Celsius 488 1/3
I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 today. Michael Moore is, and has always been, a bit over the top. That's part of his charm, so to speak. In all of his work, though, he has sought, with varying degrees of success, to stimulate thought about whatever subject he was covering. Whether you agree with him or not, I think he does a good job at that.
I consider myself a patriot. My wife and others call me a Paladin, which in the Dungeons and Dragons world is a fighter for law, order, and justice. Lawful good. Some very real part of me trusts in the system. Hell, I am part of the system. There was a shot in the flick where GWB is standing giving a speech, and my ultimate boss, the Governor, is standing off to his left.
The whole thing is very disturbing no matter how you look at it. If you take Moore at his word, or at least strong implication, that the current U.S. political climate is governed by a clique of the absurdly rich exploiting the masses for all they are worth and damn the consequences, then basically we're all doomed. The Constitution can be used for toilet paper, and we can call ourselves done as a republic.
If he's wrong, which I sort of hope, what is the alternative explanation? Some vast dire conspiracy that we'll learn about in 30 years that GWB took a fall in the media making it seem like the USA and its leadership were a bunch of blood/oilthirsty, corrupt megalomaniacs because....? What? Why?
Then comes the next set of hard questions. I, my family, and friends have joked about leaving the U.S. and going to Canada or Europe, or somewhere that isn't so blithely trampling personal freedoms, and soveriegn nations, for that matter. There are two problems I see with that. One, there are the usual issues with becoming what amounts to refugees, never a good thing. However, for me, the true issue would not be the hardships encountered in trying to move to Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, or Amsterdam but rather the fact that I would be bailing out on my country. I stayed in Upstate New York because I felt that I would be able to make more of a difference here rather than in New Jersey or Boston. I felt that Albany needed me, my education, and expertise, such as they are. The more affluent places of my youth would not benefit particularly by my being there. In this time, when I feel more and more paranoid (Who might read this?) not only from external threats, but from my own government, standing up to that fear and doing the right thing, even if it just means going to the voting booth, is becoming something that actually matters.
I've got a little trinket from the National Holocaust Museum in D.C. The Museum is a roleplaying exercise where you are given an information packet about someone who lived during the Holocaust and you are supposed to act as or consider that person as you progress through the exhibits. My information packet is a little biography of a Polish Jew by name of Moishe Menyuk, who lived in Komarov, Poland and died nearby in Kolki at the hands of the Nazis. He is clearly related to me, though we're not entirely sure how. We know my great-grandfather had relatives in Poland, and that is where our suspicions lie.
I really don't want to end up that way, buried in a mass grave in East Greenbush, slain by my maddened, terrorized neighbors; killed in the ghetto because of a LiveJournal post that someone regarded as "terrorist," or "antigovernment."
Well, I think that's enough doom and gloom for the evening. I leave you with a little humor.
The following music pun courtesy of /usr/games/fortune:
Once there was this conductor see, who had a bass problem. You see, during
a portion of Beethovan's Ninth Symphony in which there are no bass violin
parts, one of the bassists always passed a bottle of scotch around. So,
to remind himself that the basses usually required an extra cue towards the
end of the symphony, the conductor would fasten a piece of string around the
page of the score before the bass cue. As the basses grew more and more
inebriated, two of them fell asleep. The conductor grew quite nervous (he
was very concerned about the pitch) because it was the bottom of the ninth;
the score was tied and the basses were loaded with two out.
I consider myself a patriot. My wife and others call me a Paladin, which in the Dungeons and Dragons world is a fighter for law, order, and justice. Lawful good. Some very real part of me trusts in the system. Hell, I am part of the system. There was a shot in the flick where GWB is standing giving a speech, and my ultimate boss, the Governor, is standing off to his left.
The whole thing is very disturbing no matter how you look at it. If you take Moore at his word, or at least strong implication, that the current U.S. political climate is governed by a clique of the absurdly rich exploiting the masses for all they are worth and damn the consequences, then basically we're all doomed. The Constitution can be used for toilet paper, and we can call ourselves done as a republic.
If he's wrong, which I sort of hope, what is the alternative explanation? Some vast dire conspiracy that we'll learn about in 30 years that GWB took a fall in the media making it seem like the USA and its leadership were a bunch of blood/oilthirsty, corrupt megalomaniacs because....? What? Why?
Then comes the next set of hard questions. I, my family, and friends have joked about leaving the U.S. and going to Canada or Europe, or somewhere that isn't so blithely trampling personal freedoms, and soveriegn nations, for that matter. There are two problems I see with that. One, there are the usual issues with becoming what amounts to refugees, never a good thing. However, for me, the true issue would not be the hardships encountered in trying to move to Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, or Amsterdam but rather the fact that I would be bailing out on my country. I stayed in Upstate New York because I felt that I would be able to make more of a difference here rather than in New Jersey or Boston. I felt that Albany needed me, my education, and expertise, such as they are. The more affluent places of my youth would not benefit particularly by my being there. In this time, when I feel more and more paranoid (Who might read this?) not only from external threats, but from my own government, standing up to that fear and doing the right thing, even if it just means going to the voting booth, is becoming something that actually matters.
I've got a little trinket from the National Holocaust Museum in D.C. The Museum is a roleplaying exercise where you are given an information packet about someone who lived during the Holocaust and you are supposed to act as or consider that person as you progress through the exhibits. My information packet is a little biography of a Polish Jew by name of Moishe Menyuk, who lived in Komarov, Poland and died nearby in Kolki at the hands of the Nazis. He is clearly related to me, though we're not entirely sure how. We know my great-grandfather had relatives in Poland, and that is where our suspicions lie.
I really don't want to end up that way, buried in a mass grave in East Greenbush, slain by my maddened, terrorized neighbors; killed in the ghetto because of a LiveJournal post that someone regarded as "terrorist," or "antigovernment."
Well, I think that's enough doom and gloom for the evening. I leave you with a little humor.
The following music pun courtesy of /usr/games/fortune:
Once there was this conductor see, who had a bass problem. You see, during
a portion of Beethovan's Ninth Symphony in which there are no bass violin
parts, one of the bassists always passed a bottle of scotch around. So,
to remind himself that the basses usually required an extra cue towards the
end of the symphony, the conductor would fasten a piece of string around the
page of the score before the bass cue. As the basses grew more and more
inebriated, two of them fell asleep. The conductor grew quite nervous (he
was very concerned about the pitch) because it was the bottom of the ninth;
the score was tied and the basses were loaded with two out.