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Banned
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Originally Posted by matthew330
For me this is a very comforting thread. When the most critical the left can get over this particular situation is a few paragraphs of neoconservative thought from a book written in french, but perhaps english, follwed by..
"i think you need to be much more careful than this guy was in framing the questions he wanted to address"........
...the politics board here makes quite a bit of sense. The predominant view of the world on this board is clearly not reflective of this country in general. Perhaps the reason this mentality finds it's home here. What i find comfort in is the fact that the only people who will ever take yourselves seriously, are yourselves. You guys put alot of effort into it though, I'll give you that.
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What a coincidence, matthew330, because I read something just 24 hours ago that left me with the exact opposite opinion than you posted. I know that you are wrong, because it is easy to see that the high water mark of the tide of sentiment and an ideology that tolerated no dissent of "official policy", the tide that bestowed on Bush a <a href="http://www.pollkatz.homestead.com/files/pollkatzmainGRAPHICS_8911_image001.gif">70 percent approval rating</a>, and was stong enough to boot off Phil Donahue and intimidate the Dixie Chicks by attempting to destroy demand for their music CD's and concert tickets because they dare to speak out against Bush....that tide is now at a low ebb, and all that is left is the stench that comes with low tide...the rotten things that are revealed, the things that Jay Bennish exposed his students to. The balance that was concealed by the deliberate intimidation of the corporatists in charge. Adjust to the shift in the tide. Hollywood producers saw that it was beginning...three years ago, and they bet money on it.
A guy that I've come to admire for the clarity of his writing much of the time, wrote about the climate in the USA around the time of the Oscar awards, <a href="http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2003_03_23_digbysblog_archive.html#91308807">three years ago...</a>
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.....So, when I watched the Oscars last night, something I normally enjoy and go out of my way to see, I was just hoping for someone to say something heartfelt about peace. I was actually hoping that a lot of them would say something about peace --- not necessarily in the political sense, but in the universal value sense. Instead, sadly, most of them just pretended that nothing was happening.
But a few -- foreigners mostly -- did say some words about peace. Almodovar said, “I also want to dedicate this award to all the people that are raising their voices in favor of peace, respect of human rights, democracy and international legality....
....But then Adrian Brody, the guy nobody expected to win, came up and let himself be human and emotional --- for his win, naturally, but also because of the the nature of the role he was being rewarded for playing. He said:
<i>“My experiences of making <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0253474/">this film</a> made me very aware of the sadness and the dehumanization of people at times of war,” he said. “Whatever you believe in, if it’s God or Allah, may he watch over you and let’s pray for a peaceful and swift resolution.”</i>
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....and he wrote the following at Oscar awards time, this year:
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<a href="http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_digbysblog_archive.html#114161044297679460">Three Years Later by Digby<a/>
Three years ago. And I am now desensitized to the images I wrote about in the beginning of that post, the war images and the pictures of death. And new awful images have come and gone since then. I now argue with people about whether it is acceptable to torture -- a concept that would have been completely foreign to me three years ago. I would just as easily have believed we would be arguing about whether it is acceptable to molest children. I now accept that the president and his administration truly and deeply believe they are above the law, something I would have scoffed at not five years ago after the endless bellowing from the right during the Great Clinton Panty raid.
On the other hand, a lot has changed. Bush was a colossus, then. His approval rating was <a href="http://www.pollkatz.homestead.com/files/pollkatzmainGRAPHICS_8911_image001.gif">around 70%</a>. The Dixie Chick boycott had just hit the news. It was a difficult time for dissent as I'm sure you all recall. The pressure on the media was perhaps exemplified most starkly by this:
<a href="http://www.allyourtv.com/0203season/news/02252003donahue.html">A leaked in-house report</a> said Phil Donahue's show would present a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war." The problem: "He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives." The danger --- quickly averted by NBC --- was that the show could become "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."
The good old days. How nice then to realize that this year's crop of socially conscious and politically themed movies must have been green-lighted right around that time. It usually takes between 18 months and forever to get a movie done. Therefore, while I was fretting about the movies losing their political voice because nobody spoke out at the Oscars, Hollywood was quietly setting about speaking out in a much more powerful way: through its art.
People can't stop talking about how "unsuccessful" all the movies were this year and that everybody wants to watch nothing but re-makes of "the Sound of Music." (<a href="http://jameswolcott.com/archives/2006/03/hix_nix_crix_pi.php">See Wolcott</a> for a quick dispatch of that braindead trope.) But the truth is that all these movies succeeded as art, as politics and as popular works on their own terms. Hollywood made these films that are nominated this year because the artists involved had something to say, but they also made them for money. All of them were profitable, which is more than we can say for overpriced behemoths like that piece of shit "The Alamo" which lost 113 million or "Sahara" which lost 75 million and counting.
Perhaps it sounds silly to say that it took courage to make these movies, but I think it did. <h3>That night three years ago when I was watching the Oscars, I wondered if the new Republican reality would be with us forever. The shallow, fatcat, money grubbing studios made a bet that three years later this country would come to its senses and reject that awful craziness.</h3> Damned if they weren't right. Bush and the Republicans are in deep, deep shit today, Iraq is a mess, race is once again a hot topic and the cause of civil rights marches on. Maybe those guys and gals are worth the ridiculous sums of money they are paid to predict the zeitgeist after all.
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Last edited by host; 03-06-2006 at 10:51 PM..
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