There’s still hope
Bookworm on Apr 22 2008 at 11:09 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
One of the reasons I blog is because, while I shifted Left Right after 9/11, Mr. Bookworm didn’t. He still gets his news only from the old media — the New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR — while I, as you know, continue to read the old, but added a lot of new, all of which caused me to shift my views. The blogging, therefore, is an outlet for an intellectual energy that doesn’t have anywhere to go right now at home.
Mr. Bookworm, however, took two positions this weekend that I found most heartening. First, he watched Syriania, George Clooney’s 2005 movie. I found the first half hour so incomprehensible that I, being a very plot-driven movie watcher, walked out. I gathered that evil oil companies were trying to create or worsen war, but that was only a best guess given the incredible incoherence before me. Mr. Bookworm stuck with the whole movie. When it was over, I asked him how it was. “It was awful,” he said. “It was the most anti-American thing I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how they could make something like that. It was all about the Chinese being the good guys and coming to the rescue. And it was really stupid. I’m going to do something I’ve never done before on Netflix. I’m giving it one star.” Bravo, Mr. Bookworm, for both recognizing the movie’s central message and for hating it.
Sadly, a significant number of Netflix viewers, if their reviews are anything to go by, think it’s a good movie at a factual level (although most concede that it’s incoherent and, therefore, boring). (I don’t know if you can see those reviews if you don’t have a Netflix account, but they’re here.) I didn’t read all 1,600 reviews, but I did page through several pages of them, and was able to pick up some overriding themes.
One review encouraged watching it because “What it does do, is show us what goes on in the Middle East. Why some things are the way they are. How someone can be your friend today, but b/c of shifts in policy can be your enemy the next day.” Thank goodness we have George Clooney to explain the complexities of Middle Eastern policy: oil men bad, America bad, Chinese good.
Another viewer agreed that it was a splendid, apolitical explication of the troubles in the Middle East:
Robert Baer’s non-fiction book is transposed apolitically, despite all the interviews and the trailer itself. If you are naive enough to think we in the US are safe and warm without the services of the CIA or those hotel room meetings of men in expensive suits… Without them the US would look like Mexico. We should all pray every night that those men keep us rich, fat and happy. ‘Nuff said.
Paging through several screens of reviews, most of which were concerned with whether it was boring or challenging, led me to only two reviewers who found the movie’s politics off-putting. One of them correctly identified the political orientation that drives Clooney’s movie making:
left wing clap trap. george clooney’s personal politics enters into this movie. america’s bad, big oil evil, america evil, big oil bad, etc etc etc. I turned it off when they had the evil CIA blowing up the moderate socialist arab prince who wanted to bring democracy and womens rights to the middle east. (yah right)big oil cooperates with the evil government to murder an innocent man and his family in the name of greed and the evil neo-cons. of course it must be true! more of hollywood’s always portraying anything at all CIA/USA as the bad guys. and in this movie, the young terrorists are protrayed rather simpathetically, after all they are just poor young men being abused by the bad persian gulf states that our government supports just because we want the oil, so of course they have a right to be upset. what a bunch of crap. I admire cloonies attempt to do something beyond the usual junk hollywood puts out, but this is so biased left wing anti-corp anti gov anti big bussiness anti-bush it’s just tooo much.
Another was more pithy, and pretty much reflects Mr. Bookworm’s attitude about the movie:
Excellent movie-making craftsmanship doesn’t redeem the most anti-American movie to come out of Hollywood in living memory. I was appalled to see suicide bombing portrayed as rational and justified, and during the act itself there is heroic plucking of the harp. And the muddled conspiratorial plotting of big business and the CIA is reminiscent of Oliver Stone’s JFK, another well crafted disgrace. This is the very worst of Hollywood.
Mr. Bookworm also surprised me by announcing that, if the election were held today, he’d vote for McCain.
Related posts:
Email This Post To A Friend
19 Responses to “There’s still hope”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Bookie,
“One of the reasons I blog is because, while I shifted Left after 9/11…” YOU shifted Left? Typo? I assume – either that are, well, no….has to be a typo.
Typo — unless I started out to the right of the John Birch Society.
What I suffer from is like an evil variation of dyslexia. I don’t just switch letters and words, I write their opposites.
You shifted so far to the Left, Book, that you ended up on the middle-right, Book. Isolationist paleocons shifted so far to the right, they ended up allying with the extreme left. Extreme Leftists ended up so extreme that they became allied with fundamentalist Christians on how God is punishing America and the military.
Btw, this is why we continue to have wars. You will never convince the great majority, or even plurality, of mankind on almost any topic or policy or system of ethics/culture/law. So when these various factions and viewpoints collide, conflict results and eventually organized warfare.
People usually don’t notice this because the aggressive impulse has been re-directed into productive avenues of freedom of speech and economy here in the United States. But they will start noticing it once they have lost a couple of wars.
Americans have never known what it is like to be on the other side of the coin in a totally unbalanced power equation. The Founding Fathers, who experienced it with Britain, are long dead and few of the current generation take their behavior and ethics from them.
It makes a lot of sense, then, that current generations of Americans feel a need to try to make themselves think that they understand what it is like to be a Middle Easterner looking at American power. But they don’t understand and they never will, for they lack a key ingredient. That key ingredient is cosmopolitanism or aka an open mind. An open mind is not just a garbage in and garbage out door, an open mind has internal filters that discards the bad and highlights the good.
Since current generations get their thinking abilities from the media and academia, it is no wonder that they don’t have an open mind about people with less power than the US, such as other nations or ethnicities.
This is the very worst of Hollywood.
No, this is the very best of Hollywood since Hollywood has only ever been best at crafting propaganda against their enemies. WWII just happened to have us in the good position of having the Stalin-Soviet-future mass murderers as allies.
“George Clooney’s personal politics enters into this movie.” Imagine that. Isn’t that a bit like saying “Bookworm’s personal politics enter her blog”?
What is very damaging about these reflexively anti-American movies is that, while we can call them for what they are in the U.S., they are viewed as gospel in other parts of the world, fomenting hatred against us among people who do not get other points of view.
I once had a (U.S.) college-educated Saudi tell me with a straight face about how the CIA regularly assassinated Americans to protect its Middle East oil interests. How did he know this? He saw it on Robert Redford’s “Three Days of the Condor”.
People who make movies like this end up creating propaganda windfalls for Al-Qaeda and other organizations that only encourage them to attack and kill Americans. Meanwhile, people like Clooney and his fellow travelers happily pocket their blood money – Hollywood today generates more-than half of its revenues from movie sales outside of the U.S. I guess Clooney et al are simply pandering to their market at our expense.
Good news about Mr. Book, though. A thin ray of sunshine through the clouds?
The only difference being that Bookworm announces that this is a political site authored by a conservative rather than attempting to portray her work as something it isn’t.
By the way, I am hearing from a lot of Democrats who plan to vote for McCain. They sound very embarrassed by what is going on in the Democrat Primary.
Danny, that might be the same reaction as when people said voting for Hillary wasn’t bad back when McCain was still contesting the nomination with Romney. Meaning, temporary and without much substance.
Danny, that might be the same reaction as when people said voting for Hillary wasn’t bad back when McCain was still contesting the nomination with Romney. Meaning, temporary and without much substance.
A propaganda movie designed to wow the masses is very different from the personal recollections read by the person’s friends and associates.
People who make movies like this end up creating propaganda windfalls for Al-Qaeda and other organizations that only encourage them to attack and kill Americans.
It does more than encourage people who are already against America. It helps them recruit new members and to convince them of the justice of their cause when they take American materials and say “see, even Americans say that America is evil, so why shouldn’t we believe it and kill them for it”.
No, YM – I think that McCain is capturing the hearts and minds of the Reagan Democrats. This is for real.
Somewhat off topic, I know, but Wolf Howling taps into a great post noting the similarities between Chicago and Mosul. http://instapundit.com/archives2/018200.php. He’s got a point – we had a very bloody spate of violence this past weekend. Will Obama say we should pull out of Chicago?
That’s partially what Iraq is for. To learn how to solve tribal and destabilizing problems such as foreign terrorism and insurgencies so that we won’t be like the French and have to experience domestic terrorism and insurgency without the tools required to deal with such effectively.
Once one has faced Al Qaeda in Iraq then street gangs, Soros funded propaganda outfits, and political opportunists and megalomaniacs in the United States start to look not so fearsome or unsolvable. If, and this is a big if, the lessons learned in America’s wars are applied to America’s domestic situation.
In the Revolution, a stronger central government was needed if only to pay the wages of the soldiers fighting for the Colonies. After the Civil War, blacks benefited in peace what people learned in war, things like freeing the slaves would save the Union. After WWII, women and blacks got more rights and respect due to the lessons learned in warfare.
One reason why Democrats and terrorists would need Iraq to fail is because a victory there would erode both the powers of terrorists and Democrats. Crime, poverty, and corruption starts lookingly really uneven if Americans can solve such problems in Iraq, yet the Democrats and Hamas/Hizbollah can’t do the same in their home territories. It sets up a cognitive dissonance and increases the chance for rebellion and instability.
Bookworm:
Your story comes under a Passover miracle.
Better than parting the waters, more powerful than 10 plagues and better tasting than matzah…………………………
Redemption and Illumination in a fell swoop-Mr. Bookworm acknowledges a bad movie, with bad motives AND a vote for McCain if the election were held today.
Get that man a good pair of sunglasses, I do believe he has seen the light.
In relation to the instapundit link, I think it illustrates a repeating pattern that people should have, by now at least, noticed.
Incumbents and people like Bush are trying to accomplish something, either good as in the case of Iraq or bad as in the case of Jefferson or Spitzer. The insurgency or challenger is trying to tear down what the incumbent is accomplishing through sabotage, complaints, criticism, or things like filibusters. Bush, because he is the incumbent and the one in charge of the war in Iraq, has to contend with people attempting to sabotage his works. This puts Bush at a natural disadvantage because if you are the one trying to do something, like getting to your car to go to work, while someone else stops you, sabotages your car, and tries to blow you up, you are at a natural disadvantage.
Insurgencies and terrorism have one great advantage over the occupation. The occupation has to deal with the people looking towards the occupation for safety, work, and order. All the insurgency has to do is to blow stuff up and kill people. That’s far easier to making the trains run on time or getting clean water and electricity. Especially when the people you are targeting for execution are women and children, rather than armed soldiers.
This situation, however, isn’t static. There is no rule or law that says Bush has to always be the one that tries to defend against sabotage. Bush can turn the tables on someone like Obama and attack Obama’s attempt to build something for himself, like in his home city of Chicago which Instapundit’s link mentioned.
Bush doesn’t like being on the offense, though, which means enemies like Obama and many terrorists get to strike the first place. I think we can safely discard the idea that Hillary or Obama were ever part of a “loyal opposition” that criticized and opposed incumbent policies for the greater good of the nation.
So long as people like Obama get to criticize the war effort and hamstring Bush’s efforts, while Bush tries to make pathetic excuses for why they should stop beating on him and crushing Iraqi infants underfoot with their plans for withdrawal, people will continue to disfavor Bush and favor the attacker, which is Obama in this case.
Sooner or later people have to get out of their shell and attack, and it doesn’t matter what form that attack comes from, whether Petraeus inspired or just cause somebody got mad.
I especially like the part about how China comes to the rescue. Against the evil USA and its multinational oil companies!
Remember, China is the country that was shipping tons of war munitions to Zimbabwe… to support Mugabe, the socialist dictator who has utterly ruined that country. China is the country that keeps the slaughter in Darfur in the Sudan going. China is supporting Iran, who wants to rule the entire Middle East and control all of its oil via nuclear blackmail – and they will explode the next nuclear bomb should they succeed in getting it.
China! The savior of freedom-loving peoples everywhere! Oh, it is so very rich.