commentary

I watched Fahrenheit 9/11, as I'm sure many of you have by now.  It is a 
brilliant piece of propaganda, though I'm sure I'll get my ass burned for 
saying so.  Glosses over some points, ignores others, including Bush's 
relationship with the Christian fundamentalist movement.

The sequence in the film representing Iraqi life before the March 19, 2003 
attack was difficult to swallow.  Moore chose footage of people laughing, 
dancing.  Perhaps it was meant to symbolize that the Iraqi people had some 
semblance of a normal life before we blew the shit out of their country, but I 
can't believe they were uniformly happy, for crying out loud.  C'mon Mike.

Turning to the issue of military recruitment, Moore did an excellent job of 
pointing out how the poor are heavily recruited and enlisted.  For some, 
military service is not A choice, it is the ONLY logical option.  In a recent 
Mother Jones, a young soldier from NYC who was blinded and crippled spoke 
about how lucky he was to have a real job, real wages for a couple of years.  

Some would say that the participants in military service have been apprised of 
the risks such service would entail and deserve no pity.  That would perhaps 
be true if entering into service were a bargain made by equals, persons with 
equal economic and social power and that is, in my mind, not the case.

I was sickened by the footage shot by Swedish filmmaker Urban Hamid (for a 
quick rundown of his story, see July 6, 2004's DN!).  Soldiers talking about 
pumping music through their sound systems until shooting and napalming people 
became a game.  We teach these men to dehumanize their opponents, to kill as 
many as possible without mercy and on command, and then wonder why they can't 
treat detainees as prisoners of war instead of chew toys. 

After watching this movie, I was rereading a book by a science fiction writer 
about an America going to shit while headed by a moron president (on another 
note, how did some Americans think Bush was a good choice? The guy is an 
obvious idiot.  Did all of America's idiots stand up and say, goddamn, there's 
our guy!  He's one of us!) and came across this passage.

"It's natural for a man to defend what's dear to him: his own life, his home, 
his family.  But in order to make him fight on behalf of his rulers, the rich 
and powerful who are too cunning to fight their own battles--in short, to 
defend not himself but people whom he's never met and moreover would not care 
to be in the same with him--you have to condition him into loving violence not 
for the benefits it bestows on him but for its own sake."

-John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up

-x
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Let freedom reign, ass.
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