The insanity of the "culture war": DEFINED
I live my life by very few ironclad rules, and even those with escape clauses. There's very little in the world which I do not believe benefits from an open, malleable perspective.
To wit: ONE of the few ironclad rules is to educated myself exponentially more on the veiws, outlooks and opinions of those who DISAGREE with me than with those who agree. It's a simple axiom, perhaps even dated, but I subscribe to it none the less: You learn more from people you who disagree with you.
It is for that reason that, whenever time avails it, I scour the web for not only the film reviews but the art, literature and CULTURAL reviews put out by those whom I consider my ideological "foes." Readers of this blog will guess, correctly, that I refer to the "traditionalist" side of our so-called Culture Wars.
This stuff can make you crazy if you don't approach it with a certain detachment. It helps to remember that disagreeing with you on a position doesn't necessarily make someone crazy, and even if they ARE crazy they speak as individuals even as they claim to speak for a "movement."
I try, very hard, to absorb all such material in a manner that allows me to take in all information without getting uselessly angry. It takes rare instances of outright, bald-faced madness presented as journalism to make me angry.
I'm angry.
Here's why:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38450
It's an article from right-wing website Worldnetdaily, reprinted from Business Reform magazine. Title: "Is Kill Bill Responsible for Abu Ghraib?"
Yes, you read that right. The author is asking us to consider if a Quentin Tarantino movie is responsible for the scandal of U.S. reservists abusing prisoners in Iraq. Please excuse me while I vomit.
What's really going on here, predictably, is the extremist wing of the Religious Right trying to turn American's justified anger at Abu Ghraib into a sounding-board for their advocacy of film censorship. Their argument: The actions of the soldiers who abused the prisoners are "symptoms" of our eeeeevil progressive culture, specifically entertainment that glorifies violence.
I could write a long disortation about this, but do you really need that? You're intelligent people, I know, and thus capable of seeing this for the clap-trap propaganda it is. However, it DOES have a use I think as an object lesson in the hypocrisy of the cultural right: "Kill Bill," a work of art, is responsible for evil because it "glorifies violence," but the culture-warriors LOVE "The Passion," the most violent film of the year.
These are the people who want to control what we can see and what films we can make. Never forget that.
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