Taking advantage of the Netflix and Hulu.com streaming, I had a nice week of documentary watching. Of course, as I streamed them, their were some that I couldn’t get to much into and so felt quite free to halt. The ones that I completed though, consisted primary of these…
The King of Kong. Man, I’d been wanting to see this for a long. Time! The story of Billy Mitchell, the fellow who got the Donkey Kong world record (among many others) in the early 1980’s and another fellows recent attempt to defeat that record. Donkey Kong was one of the first games that I was “good” at (until that fateful day at the Red Robin on Burnside when punk-ass Jon beat me and I moved onto other games), so it was fun to watch this story… It was also somewhat gratifying to have them especially cover the difficulty of the Third Elevators as that level was my fatal downfall. What becomes somewhat surprising is the politics and cliquishness of the scene. The same major player have been around since the old days (including the fellow who is in charge of official records keeping) and they don’t seem to take to well towards new comers trying to unseat the champ.
Crawford. Uff. Man. The story of what happens to a small Texas town when the Governor of Texas decides to by a ranch in the town as he makes his play for President. I found that theme to not be as interesting as it was to listen to the things that these people have to say in general. Primarily non-analytical pro-government, pro-military, pro-god, anti-peace… I am always torn in that way that I do (or at least want to) appreciated the reputation of genuineness and community spirit shown by small town America, but also mortified by what they sometimes say in their attempts at honesty. I would almost rather that they behave in decent ways that are dishonest to themselves then have them believe that we can go and bomb all to hell any foreign country that we want for no legitimate reason. All in all, somewhat disturbing. In the few high-point’s to this town are a thoughtful teacher who tries to teach her students to think about things and be somewhat analytical and one youth who really does try to understand the truth and express it. By the end of the movie, neither of them are living in Crawford anymore…
Welcome to Macintosh. Now this is a good Macintosh documentary! Way better than that terrible Macheads that I watched a while back! It is a history of Apple, of the Macintosh and its development and of the followers of the mac. Covering Apple’s successes and missteps with interest and sincerity, it also has some good speakers, including Guy Kawasaki(!), Apple engineers, bloggers and a lot of people who were around Apple and the Mac in the old days. The filmmakers are obviously big fans of Apple and though they are strongly supportive of Steve and though they wisely tie the success of Apple to his vision, personality and his person itself, they aren’t blindly mired within his halo effect… Though some of the people interview in the movie are.
Forgiving Dr Mengele. This was an interesting and enlightening story. Forgiving Dr Mengele is the story of a woman who had been a prisoner in Auschwitz. Her and her sister where twins so they we, um, enlisted to be some of Doctor Mengele’s experimental subjects for his genetic testing. The women, now elderly, has decided that to continue on with her life she needs to put it behind her and forgive Dr Mengele. Not because his actions should be forgiven, but because she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life under that cloud. Of course her decision is not taken well by a good portion of the Jewish community. There are some interesting other side trips… In one she starts a holocaust museum in the little town that she lives in and goes about educating the local school children and, two, she takes a trip to visit Palestinians. I thought that was most interesting as they primarily wanted to talk about the harm that has been done to them by the state of Israel, and she was really quite disinterested in hearing anything about that.
Following Sean was alright. The story of a fellow who lived in the Haight area right at the peak of the hippie thing who befriended a smart four year old hippie boy who lived upstairs. At one point, he asked the kid some questions in front of a camera and Sean mentioned some things about drug use and other hippie stuff. When the filmmaker originally released that footage way back when, he got famous and his movie got acclaim and criticism. Now, many years later, he decides to go back to San Francisco to see what all of those folks from old days are up to. It really didn’t spark much interest in me and the results of his quest aren’t particularly surprising or compelling.
Ohh, shivers! Tonight I watched a documentary that was very thought-provoking in a number of ways. It was The Business of Being Born
(which is a very accurate title for the subject matter) and it basically covers the difference between “regular” hospital births and midwife attended, both at home and in the hospital.
The Business of Being Born
is told mainly through interviews with OB/GYN’s (both American and European) and midwives, with lots of footage of births and birthing processes, both at home and in the hospital. It is very blunt, both in its message and its methods. Starting with the basic fact that the United States has: the industrial worlds highest rates of hospital births, highest rate of cesarean sections and also the most expensive births. From which this country ends up with about the worst rates for infant and mother mortality in the industrialized world! The filmmakers look at the smear campaigns against midwives in the early 20th centuries and some of the horrible practices used against women going through child birth in the decades since then (some of these are too much to stomach watching). There is one troubling segment where they discuss how once medical intervention is begun (generally under the guise of relieving pain for the mother), each step of intervention leads to effects that pretty much require a further step of intervention. All of which ends up in an unhealthy, expensive (and for some, quite disappointing) viscous circle of even increasing intervention.
They thoroughly point out that only in a small numbers of cases is there any reason for childbirth to be a surgical procedure or even a hospital event, yet in this country that it what it has become in the vast majority of cases. It becomes obvious that they are using the ever-present American tactic of “giving direction through fear” to keep childbirth a profit center (for many: hospital profits, insurance companies profits, ensuring enough highly billable work for doctors) and to undermine (if not quash) traditional, logic and natural means of doing that for which the human was actually designed to do. Of course to me it all brings to mind the old RIAA philosophy of seeing anything that doesn’t feed these good old boy profits centers as some kind of evil or ignorant foolishness.
Anyway, I digress. The Business of Being Born is a project of Ricki Lake (but no, she is neither irritating or obnoxious here) which she was inspired to make after undergoing a hospital birth. Conveniently, the director got pregnant while the film was in production and her experience was worked into the film. All in all, even for one as skeptical of the Establishment as I am, it was still quite eye-opening. And unsettling, and maddening. The fear that people are saddled with (to bring gain to the greedy), and the limits of what the Establishment will do to defend itself against reason can be a little hard to take in such potent doses.
I guess I feel the air of election time approaching, so last night I re-watched Orwell Rolls in his Grave. Part of the flood of political documentaries that sprouted up after George Bush was, um, elected in 2000, it is one of my favorites of that genre. An all-encompassing movie, as its subject is the control of the media, media consolidation and the role that the modern media plays in the government. As the cover says, it explores what the media doesn’t want to talk about – Itself.
It is a serious documentary, being primarily just interviews, but these are interviews with some great folks: Charles Lewis (formerly of 60 Minutes), Mark Crispin Miller, Bernie Sanders, Greg Palast, Vincent Bugliosi and more! Filmmaker Robert Kane Pappas continually reminds us of the dangers of the national dialog being not just presented in the forms that they are, but with the control of that presentation in the hand of too few corporations whose agendas are more and more hand in hand with the government, rather than serving the public interest to inform us about the actions of the government and corporations.
The movie has extensive quotes from both Nineteen Eighty-Four and from Joseph Goebbels, I imagine in the hope of shocking the viewers in either awareness or an actual sense of caring about any of this. But the people who would watch this aren’t the people who need to see it. But would those people care anyway? Probably not.
Orwell Rolls in his Grave goes into the deregulation of the media, the removal of the fairness doctrine, the FCC lack of interest in the public good and the effects of all of those. It is scary stuff, rather aggravating with some great scenes… Especially the FCC committee hearing where they are planning on basically throwing out all ownership rules, hearing one board member make an extensive and intelligent argument against relaxing these rules, and then having another one make an terrible argument for it (against the first amendment rights of the corporations, and some chatter about media ownership limitations deny the citizens their right to choose?)… They also look at the power of the Media’s lobbyists in Washington (personally, I’m not ever sure why any lobbyists are allowed at all).
As with most of these films, it is frustrating and maddening, but also filled with though-provoking and valuable insights and it is all something that is good to keep in mind. And a reminder that though we are made to read Nineteen Eighty-Four in jr. high as (I imagine) some kind of warning, some of those kids took to it as a “how to succeed” guide.
No, I don’t know why I watch these political documentaries either. Sure, the recent ones are bearable in that, “it’s all a lost cause, but at least everyone knows it” kind of way. But some of these? They hurt. Tonight I watched One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern. Man, what a harsh trip. Sure, there are endless documentaries about the good guys (those who actually uphold the laws of the nation and work to benefit “the people”) losing out to the bad guys (those who see the government as nothing but a device to funnel tax money into their own pockets and have no regard for anything except furthering their own power through whatever lies, misrepresentation and law-breaking are needed), but this goes farther back then most, as it is the story of George McGovern and his presidential campaign of 1972.
From the looks of it, had he and his group been somewhat more professional and prepared, then we quite possibly could have avoided: the last couple of years of the Vietnam War, the divisive economic “redistribution” of Reaganomics, the terrible selling off of America to foreign powers to pay for unconstitutional wars (that only exist to keep the masses in fear and stuff the pockets of the white house and it’s associated war profiteers), both of the “gulf wars” and the thousands of American lives snuffed out in the pursuit of oil possession and getting a second American possession in the Middle East to back up Israel… The mind boggles at how many hundreds of thousand of lives (or millions if we had prevented the dirty deeds of Kissinger) could have been saved and how many hundreds of billions (if not trillions) of American dollars could have gone to secure the people, industry and economy of the United States, rather than get laundered through the Department of Defense into the pockets of corporate interests. So much was at stake, and the good guys lost. I find it humiliating that in seven of the ten Presidential elections of my lifetime, the “average voter” has failed to even try to see through the spin and has been hornswoggled into voting against themselves to put a Republican into the White House. Maybe that would have changed with a McGovern victory, but then, maybe not.
McGovern tried hard, he meant well and he was fighting on the behalf of honesty, the people, and doing the right thing. But a lot of people aren’t really interested in stuff like that. As Dick Gregory said, “once you’ve been in the dark for so long, the light hurts your eyes”. The title of this movie really sums up the feeling that you get watching it. I may be overly optimistic in saying that the despair, alienation, greed, dishonesty and general poverty of the 1970’s and 1980’s might have all been avoided had the McGovern group (and I don’t say the Democratic party, because you don’t get the feeling that the party wanted McGovern anyway) spent more time on thinking about how to win the election, rather than just win the nomination, but that is the feeling that I came away from this with. Of course, one might argue that they fell victim to Republican dishonesty, like the Democrat’s of 1968, 1980, 2000 and 2004, so it didn’t matter what they did anyway. But I don’t know.
Well, sure, Dickie and Kissmyassinger, but who’s that behind them?
Oh, him? I guess he learned from the best.
In One Bright Shining Moment we trace McGovern from his younger days growing up during the depression through his days as a bomber pilot in WW2, his brief stint as a minister, his time in the Kennedy white house (where he served as director of the Food for Peace Program), his time in the senate and his staunch and continual (well, except for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution) opposition to the Vietnam war and then forward to the great ups and downs of the debacle of the 1968 convention, Kent State, the seeming (yet fleeting) greatness of the 1972 convention, the missteps that followed it and his resounding defeat at the hands of Nixon. I do find it somewhat surprising, considering that I was five at the time of the 1972 election, that until this evening I knew nothing about George McGovern except for his name.
Told through lots of footage from the time and plentiful interviews with McGovern himself, Gore Vidal, Howard Zinn, Gloria Steinem and the wonderful Dick Gregory, who has the best, most profound and boldest statements to make of all of them. This film is another re-eye-opener to how American politics really works, to the general corruption of our two-party system, a re-introduction to the pervasive power of greed and a testament to the self-induced ignorance of the average person. Though it was a bright and shining moment, it certainly wasn’t the light at the end of the tunnel. On the bright side, the grass-roots upheaval that lead to his nomination, four years later led to the election of the best president of modern times, Jimmy Carter. Unfortunately, Carter turned out to actually be too good and honest a person to be an American President… And with help from the Republicans once again (can’t they just win an election honestly?), this time conspiring with the Ayatollah Khomeini to keep our citizens hostage extra long to hurt Carter’s chances (strangely similar to Kissinger’s tactics of killing the Vietnam peace process to hurt the Democrat’s presidential hopes in 1968, a mere dozen years before), the Democrat’s were out for the next 12 years… And the office of the President would never be the same.
Well, some news browsing over lunch led me to some “news” stories that bear repeating. From my main news source again, Slashdot, there was a sad piece of information from my younger days… Gary Gygax has passed away (if you don’t know who he is, don’t bother looking him up, you probably won’t want to know who he is…). A pivotal influence over many of my teen years, and those of a good number of folks I knew. Its not a shock or a tragic accident, but I still felt the urge to bring it up.
Also and more sad and tragic, a legislator in Florida, recoiling from the state requiring the teaching of, of all things, the theory of evolution, is pressing for a bill that would allow teachers to have the “right and freedom to present scientific information pertaining to the full range of scientific views regarding biological and chemical evolution.” Basically, to be able to teach whatever they want. Of course, it shouldn’t allow that, since I believe that “scientific” is generally held to mean investigating through evidence and reasoning, both of which are missing from creationist dogma.
Read here: Will the battle on science and evolution move to the Florida Legislature?.
Sure, there may be some issues with the evolution theory, but the concept is quite undeniable… After all, many creatures have been observed to change in accordance with their environment in recent memory (flu virus, anyone?)… The truth is hardly deniable, regardless of its stature as a “scientific theory”, as opposed to a “stupid theory” like these “(ahem) intelligent design (amen)” fans keep wasting everyone’s time with…
Hmm.. I suppose every teacher should be able to teach every subject exclusively in accordance with whatever personal beliefs they have, or have made up. Personally, if I am going to live in a fantasy land, I’ll make it up myself (or borrow it from Gygax) and won’t be concerned with what the courts and the public schools say about it… And I certainly won’t try and force it on school children. But on the positive side, I like to take i.d. as a sign that the christian creationists have finally come somewhat to grips with reality. After all this time of saying that Adam and Eve and the garden where true stories (even though they were just taken from the Babylonian myths anyway), the i.d. factions among them have basically agreed that those stories aren’t true after all (or maybe they are trying to pull another fast one on us non-believers, like Jehovah did with those dinosaur bones).
And, then finally (as my lunch break should be over now) from the Sunday Herald, this tidbit on how email is for old folks and too formal… “For most South Koreans, email is fit only for addressing the elderly, or for business and formal missives.”…
Read here: Why e-mail is so old-fashioned.
Sure, e-mail may be for old people now, but I must challenge the “too formal” claim. E-mail is way too informal, to say nothing of the crud that gets texted. I already have a hard time with how sloppy and informal e-mail is (in a hundred years will capitalization just be a forgotten theory?), the thought that people are going to get worse and lazier…
While I see the truth behind their points, I think (of course, speaking as an old person) that those are some sad truths. But I guess that society always changes and moves forward (technologically at least) and those of us who have already grown up tend to like to keep things that way that they were. Like Still listening to classic rock radio now, 30 years after the fact…
While, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I have both giving’s and misgiving’s about both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton… And I’m in no place to vote for either in the primary anyway… I feel like either one of them could be quite good possibilities for President. Sure, in an ideal world, Gravel, Nader, Kucinich or (my favorite) Peter DeFazio would be front runners, as they have ideals far beyond anything realistic for a national politician, and far beyond anything felt by Clinton or Obama… But in terms of realistic candidates, it is shockingly great that the two front runners are beyond the pale of what is expected from a population living under this contrived umbrella of racial and sexual bias that one expects to permeate our national dialogue… But, aside from the vast amount of political experience held by Clinton (which I can handily see how it an be perceived as both a positive and negative aspect), I honestly don’t know how any woman, republicrat, independent or otherwise, could rightfully do anything but vote for Hillary Clinton. Yes, Obama is a man of high ideals and great charisma and could be a breath of fresh air and, quite possibly, help to break down the facade of lies that is the concept of “race”, and yes may drag us even quicker out of that facade of greed that is the Iraq situation… But he is yet another confident and persuasive male politician in a stream of a quarter of a millennium of American presidential candidates.
Hillary Clinton winning the presidential election would be (bar none, I think) the greatest event in the cause of equality for women since Sufferage and, in fact, would be the culmination of all of the great struggle that was Sufferage and the work leading up to it. For any woman to not vote for Hillary, regardless of ones personal feelings about her or ones political beliefs, would seem to me to be a denial of the suffering, discrimination and marginalization that has been forced upon women in American history, and of their relegation to the sidelines the history of national and social dialog.
What I also view harshly is that, while Hillary is ahead in the battle for the Democratic Nomination, the media are treating her as if she is behind and is struggling to catch up… It seems to me that to have a woman as the front-runner (by however a small margin) for the white house should be something to be applauded and honored by all women, instead of being treated as if she’s barely holding on. I mean, sure Obama is gaining on her but it is unfair (and sexist) for the media to be writing her off as if she’s a has-been when she is actually in the lead. Plus, she does stand for (at least currently) some very good things. She has been one of the most vocal proponents of health care reform and she does claim that she is for the withdrawal (I think she said “in 60 days” on 60 Minutes) of our Iraq Invasion forces. Neither one of these will ever be done to my satisfaction, but she does publicly support the right ideals.
I came across, thanks to Slashdot, an article at Technology Review about the state of TV news. Yes, I know that we all know how irrelevant TV news is, but the author of this article formerly worked for Dateline and was around those offices in the immediate post-9/11 times and has some pretty interesting comments. The first page wasn’t too exciting, so I’m linking to page 2 instead, about his encounter with the head of NBC..
At the moment Zucker blew in and interrupted, I had been in Corvo’s office to propose a series of stories about al-Qaeda, which was just emerging as a suspect in the attacks… It had occurred to me and a number of other journalists that a core mission of NBC News would now be to explain, even belatedly, the origins and significance of these organizations. But Zucker insisted that Dateline stay focused on the firefighters. The story of firefighters trapped in the crumbling towers, Zucker said, was the emotional center of this whole event. Corvo enthusiastically agreed. “Maybe,” said Zucker, “we ought to do a series of specials on firehouses where we just ride along with our cameras. Like the show Cops, only with firefighters.” He told Corvo he could make room in the prime-time lineup for firefighters, but then smiled at me and said, in effect, that he had no time for any subtitled interviews with jihadists raging about Palestine.
and…
This was one in a series of lessons I learned about how television news had lost its most basic journalistic instincts in its search for the audience-driven sweet spot, the “emotional center” of the American people. Gone was the mission of using technology to veer out onto the edge of American understanding in order to introduce something fundamentally new into the national debate. The informational edge was perilous, it was unpredictable, and it required the news audience to be willing to learn something it did not already know. Stories from the edge were not typically reassuring about the future. In this sense they were like actual news, unpredictable flashes from the unknown. On the other hand, the coveted emotional center was reliable, it was predictable, and its story lines could be duplicated over and over. It reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn.
Read it here:
You Don’t Understand our Audience
Okay, I admit I have as many issues with Michael Moore as the next guy. He has an unpleasant personality, he can rely on a mind-numbing slamming of his message home over and over, he uses tactics that are corny and, well, over played and melodramatic. In Sicko, his display in front of Guantanamo Bay was as irrational and silly as when he put the photograph of the murdered girl on Chuckie Heston’s driveway, lame and ill thought-out attempts at making some kind of emotional statement directed at the absurdly incorrect people…. But through all the hogwash and humor, his message is a strong one, a message that has remained the same message through his career. No matter what the subject matter of the movie (or his seeming obsession with Canada or his “anti-Americanism”), when you get down to it, they all have one focus. Which is that in this country, it is acceptable and expected for organizations to pursue profit above all else, with little (if any) concern for anyone else. And, of course, this message doesn’t really mean much unless it is packaged with examples showing that things don’t have to be like this. All of this really comes to the forefront in his newest, Sicko. Like most of his movies, watching how things work here and then how things work in the rest of the DemoCapitalistic first world makes one feel gullible and lame to be an American and to not be either leaving or actually changing things here.
Sicko is the story of how the US medical system has no concern with making anyone better, instead it is all consumed with profit. In fact, the public is stuck between a two-way battle for profits! From the HMO’s side, doing the most billable treatment with the least effort (in cahoots with the pharmaceutical companies who want to sell as many overpriced and unneeded drugs to everyone, even if it kills them and even if they don’t need them) and, from the insurances companies side, finding any excuse to pay for as little treatment as possible, even if it leads to the death of your patients. Unlike Moore and a lot of other people, I don’t really blame the insurance and health companies for this. The American obsession with profit, wealth and power coupled with politicians who are paid by big business to do their billing, and, well, what else would you expect. Our view of business and the strange fear of anything that could be misconstrued as socialism is the reason that this stuff happens. There would need to be an enormous shift in the way that the people in this country think and act before any of this stuff will improve. But watching Moore’s movies and seeing how other countries do things, it is a bit wrenching how everyone and everything is sold out for profits under a big blanket of lies. The most intriguing part of the film was the tape recording of President Nixon when he bascially approved changing the American medical system to an all-profit, minimal treatment system. Great. I would say that it all makes me want to emigrate to another country, but I’ve always wanted to do that anyway. New Zealand anyone?
Yes, regardless of what you might say about his ethics, or the particular examples that he uses of situations that he takes advantage of, he has a well-documented and pretty obvious point that communities and people in this country mean little to the powers that be except for their role as a profit-base to organize their methods around. It was a telling point that the old Member of Parliament made when he said that “keeping people poor makes them hopeless and when people are hopeless, they don’t vote. It the people would vote for someone who actually supported them, it would be an economic revolution”
And then, a fellow at work turned me onto this site (yes, another quiz) Glassboth.org, where you enter your views on various issues and they show you which presidential candidate you are the most similar to. I ended up with someone that I hadn’t even heard of… Mike Gravel… But after looking into his shtick (sadly, on youtube), I do think he’s a pretty good guy, even if he is a democrat.
Mike Gravel shares a 93% similarity with your beliefs
former Senator, (D-AK)
Mike Gravel was born on May 13, 1930. He is a Democrat from Alaska. He served the state of Alaska as a Senator in the U.S. Senate from 1969 to 1981. He is primarily known for his efforts in ending the draft following the Vietnam War. While a Senator, Gravel spoke the Pentagon Papers into public record.
 |
| Social Security | very similar | find out why |
| Taxes and Budget | very similar | find out why |
| Abortion and Birth Control | very similar | find out why |
| Iraq and Foreign Policy | very similar | find out why |
| Trade and Economics | very similar | find out why |
| Health Care | very similar | find out why |
| Civil Liberties and Domestic Security | very similar | find out why |
| Environment and Energy | very similar | find out why |
| Education | very similar | find out why |
| Gun Control | similar | find out why |
I have certainly spent my share of time around “true grue”: newscasts, forensics/crime shows, working in the true crime book section… But I must say that I doubt the advantages of this kind of media. Experiencing things such as: photos of murder victims in books, extensively detailing violent crimes on tv and in books, clearly explaining peoples methods for “breaking, entering, raping and killing”, playing 911 tapes on the air (!), showing gruesome crime scenes… Now not only does it appear in the news and in books everyday, but there are whole tv channels that show it all day long.
I wonder how much of an ulterior motive there is behind this. I don’t just feel like they are being aired/printed just for ratings/sales (though, obviously, that is a big part of it), I can’t help but wonder how much of it is intended to instill more feelings of irrational fear in the general population. Does knowing/seeing this information make people any safer? Or does it actually increase the dangers? I would imagine that while it may not actually inspire much crime, it is certainly bound to inspire more crime than it will prevent. And since I think that a lot of our society (military proliferation, expansion of law enforcement powers, degradation of civil rights, the right to bear arms, homeland security, xenophobia, fear of other religions, consumer desire…) is based on insuring insecurity and fear where there is little or no basis for it, I have to again question the intentions.
I also have to wonder about who is really interested in it and why. Spending three years working in the true crime section, there is a particular portion of the population who are overwhelming the biggest fans of these books. While I’m not going to point out any root cause or reasons for this, it becomes so unquestionably the case that one cannot help but wonder why most of the interest in this subject matter seems to come from white, middle-class, housewives from their mid-20’s through their 50’s. It begins to seem a bit odd. What is the attraction there to seeing other peoples misery?
I used to work with a women who would always have pictures of gruesome accident victims as the desktop on her computer. I asked her once about and she said that it was to remind herself that their were people worse off then herself…
Sitting around “in the buckets”, no, not soused or mired or any such excessive state. Just tippin a couple and thinking. I stopped for dinner at The Hedge House and I had a couple of pints o’ stout. Well, more like a pint and a half. Tonight my second beer made me feel a bit sour, but it might have been the 90+ degree heat today. But I digress. A long lost like has returned rather suddenly, after being off for no good reason. A while back I purchased a Sheaf Stout. Now this is a fellow I used to drink a fair bit of, especially in my pre-21 phase. Now though, I have purchased a few bottles and I wonder why I ever stopped. It has a great flavor and it certainly has a place in the list in the top half dozens beers. Anyway, I just wanted to mention it.
On a more downbeat notion… If you ever want to feel like the Bush Administration isn’t that bad, sit down for White Light, Black Rain, an HBO documentary of interviews with survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is, of course, horrible yet strangely calming. It is hard to separate the political aspect of these deeds from the tragedy aspect (as is is with the other excessively inhumane tragedies of the 2nd World War) but, to an extent, they try. The movie focuses more on the survivors chilling stories of the actual incidents. While the stories and the images are horrifying, and you can’t help but feel for the people who lived through it and continued on with their lives, the most telling part for me was the one old hibakusha who said (and I paraphrase) “I don’t blame the Americans for the bombings, we lost the war… But I blame the government of Japan for not helping us afterwards”. He expresses an unsettling statement of such logical resolve that I still haven’t got my head around… but then the Japanese seem to have an old reputation for their attitude towards defeat.
70,000 Civilians, now gone. And the rest of us live forever with the knowledge of the possibilities
Whenever I think of this incident (and expand it with thoughts towards other incidents like the potential complicity of Pearl Harbor and the firebombing of Dresden), I can’t help but blame the Governments. I don’t buy the “All’s hell in war” theory. I guess I can handle it for soldiers, after all, killing and dying is part of the package of potentialities that they sign up for, but to kill tens of thousands of civilians in one fell swoop? It’s a bit too much for me to handle. Another problem with these kinds of tragedies is the lack of personal resolution. During events like September 11th (the WTC 9/11), there is always an issue of trying to identifying the remains so people can be moved from missing to dead. But with these firebombings and nuclear annihilation’s and Nazi purges there are tens of thousands who are incinerated. Hundreds of thousands of people end up with family and loved ones that they will never have any kind of a body to associate with (lord knows how many in the case of the Holocaust, I imagine that millions disappeared to never be identified). Though one could easily assume the death of someone missing, there will never be the closure that comes with the certainty of an identifiable corpse. Yes, sure, war is hell and war is glory and war is whatever else it is. But hopefully one day the “hell and glory” will be left to the warriors and the rest of us can live in peace.