BLOOD DIAMOND
This movie had been sent by Netflix weeks ago, and I just kept avoiding loading it into the DVD player. With Carl heading off to his new job we decided to clear the boards and give this a go. I’m _so_ glad I watched this film. Leonardo di Caprio’s performance was nothing short of stunning as was Dijmon Hounsoul. Aside from the power of this story I was so pleased to watch a film where human bodies can only take so much punishment, and people can’t shrug off a gun shot wound. After a summer of essentially Roadrunner/Coyote cartoons this was a welcome, if brutal, reminder of the costs of violence.
The scene where the helicopter gunship flies in and rockets the rebel forces (many of whom are ten and twelve year old boys) was horrific. Watching some of the brainwashed children turn back into terrified babies left me terribly shaken. Then this morning as I was preparing breakfast I heard Chris Dodd reflect about the importance of the rule of law when he was interviewed about the book of his father’s letters from the Nuremburg trial. Dodd said that this look back had relevance to today because when Churchill and the Russians wanted to summarily execute the Nazis, the American’s argued for due process. He considered this an example of America at it’s moral best. Then he contrasted it with today where we have Guantanamo and the abrogation of habeus corpus.
This was followed by a story about a college student being tasered when he hogged a mike because he wanted an answer from Senatory Kerry. To Kerry’s credit he kept shouting at the police to let the kid ask his question and that he (Kerry) would answer. But in Bush World any challenge to authority is met with a stunning overreaction.
All of this had me thinking back to the activism of the sixties and early seventies. Was it all only fueled because of the draft? I’m not saying the boomers were/are more moral or involved then other people, but why was there this surge of activity for justice? Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, defendents rights the anti-war movement. I wondered if in addition to the draft some of it was the economy in that period. People felt pretty secure financially. Now kids are desperately afraid there won’t be a job for them when they finish college. It’s hard to spare a thought for others when you’re so worried about your own future.
Add to that the news that the Northwest Passage is now free of ice, and I’m having a very melancholy start to the day.
Melinda
September 18th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Well, it’s notable that mass campus protests against the Vietnam war stopped with stunning abruptness the moment the draft was abolished.
I strongly suspect the real motivation in most cases was a burning, principled desire to keep their own precious, personal and highly entitled pink buttocks out of the bad bush, combined with lesser but still important concerns like meeting chicks, getting laid, looking cool, getting stoned, and listening to their favorite bands.
I certainly had that impression at the time.
In general, I had and have a rather jaundiced view of “the sixties” . Lots of narcissism and self-involvement, and class prejudice masquerading as morals.
Like the people in Chicago in 1968, who ensured that Nixon would be elected President.
In fact, self-indulgent narcissism and a conviction of one’s own supreme importance seem to have been and to still be widespread among boomers… and I’m a boomer myself.
Compared with the stoicism, emotional reticence, healthy tribal loyalties and hard common sense of the generation before, it all ain’t very impressive.
September 18th, 2007 at 10:44 am
“People felt pretty secure financially. Now kids are desperately afraid there won’t be a job for them when they finish college.”
– I don’t see why. Unemployment rates are similar to those in most of the 60’s and early 70’s, and are particularly good for college graduates.
“Lifetime employment” has more or less gone the way of the dodo, but as the saying goes this is not the age when the strong eat the weak; it’s the age when the fast eat the slow. There are plenty of jobs, but you have to be ready to move and switch your line of work.
Unemployment used to hit 10% in recessions; that hasn’t happened here since the early 80’s. We had one very mild recession in the 90’s and another very mild one in the early part of this decade, but that’s about it.
In fact, in economic terms the Age of Bush is turning out to be pretty much a carbon copy of the Age of Clinton — which indicates that presidents are not nearly as important to the economy as they’d like you to think. They’d take credit for the weather, if they could.
The people feeling economic pressure are non-college graduates. Unemployment is low for them too, but wages haven’t been rising much, if at all.
September 18th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Yes, I’m sure that some of the selfish motives you assign to the Boomers is true… but not all of it. Freedom Riders risked and lost their lives. I got into Law School because of the woman’s movement. I had control over my life and reproduction because of activism. The anti-war movement was certainly propelled by hatred of the draft and that terrible war, but the multi-colored world in which we now live was helped by people’s belief that America’s society ought to better reflect the proud words of the Declaration, the Constitution and thousands of political speeches about how unique, free and just we were.
September 18th, 2007 at 11:09 am
Do the ‘healthy tribal loyalties’ of the past generation include the rampant institutionalized racism?
I find that most people who look back with longing on the 40’s and 50’s forget how much those decades sucked if you weren’t a white male protestant.
And I doubt that the kids who drove down to the south to fight for civil rights, sometimes losing their lives in the process, were doing it to look cool and get laid.
September 18th, 2007 at 11:13 am
“He considered this an example of America at it’s moral best. Then he contrasted it with today where we have Guantanamo and the abrogation of habeus corpus.”
– FDR abrogated habeus corpus too, and slapped hundreds of thousands of American citizens in concentration camps for the offense of having slanty eyes and being disliked by the neighbors.
Nor was arbitratry incarceration limited to Japanese-Americans; many others were also dropped in the slammer without trial.
It didn’t even _occurr_ to anyone that enemy foreigners were entitled to use our courts.
Plus we had a wartime policy of unlimited terror attacks on civilian populations which roasted whole cities alive and killed millions of helpless men, women and children, differing from the British only in that we were more dishonest about it.
And our submarines in the Pacific followed exactly the same tactics against the Japanese which, when the Germans used them in the Atlantic against us, we denounced as war crimes, something which came out rather embarassingly at Nuremberg.
And incidentally, in that era our armed forces shot prisoners of war as often as not. It was unofficial, but widespread, and everyone up at the sharp end knew about it. Prisoner interrogation was also often… ah… vigorous.
Did I mention the hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens we turned over to Stalin after WWII, knowing they’d be murdered? Our cynical silence as the Russians let the Germans supress the Warsaw uprising?
All this didn’t get much press time; but then, the press was controlled by the government and vigorously censored. Hollywood was unabashedly a myth-peddling cheering section and propaganda agency.
It’s a perennial American delusion that the United States is, or was, more moral than other countries.
Generally speaking, it just ain’t so, all other things being equal. The most you can really say is that we’ve been lucky not to be under the same sorts of pressures others have.
It’s true that American influence has and is generally a good thing and promotes democracy and so forth, but that’s because it’s in our interests and spreads our ideology.
September 18th, 2007 at 11:55 am
I’m a student of WWII. I know about all of these horrible things, and I could add many more — turning away a shipload of desperate Jews, not bombing the rail lines taking people to the death camps. Does that make them less horrible? No. We paid reparations to the Japanese Americans because it was vile what was done to them. We prosecuted Calley for Mei Lai (I know I misspelled that).
Every day we try to be more civilized. It’s the best we can do. Simply looking at the past, and saying, “well, we acted like monsters then so I guess we can now” seems craven.
September 19th, 2007 at 10:37 am
I think you have to separate out the Freedom Riders from the anti-war movement. The people who fought for Civil Rights in the ’50s and ’60s were idealists in the finest sense. The anti-war movement took off when student deferments were lifted, and ended when the dsraft ended. Pretty evident cause and effect there, I think.
September 19th, 2007 at 10:43 am
I agree with that, Sam. I just think it’s unfair to tar all of the activism of the sixties as being just driven by selfishness.
Although I guess you could call the women’s movement “selfish” because we wanted a the same rights and opportunites as men.
September 19th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
It’s still less selfish than the selfishness displayed by the people who didn’t want to share those rights and opportunities.
There are some interesting things being written these days about the women’s movement being an upper class professional movement built on the backs of the underclass and immigrant women left raising the children and cleaning the homes. Early feminists were wary of that sort of triumph, but somehow that aspect of the cause may have been dropped along the way. Ever read any Caitlin Flanagan?
September 21st, 2007 at 11:41 am
No, I haven’t read her work. I admit, the first time I hired a maid service I had this feeling that I was a horrible oppressor of the people.
There might be some truth to this. It was access to education and career opportunities that really fueled the movement. Extreme poverty doesn’t make either of these seem very likely in your world.