking at Hitler who, even as he was being surrounded in his bunker in Berlin kept issuing orders as though he were living at the cusp of a thousand year Reich. To Curtis, the ideas of Leo Strauss, Said Qutb, Iman al-Zawahiri, Paul Wolfowitz, Osama Bin Laden, and Richard Pearle are all expressions of the need that Plato says in The Republic, that all states have for a convincing narrative of fear. If they do not have it in fact, they must invent it in fiction.
It is from this politics of fear that we are introduced to “The precautionary principle” and “The preventive paradigm” – assertions that possible scenarios that we fear can and should be the basic for public policy as much if not more than analysis of past events and present realities.
As for me, come hell or high water, I stick by my friends. Feel free to watch the documentary yourself. You will find it on youtube. Then read a critique like that of Daniel Pipes. Then make up your own mind.
Question for Comment: Have you ever been on the receiving end of someone deciding to act on unsubstantiated fears? Have you ever inflicted harm on someone because of your unsubstantiated (but intensely felt) fears?
Chasing Freedom,
American East, and The Visitor are
all movies about how 911 has impacted the lives of individuals in American
society who are of Middle Eastern descent. It is safe to say that Osama Bin
Laden and his ilk have a global agenda that does not allow for friendship
between people of America and the region of the world they come from and that they want
to see returned to some vision of former glory. From Bin Laden's perspective, hopes of
a return to 7th Century greatness are contingent upon a State of
conflict first. You will not get that sense from any of these movies. They depict a
world where such conflict and suspicion are doing damage to people on all sides
of the conflict.Dragging us all down.
Yesterday, I read the 200 page abridged version of the 9/11 Commission Report. What is remarkable about this document is how it originated from the effort of ten politicians, five from each party but it reads like a history text rather than a hatchet job. The leaders of the commission had a good deal of graduate work in history in their backgrounds and you can see the results in the final product. “We want a report that our grandchildren can take of the shelf in fifty years and say ‘This is what happened” said Thomas Kean, chair of the 911 Commission.
On American flight 11, one of the hijackers depressed the
microphone to tell the passengers to stay calm. Accidentally, he depressed the
microphone that sent a message to the ground control and not the plane. “Nobody
move. Everything will be okay” he said. “If you try to make any moves you will
endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.” I wonder if, in whatever
sort of paradise this man expected to wind up in, if this sort of total
dishonesty is accepted? It occurred to me that it made an interesting paradigm
for the specific Al-Qaeda ideology that brought him to that moment.As others had been willing to lie to him to get what they wanted, he was willing to lie to the passengers of the plane he knew he would be murdering in a matter of minutes.
In the black box recordings of the flight deck of United 93,
as the passengers were rushing the cockpit, the sound of the Al-Qaeda pilot
asking his fellow hijackers if he should take the plane down can be heard. “Allah
is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!” He is making a theological argument
with a 747 and a plane full of innocent lives. Indeed, the last seven lines of
the transcript of the plane’s voice recorder are the words “Allah is the
greatest” with one exception. The word “No.”It was as though these men believed that the keys to paradise were to be found in having those words on their lips as they made the transition out of this world.
One of the things I learned from the book is the Arabic word “tikfiri”. It is the word used for people like Osama Bin Laden who freely define other Muslims as unbelievers if they do not ascribe to the version of Islam that he does. What emerges from the debris after reading this book is how both Al Qaeda and its enemies have felt a violation of trust. Osama Bin Laden asserts that Americans come to the Middle East, Saudi Arabia in particular, with a promise that they are there to help, to protect, to serve but that this is only the mask of an imperialist anti-Islamic crusade. Similarly, Americans have reacted strongly to the feeling of betrayal. That these terrorists made use of America’s basic openness to attack us. These men came to America and signed up for flight schools and they were allowed to do so. They were not singled out and interrogated and strip searched at our airports. They were not treated as enemies as they went about planning and carrying out the preparation for this attack.
It is impossible not to see that at the heart of the conflict is not simply violence but betrayal.
And this can only be healed by non-violence and a re-commitment to trust. One of the books on Islam that I have read recently
included a statement by a man who said that the conflict is not going to be
easy to resolve because of the absolutes that exist at the foundation of two
different views of where the world should be going. Both sides know that there
is something radically dangerous about the ideas of the other and thus, loving
the people who hold those ideas, while disagreeing with them is a bit like “loving
the bomb but disliking the explosion”.
Question for Comment: Can people who hold ideas that cannot coexist still like each other? Trust one another? Work together? Or must the IDEAS they hold eventually corrode the relationship they build? Or visa versa?
“Great books are like wine. My books are like water,” Mark Twain once said. But Mark Twain said a lot of things worth remembering. I just finished the PBS Documentary on Twain’s life. I found myself wishing I had watched it backwards as it is hard to see the lights going out in his life at the end. It is sad to see the lightning strikes of tragedy taking away his great soul and Spirit.
Of the many things there were to love about this man, but I liked the line “He was a prodigious noticer.”
I find it sad that Ken Burns will probably not create a two hour biography of my life. He does such a fine job of it. His documentary on the Civil War was moving – tracing the arcs of the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. His documentary on Twain has the same effect on me though it traces the arc of one life. Twain teaches us how to be human one of the commentators says of him. He has given us “laughter out of a font of sorrow” says another commentator. Would that the same could be said of my teaching someday. I feel like I am slipping away from that ideal the more I need to find teaching work to support myself.
Confession: I teach a college Ethics class. Thus far in the course, we have discussed ethical theories that can help us process difficult ethical decisions in our lives. But we have shied away from the debate of contentious issues. My own hope has been to begin to share common processes for ethical decision making before we descend into the murky depths of those issues that are likely to make it impossible to do anything mutually. And now we have a week left and two of the students have decided to do their presentations on two of the most controversial ethical dilemmas we face and will face as a nation. Abortion and Euthanasia.
So, in the interest of exposing myself to as many sides of these contemporary issues as I can, I have been watching and reading what I can. Tonight’s documentary, Unborn in the US is one that I cannot imagine anyone not finding something to cringe about. The filmmakers have not attempted to explain anything. They simply film people who care about this issue the most deeply doing what they do and saying what they say. They seem to have made the decision to make the primary focus of their documentary those people most involved with the radical pro-life movement. By nature of their endeavors in the field of public protest, it is only natural that the film also gets to cover, with some substantial face time, the most vociferous of their opponents.
No matter which side of this debate you are on, this movie will introduce you to people that you will find it impossible to like. By design, the film focuses on the ragged and emotional polar edges of the debate while it responds to those few who struggle to stay in that middle between apathy and screed.
One reviewer of the movie at Amazon thought
that perhaps this fixation with the high conflict proponents of the two sides
was a mistake. She writes:
“It was with great anticipation and expectation that I partook of "Unborn in the USA" - a thought-provoking, insightful presentation about our nation's most divisive social issue.
As a woman whose long and tortured journey has hardly been unfettered, I welcomed the opportunity to observe the filmmakers as they presented proponents of both sides of the abortion debate. I wished to be challenged, touched and informed. None of us is omnipotent or infallible enough to be unmovable, in my opinion.
For the most part, the producers succeeded. However, they committed one cardinal sin here: allotting inordinate amounts of screen time to the undeserving - on both sides.”
And yet, periodically, one is forced to consider whether it is the unbending and uncompromising on both sides that are the only ones to “get it”. As a historian, one is tempted to ask; “Who understood slavery better? Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, or John Brown?” And yet one also must ask, “Who was likely to succeed at ending slavery eventually? Abe Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, or John Brown?”
This movie demonstrates how many ways there are of NOT coming to a resolution. Alas, it shows us precious little about how to succeed at it, and for that reason I suspect that many who watch will simply say “Now we know why we should not bring this topic up for discussion.”
I sit here wondering if, even after a full semester of learning about various theories of ethical decision making, a class like mine is ready to look at this question – a question I even wonder if I should be blogging about.
Earlier today, I was listening to Hucklebury Finn talk of his moral dilemma over slavery.
“So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter - and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:
Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. Huck Finn.
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking - thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and suchlike times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
"All right, then, I'll go to hell" - and tore it up.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Question for comment: Do you think it is best to leave an issue alone if you know that no one is going to change their minds about it? Or does that fact cause you to want to force it to the surface?
Kadosh is one of those movies I am tempted not to blog about. It is an Israeli movie in which secular Israeli actors play Orthodox Jewish characters. Amos Gitai has chosen to focus on the experience of women in two somewhat irregular but never-the-less, realistic and not altogether uncommon, Orthodox marriages.
The word, Kadosh, in Hebrew can be translated “Holy” or “Separate” and has the connotation of an attribute of God that suggests that He is immaterial. Mind but not body. Separate. Altogether different, above, uncorrupted. In some sense, the title describes the way that this community of people, in its search for Holiness and absolute separation from the world, has, at times separated itself from its material existence – Its understanding of the way the material body, emotion, and instinct actually “work”. The emphasis on the spiritual aspect of life minimizes (at best) and represses (at worst) the influence of our materiality. Decisions are made by rabbis that affect people’s deepest psyches and yet that do not take those psyches into consideration as a consequence of their abiding focus upon the Torah and the Talmud and the Ethics of duty,
By Talmudic law, a man may (and some Rabbis say, must) repudiate his wife if she has not born him sons in the period of ten years, and the two main characters in this film, Rivkah and Meir, are a husband and wife who, though they love one another, have reached this place in their relationship to one another and to their community. It would be a mistake to say that this movie is disrespectful of religious communities and their laws. It isn’t. But it would also be a mistake to say that it does not evoke within the viewer a certain displeasure at some religious communities that seem to negate the power of that within us that is not simply a mind that has memorized the Torah.
Carol Gilligan, in her influential book, In a Different Voice, speaks of the tendency all societies have had to allow men to speak for women, to monopolize the male experience as “the human experience”. She insists that women often repress that voice that they have to share and one gets a great sense of this in the character, Rivkah, who almost never speaks but says, with her silence and with her eyes, more than anyone else.
A few quotes from Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice speak to the need to hear women like those in this movie.
“My questions are about psychological processes and theory, particularly theories in which men's experience stands for all of human experience--theories which eclipse the lives of women and shut out women's voices. I saw that by maintaining these ways of seeing and speaking about human lives, men were leaving out women, but women were leaving out themselves”
“The differences between women and men which I describe center on a tendency for women and men to make different relational errors -- for men to think that if they know themselves, following Socrates' dictum, they will also know women, and for women to think that if only they know others, they will come to know themselves.”
“The failure to see the different reality of women's lives and to hear the differences in their voices stems in part from the assumption that there is a single mode of social experience and interpretation.”
In the end, the final shot of the movie makes it clear that the target of the movie is not so much the men who force these people to make the soul-suffocating decisions that they wind up making “for God” – it is the books that these people revere. The last shot of the movie is a shot of the bookshelves full of Torah and Talmud. Nothing is said. But the point is undeniably self-evident. As much as these books offer comfort and solace and meaning to all of the characters in their daily lives, men and women alike, they contain that which is soul killing to some as well.
And therein lies the reason that I hesitate to blog about the film. Silently, quietly, respectfully, it says to the viewer that no set of religious guidelines can orchestrate from ancient history, the lives of contemporary people. “One size fits nobody” as I often say. So long as people are not universal, law codes that try to be cannot serve them all.
Question for Comment: Is there anything soul killing about the authorities that you try live your life accountable to? Can anyone say that their source of authority always commands in accordance to what we as individuals need?
"A Convention of Moral Lunatics": The Rutland, Vermont, Free Convention of 1858.
READ HERE. Just one more reason why I love my State. It is only 1858 and it is already attracting oddballs like bees to honey. And if you read the article, you see that these oddballs do not all agree with one another. What they agree on is that the world should be a better place than it is. What they disagree about is how to make it so. What they agree about is that everyone should have a platform on which to make the best case for their argument. What they disagree on is what that argument should be. Temperance, Abolition, Millennialism, Spiritualism, Mesmerism, Herbs, Channelers, Women's Rights Activists, Cult of Domesticity Advocates, Anarchists, Celibates, Shakers, Free-Lovers, and names you can't even pronounce gathered on Grove Street in Rutland (the street I grew up on) to hash out their various theories of alternative thinking.
It was like the Olympics of screw balls drawing people from all over New England, America, and the world. If I could go back to a moment in Vermont History, I would go back to this summer of 1858 and walk around the grounds of the Rutland Free Convention with a digital camera and a tape recorder. Thats what I would do.
Question for Comment: What moment in your State's History would you go back to?
What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.
—Søren Kierkegaard, Letter to Peter Wilhelm Lund dated August 31, 1835
Existentialism comes to Valhalla. The Bothersome Man, a rather bizarre Norwegian movie, has its disturbing moments. It is difficult to decide if those moments take place when the main character, Andreas, cuts his finger off or gets himself run over by a train a few times, or if those moments are in the vast spaces between those somewhat gruesome moments when seemingly NOTHING of interest happens that Andreas might lodge in his mind as a worthwhile memory.
Andreas, we surmise, kills himself in the opening scene; I suspect because he finds everything in life completely vapid and banal. Everything seems absolutely and totally material to him and so he throws himself in front of an oncoming train, only to wake up in a world one level further down in an existentialist’s Dante’s inferno where everything is one degree MORE banal, vapid, and meaningless. Refusing to be satisfied with a world that has no pain but no meaning (and no smell and no passion), Andreas eventually discovers a crack in a basement wall through which he discovers the slightest hint – the slightest smell of beauty. A woman singing. A child laughing. When he jackhammers through, he discovers, yet ever so briefly, a world, like the one he came from in the life before this. Not entirely meaningful but one level less vapid than the one he has wound up in. It is a world where you can at least taste the food. A world like ours.
Alas, “the angels” in this world he has been deposited in will not tolerate this breaking down of walls. They come and haul him off, seal up the wall, and stuff Andreas in a bus that dumps him off in a world one level lower in the hell of meaninglessness. No one can understand why Andreas cannot simply be happy with meaninglessness and order. This new world he has been sent to, we surmise from the howling of the wind as the final scene draws to a close, is one level chillier and less interesting than the last. In short, to kill yourself is not a sin. It is something people “just do” from time to time. But to try and find meaning? That cannot be tolerated. People who do that are taken away and deposited in worlds where that hope becomes even more impossible to achieve.
"...how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!... There can be no peace without hope." - Albert Camus, 1948, The Plague
Question for Comment: What do you think you will "wake up to" when you die?
I just watched FRONTLINE'S Breaking the Bank. I am not sure what to say that has not already been said really. Really. It is like watching Rome burn. Why talk about it? I think I will just share some lines from Juvenal's Satires, descriptions of life in Rome in the days before its fall.
"Why tell how my heart burns dry with rage when I see the people hustled by a mob of retainers attending on one who has defrauded and debauched his ward, or on another who has been condemned by a futile verdict—for what matters infamy if the cash be kept? The exiled Marius carouses from the eighth hour of the day and revels in the wrath of Heaven, while you, poor Province, win your cause and weep!
. . . Would you not like to fill up a whole note-book at the street crossings when you see a forger borne along upon the necks of six porters, and exposed to view on this side and on that in his almost naked litter, and reminding you of the lounging Maecenas one who by help of a scrap of paper and a moistened seal has converted himself into a fine and wealthy gentleman?
. . . For when was Vice more rampant? When did the maw of Avarice gape wider? When was gambling so reckless? Men come not now with purses to the hazard of the gaming table, but with a treasure-chest beside them. What battles will you there see waged with a cashier for armour-bearer! Is it a simple form of madness to lose a hundred thousand sesterces, and not have a shirt to give to a shivering slave? Which of our grandfathers built such numbers of villas, or dined by himself off seven courses?
"What can I do at Rome? I cannot lie . . . No man will get my help in robbery, and therefore no governor will take me on his staff . . . A man's word is believed in exact proportion to the amount of cash which he keeps in his strong-box."
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/juv-sat1eng.html
Question for Comment: What do you think is the root cause of the present financial crisis?
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