Tuesday, March 14, 2006
One or the other.
Just finished watching The Road to Guantanamo, Michael Winterbottom's docudrama on three British youths who were caught in Afghanistan and spent three years in the American gulag. I emphasize the drama bit: this movie as much a "balanced" documentary as Fahrenheit 911. The basic facts though, are correct - they were imprisoned, subjected to various tortures, and eventually released; ironically enough, their police records in the UK exposed a discrepancy in the US-fabricated "evidence" that claimed they were partying it up with Bin Laden at the time one of the three was working at Curry's. Score one more for military intelligence. The film presses all the right buttons, and should by rights fire up the good old moral outrage. So why do I feel so numb inside?
After four years of this, I'm quite inured to the propaganda, both left and right,and I suspect many people are too. 99% of people, when you speak to them, will have one opinion or the other; but in the end, what we all want to do is get on with life, work, school or whatever; we "sleepwalk into dictatorship" simply because there is no waking up from the everyday struggle of just getting along. Meanwhile people like Shafiq Rasul and his cohorts get caught up at the fringes. People are murdered in war, children die, families are torn apart, innocents are jailed and tortured, millions starve while reality show winners and football players burn money away. At the extremes, the world is a barren, fruitless place. One or the other - feast or famine; heaven or hell. It's always been like that. Meanwhile the rest of us get by.
We retreat into the safety of the bell curve because it is large, and it swallows us up in comforting averages. Average income, average status, average life. Quite possibly, I will live and die unremarked except by my family and friends, as average people do. Quite possibly, I could be OK with that.
_random stuff
[movies]
After four years of this, I'm quite inured to the propaganda, both left and right,and I suspect many people are too. 99% of people, when you speak to them, will have one opinion or the other; but in the end, what we all want to do is get on with life, work, school or whatever; we "sleepwalk into dictatorship" simply because there is no waking up from the everyday struggle of just getting along. Meanwhile people like Shafiq Rasul and his cohorts get caught up at the fringes. People are murdered in war, children die, families are torn apart, innocents are jailed and tortured, millions starve while reality show winners and football players burn money away. At the extremes, the world is a barren, fruitless place. One or the other - feast or famine; heaven or hell. It's always been like that. Meanwhile the rest of us get by.
We retreat into the safety of the bell curve because it is large, and it swallows us up in comforting averages. Average income, average status, average life. Quite possibly, I will live and die unremarked except by my family and friends, as average people do. Quite possibly, I could be OK with that.
_random stuff
[movies]
Labels: random stuff
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