Erin Brockovich Rocks!!
Anyone
Brockovich" and let me say, I'm not usually a big Julia Roberts fan, but
this time she really gets to show off her acting skills (I'm not talking
about her eye-popping outfits), and the script and direction are right on.
This is a very very good film that will hopefully make money and do wonders
for Soderbergh. Julia has one foul mouth in this film and its really cool
to see the "girl-next-door" pour it on. She's taking a chance in all the
right ways that were wrong when she decided "risks" meant the dreadful "Mary
Reilly" and succeeds.
The supporting cast does a really good job. Albert Finney and Marg
Helenberger are excellent, although the weakest link is the relationship
between Julia and Aaron Eckhart's character, who I really like but here was
just portrayed with a halo. He's very likable in the film, but ultimately
doesn't have much to do (quite a change from most women's roles where the
actress is the token girlfriend. He's the token boyfriend.)
Some little things aren't really explained over the course of the film but,
overall, it rocks.
--Ben
Mark Cotterill
Mark,
--
"Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots
stopped moving - forever?" -Harry Lime.
Check The Toronto Moon -
http://jetpac.tripod.com/moon
Anyone <n...@netzero.com> wrote in message
news:38cfc...@news.access1.net...
UnclePete
>Helenberger are excellent,
What? Marg is in this movie? So it is a must see! :)
robc
Cotterill" <m.cot...@home.com> wrote:
>The Who rocks... The Rolling Stones rock... Erin Brockovich? I
dunno.
>
>Mark
The Who and Stones "rock"? Surely you don't mean within the last
10 or so years ;)
* Sent from RemarQ http://www.remarq.com The Internet's Discussion Network *
The fastest and easiest way to search and participate in Usenet - Free!
Mark Cotterill
Mark.
--
"Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots
stopped moving - forever?" -Harry Lime.
Check The Toronto Moon -
http://jetpac.tripod.com/moon
robc <dcrobclar...@yahoo.com.invalid> wrote in message
news:0a34c704...@usw-ex0103-019.remarq.com...
robc
Glad to hear it. I was getting ready to suggest that you get out
more ;)
In article <iJ7A4.1637$3a.3...@news2.rdc2.on.home.com>, "Mark
Cotterill" <m.cot...@home.com> wrote:
>thats right. surely I don't.
>
>Mark.
* Sent from RemarQ http://www.remarq.com The Internet's Discussion Network *
John S.
it's violent, nor can you see an animal-based movie without being
reassured that the creatures "were not harmed in the making of this
film." If these notices are THAT important, then advertising for
docudramas like THE INSIDER, THE HURRICANE and ERIN BROCKOVICH should
include the disclaimer "This dramatization of actual events may contain
some fictionalized material."
--
Visit my web page http://quotesillustrated.homepage.com
Kevin
>Nowadays you can't see an action movie on TV without being warned that
>it's violent, nor can you see an animal-based movie without being
>reassured that the creatures "were not harmed in the making of this
>film." If these notices are THAT important, then advertising for
>docudramas like THE INSIDER, THE HURRICANE and ERIN BROCKOVICH should
>include the disclaimer "This dramatization of actual events may contain
>some fictionalized material."
Films like that generally do contain that disclaimer, dood. Not in the ads, of
course, but neither do your examples.
Not that it matters. Anyone expecting a Hollywood megahit at the cineplex to
be a work of nonfiction has more serious issues to worry about.
--Kevin
"Goals are for people who are afraid to drift."
PonEgirl
>"Goals are for people who are afraid to drift."
>
=) I like this.
Kevin
>>"Goals are for people who are afraid to drift."
>=) I like this.
Thanks. I wish I could remember the comic whom I'm quoting. His name was
Jack, I think. Maybe something like Jack Hanley.
--Kevin
Kevin
>pone...@aol.com (PonEgirl) wrote:
>>>"Goals are for people who are afraid to drift."
>>=) I like this.
>Thanks. I wish I could remember the comic whom I'm quoting. His name was
>Jack, I think. Maybe something like Jack Hanley.
You know, it only took me 5 minutes to realize this was probably Jack Handey.
When I heard him on the radio, I didn't make the connection that he was the
"Deep Thoughts" guy. Duh.
The Mgnt
>docudramas like THE INSIDER, THE HURRICANE and ERIN BROCKOVICH should
>include the disclaimer "This dramatization of actual events may contain
>some fictionalized material."
*Based* on a true story...
-paul
Mark Tangard
To return to the initial point of this thread....
Saw it tonight, and I gotta say, it *is* a hell of a movie. True, it's
fairly predictable. It has no real twists, so the plot isn't exactly
a mindblower. But the script is delicious, drawing much happy cackling
from the audience. The first half is more upsetting than refreshing but
the later payoffs make it all worth it. And yes, it does indeed fit the
mold of a feelgood movie, but the execution was so good that I couldn't
hold that against it.
And judging from the faces of others leaving -- virtually all of which
were grinning ear-to-ear -- neither could most people.
Note: I don't even *like* Julia Roberts.
This was the best film I've seen since American Beauty.
-- Mark Tangard <mtan...@pacbell.net> -------------------------------
-------------- "Life is nothing if you aren't obsessed." --John Waters
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Tony Kondaks
John S. wrote in message <38D1C1DA...@freewwweb.comm>...
>Nowadays you can't see an action movie on TV without being warned that
>it's violent, nor can you see an animal-based movie without being
>reassured that the creatures "were not harmed in the making of this
>docudramas like THE INSIDER, THE HURRICANE and ERIN BROCKOVICH should
>include the disclaimer "This dramatization of actual events may contain
>some fictionalized material."
Yeah, and all three movies contain complete bullshit:
The Insider is about a scientist who feigns outrage over the fact that the
Tobacco Company -- which he freely went to work for and took their very
generous money as salary for many years -- was selling a product that caused
cancer. Shit, I'm no scientist and like every other American, I've been
inundated with those non-profit commercial on TV since the mid '60s and I
know that cigarettes cause cancer!
The Hurricane is about a wretch of a human being -- Rubin Carter -- who is
as guilty of those 3 murders as O.J. Simpson is of killing Ron and Nicole.
And even if he didn't do it, I thank god that this monster was locked up for
20 years because I can only imagine the many lives he was NOT able to ruin
because he was behind bars.
Erin Brockevich is about a bunch of lawyers fucking over a multi-billion
utility to the tune of $333 million for causing cancer that there was
virtually no proof that they caused.
Tylerfile
spino...@my-deja.com
you have seen the film.
Erin Brockovich presents working class people (that is, most of us)
with dignity and goes against the grain of Hollywood movies that
snidely take the side of property owners by presenting single males as
potential criminals, by personalizing social pathology, and by blaming
people for all their problems.
However, this movie confirms Adorno's and Kracauer's contention that
the essence of a visual medium is to freeze-frame social possibilities
into what can be imaged. To both Adorno and Kracauer, movies,
especially the standard Hollywood narrative film, are a conservative
force, by nature. In order to be believable, films have to present
millions of social givens as givens that cannot be changed.
Thus, in Hollywood, legions of script consultants see to details that
make the movie believable by making it conform to a standardized false
consciousness. Thus, when a single girl goes Bohemian and moves to the
Village, her false consciousness is that she will have an apartment
like the nice place she had in Ohio, so therefore the movie The Way We
Were presents Barbara Streisand with a lavish bachelorette "pad" bought
apparently with air.
The cockroaches in Erin Brockovich are decoration, for the reality is
that house prices even in California's Central Valley have been subject
to the economics in Silicon Valley on the other side of a mountain
range: highly paid software engineers are commuting from Sacramento to
San Jose, and forcing up rents and mortgages all over the state. One
wonders how it is that a single mother even has a rented house in a
state where a mere studio apartment is 800.00 plus per month.
But the biggest problem is not script details. It is the imagining of
social justice as a game show.
Erin Brockovich attains her goal of providing for her family and suing
a major polluter, and this is a true story. This means that the
audience goes home thinking that the battle for social justice has been
won, because they saw it in the movies.
The reality is quite different. Not only at Love Canal and Hinckley CA
(the site of Brockovich's struggle) but all over the country poor and
working class people have to live near producers of toxins whereas the
wealthy do not. Heavy duty cancer at an early age, and complete lack
of medical care as a consequence of no money, are common features of
poor communities in the USA.
The false consciousness is that "if I get poor, old and sick, someone
will take care of me." The brutal fact is that this was true in the
USA after Franklin Delano Roosevelt but not after the presidency of
Ronald Wilson Reagan, who essentially used the false consciousness of
millions to give those millions a world-historical shaft. Erin
Brockovich, for all its surface liberalism, does not ask why it is that
poor people who get sick as a result of pollution (as is the case in
vast stretches of the industrial Northeast) are presented with medical
bills that cannot be paid without an exhausting legal battle.
Very many successful torts are won by plaintiffs only to be changed or
reversed on appeal because it is unseemly that ordinary slobs get
significant awards, and in many cases awards that survive appeal ARE
NOT PAID. None of these realities exist in the world of Brockovich.
In the world of Brockovich, a single mother has only to wear sexy
clothes and to insult fat people and African Americans to get her way.
Mere fairness and equity in daily life have become rare and precious
commodities in our society in recent years. Under the neo-barbarism of
employment at will, employees including single mothers can lose their
jobs for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all. Use of
email for complaints about unfair on the job treatment have been
transformed into serious criminal charges of harassment.
Erin Brockovich presents mere fairness and equity as attainable prizes
as long as the social actor has a cute body and a foul mouth: this is a
home-grown form of Fascism, for suppose (imagine) Erin Brockovich had
no case, or was fighting an unfair fight for a corporation. If power,
as Foucault say, operates in a capillary fashion, then perhaps if we
conduct ourselves in an authoritarian, Fascist spirit, we have no right
to complain when the macro structures (corporations or governments)
conduct themselves on the national and international stage with the
same barbarity.
Teaching a working class person to "get hers" by a foul mouth is merely
to recruit willing centurions of an international order which yearly
has become more authoritarian and less comprehending of what simple
justice is...as witness the treatment of Bosnia in 1992. Questions of
equity become resolved in the manner of a particularly nasty beauty
contest.
The regression is deeper. Brockovich's case was won, according to this
true story, by foregoing a Constitutional right, for the plaintiffs had
to agree to binding arbitration. Binding arbitration is accurately
shown in the movie as distasteful to the citizen because it dismantles,
on a case by case basis, legal protections that were won only after a
great deal of struggle. Binding arbitration is a form of legal
regression because it regresses American law, with its populist streak,
towards more top-down and aristocratic English law at the behest of the
monied players who can demand binding arbitration as the price for
foregoing a protracted legal battle. The judge arbitrator is more like
an English judge who is biased, by his very position, towards
the "better sort" of player, which of course means those on the
corporation's side.
Brockovich proposes that we agree to legal regression, as we agree to
legal regression in the form of "three strikes and your out" laws, in
order to get the American Dream back. This is creeping Fascism.
Because of the Taft-Hartley act of 1948, American workers and their
unions are not able to address the way in which polluting engineering
designs (such as holding tanks without liners) are implemented. Thus,
at Boeing, engineers do not talk about the content of their jobs as
structured towards unfairness (as in the case of longer hours resulting
from poor management decisions, or, conversely, too little time spent
on safety.) They are restricted, by law, to merely pointing out that
the machinists got a better pay and benefits deal.
This allows the press to present the Boeing machinists less as fully
grown adults concerned not only about pay and benefits but also about
the intellectual content of their jobs: for all a student of media
knows about engineers, they are merely lucky white guys who push
pencils around. The image of the engineers becomes that of children:
the nerdly siblings of the rough tough machinists who are demanding the
same candy, and the same slice of the American Pie.
This media imaging is probably responsible for the fact that so many
American technologists come to work formally prepared for work by years
of conformity to unquestioned educational authoritarianism...but
staggeringly ignorant all the same, and profoundly anti-intellectual to
boot.
In countries without this tradition, like Germany, engineers regard
themselves as serious social actors as a result of the fact that labor,
including engineering labor, has a seat at the table. But in America,
many engineers regress from reasonably critical and well-informed
college graduates to embittered and essentially childish defenders of
outdated conspiracy theories in politics, and outdated technology on
the job, as a result of their treatment, under Taft Hartley, as non-
adults who are responsible for mistakes but not able to influence macro
direction in the slightest.
At Alaska Airlines, the fact that maintenance workers banded together
to present management with a statement describing slipshod maintenance,
that may have led to last January's crash of an Alaska jet, is not
presented in a union context at all. That is because their union
(assuming that they have one) is restricted to pay and benefits. Their
union, if it exists, can't even defend this action.
The movie Erin Brockovich presents individual P G & E workers who had
to violate work rules (under Taft Hartley a management zone of
authority) in order to preserve documentation of P G & E misdeeds. It
does not image, it does not imagine, the nonexistent possibility, of a
group of midlevel P G & E engineers resident in the town saying BEFORE
PEOPLE DIED that the holding tank design was flawed.
The corporate executives who approved the "bad" chromium, and the
executives of Exxon who probably forbid any consideration of double-
hulling the Exxon Valdez so that its 1980s spill did not wreck Prince
William Sound, live in Pacific Heights, in San Francisco, and the upper
East Side of Manhattan...not in California's central valley or Alaska.
But the engineers do in many cases and, had they the basic right to
incorporate considerations outside the bottom line, they could have,
but did not, save their family's lives and environment. But as a
consequence of Taft Hartley, any sense of connection is lost.
So, we are presented with "justice" in the form of payments to people,
some of whom are dying. The related movie A Civil Action at least
speaks to the possibility of transferring a polluter's case to a
criminal venue, one in which the managers of the polluter would face
jail time: Erin Brockovich does not do so.
Erin Brockovich fails completely to break out of the Hollywood system
and reproduces it far more effectively by its liberal tone.
The movie does assert the simple dignity of the employee who dresses
carefully and with style for work, only to be told that his or her
attire is "not appropriate" and to be dehumanized and
deprofessionalised thereby...for the underlying message is that the
employee is a child who has to be under lifelong tutelage.
As a white collar employee who prefers a suit and tie to "business
casual" and who has actually been rebuked, in overtly democratic but in
actuality authoritarian tones, for wearing a damn tie, I fully support
the right of a woman like Julia to wear micro-mini skirts. "Business
casual" employers, for all their pseudo-populism, cannot seem to
understand that a world is possible in which people choose to dress the
way they choose.
Homeless women in Chicago who are being groomed for entry in the
workforce are told precisely that they should not dress "fly", like
Hollywood stars. Were a single parent to actually dress in the style
of Julia in a real law office, she'd be told, "girl, who you think you
are? Julia Roberts?" In our society, it would not be a valid or
acceptable answer to say that one is who one is and that one has the
right to choose to dress any way one pleases and as one has concluded
is most appropriate to the content of the work.
So while on the face of it Erin Brockovich takes the ordinary person's
side, it is unfair to real working people, who don't win confrontations
by being foul-mouthed: who don't "win" much at all.
Their final work-related cancers and heart diseases, carefully
separated from the possibility of employer payment of medical bills by
an out of date workmen's compensation system, don't have "good days."
The Hollywood system, and the media in general, avoids through images
naming their suffering and endurance.
It might be said that this is in part a "women's" picture and that I
Just Don't Get It because I am a guy. This criticism ignores the
social fact that many working women, for the very reason that they work
two shifts on the job and in the home, tend to think about social
justice in a damaged fashion, and to transform the fight for justice
into a fight for Number One out of necessity.
If further people are not to be made sick by industrial pollution, the
legal system is not enough and if there is further pressure on the
courts for recompense as a result of movies like Erin Brockovich and A
Civil Action, more and more people will simply be denied access to the
courts in the name of "tort reform" and Richard A Posner's "law and
economics" theories...which sharply favor time-savers like binding
arbitration and the willing sacrifice by the victim of her rights.
Alain Finkielkraut is a French intellectual...one of those guys
presented by the media as being remote to the concerns of a single
mother in California. Yet his concern is not remote, for it is of the
ways in which real injustice and real justice are systemtically erased
by glamorous images. He writes this, which could be applied to Erin
Brockovich:
"The twentieth century's specificity lies not in tragedy-
all times have known tragedy-but in the *nightmare*-that is,
in the very denial of tragedy."
There are a number of sly film-school references to the 1970s movie
Silkwood, about a real nuclear whistle-blower. But the significant
difference is that Silkwood ends with the reality of Karen Silkwood's
car being run off the road. One might emerge from Silkwood with the
sense that if that battle was lost, there are other battles: but one
emerges from Erin Brockovich thinking at some level that since Julia
was on the case, one is now "safe."
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
ELurio
WARNING, this is a critical review WITH SPOILERS meant to be read after
you have seen the film.
>>
<< Erin Brockovich attains her goal of providing for her family and suing
a major polluter, and this is a true story. This means that the
audience goes home thinking that the battle for social justice has been
won, because they saw it in the movies.>>
You seem to be insinuating that it isn't for some reason.
<< The reality is quite different. Not only at Love Canal and Hinckley CA
(the site of Brockovich's struggle) but all over the country poor and
working class...>>
This is the story of Erin Brockovitch. The reality of the Hinckley case was
depicted somewhat accuratley. Hence it is a decent version of the reality of
the case, unlike, say, "the Hurricane," which was about 66.6% Bullshit.
<<Very many successful torts are won by plaintiffs only to be changed or
reversed on appeal because it is unseemly that ordinary slobs get
significant awards, and in many cases awards that survive appeal ARE
NOT PAID. None of these realities exist in the world of Brockovich.>>
Then how do you explain the explicit mention of the above fact and that the
Love Canal plaintiffs had yet to see a penny of their settlement at the time of
the Hinkley suit?
The fact that you deny a major part of the film happened in the film is a clear
sign of disengenuousness on your part.
<< In the world of Brockovich, a single mother has only to wear sexy
clothes and to insult fat people and African Americans to get her way. >>
That plus hard work. I guess you didn't see the movie after all.
<< Erin Brockovich presents mere fairness and equity as attainable prizes
as long as the social actor has a cute body and a foul mouth: this is a
home-grown form of Fascism, for suppose (imagine) Erin Brockovich had
no case, or was fighting an unfair fight for a corporation. >>
Why? Erin Brockovich appeared on lots of talk shows recently to promote the
movie and she says that she has a foul mouth. On her TV appearences, Brockovich
shows the world her magnificent bod. What the movie shows is that she got where
she was DESPITE those things and is shown to be an extremely intellegent
person.
This has nothing to do with fascism. Calling something fascist which clearly
isn't is the leftist way of saying it isn't politically correct.
<< There are a number of sly film-school references to the 1970s movie
Silkwood, about a real nuclear whistle-blower. But the significant
difference is that Silkwood ends with the reality of Karen Silkwood's
car being run off the road. >>
You are implying that "Erin Brockovich" is complete fiction. I think you should
go see the movie for the first time. It's clear that you haven't seen it at
all.
eric l.
Helen & Bob
amit wrote:
> "ELurio" <elu...@aol.com> wrote
>
> > I think you should
> > go see the movie for the first time. It's clear that you haven't seen it
> at
> > all.
>
> Can't have a negative review of EB without that coming up.
>
> amit.
> 'O-R they?'
When the review is so off base as to what happened in the film, it does raise
some doubts.
Bob
amit
spino...@my-deja.com
Helen & Bob <chil...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
does raise
> some doubts.
It's really amazing that this criticism...that I did not see the
film...should be raised, because I gave details that were in the film
in a long review.
I think that the charge is made with a straight face because beginning
with Forrest Gump, certain Hollywood movies have become ritual
occasions at which the audience is not only expected to be entertained,
but to willingly consent to the second-order message of the film.
Following the release of the movie Forrest Gump, which was an infantile
retelling of recent American history, the nascent Internet was replete
with postings that chided others for not "getting it", getting the
message that Forrest Gump, the Holy Innocent, represented our real
selves...not Richard Nixon, Rusty Calley, or Charles Manson.
Indeed, as I left the theater after seeing Forrest Gump with my son, I
was factually recounting to him my own history, which diverged
significantly from that of Forrest Gump, in that I was a war protestor
who was not, as it happens, an abusive psycho. A man stared at me
hard: as if my factual history was somehow less worthy than the
ritualized history of Forrest Gump.
It is clear from these posts that as Forrest Gump was to rescue
American international conduct in the Vietnam period, Erin Brockovich
is to rescue upper-middle-class self-images after several years in
which the upper middle class has deprived the working and lower classes
of access to health care, education and a safe environment. And the
ritual participation of the audience shall mean that if one does not
participate in this Nuremburg rally one shall be charged with
dishonesty in posting notes about a movie one has not seen.
> Bob
spino...@my-deja.com
> WARNING, this is a critical review WITH SPOILERS meant to be read
after
> you have seen the film.
>
> >>
>
suing
> a major polluter, and this is a true story. This means that the
> audience goes home thinking that the battle for social justice has
been
> won, because they saw it in the movies.>>
>
The untruth is at the level of contextualization. As Noam Chomsky
points out in his bok on media, Manufacturing Consent, it would be
foolish in an open society for the media to present lies, as it does in
totalitarian societies. This is because the citizen in an open society
can verify or refute simple statements and misstatements of fact by
inspection of the evidence.
Erin goes to the PG & E site and takes water samples. Although she is
chased away by security guards after getting her samples, in a
totalitarian society should would either not have gotten access at all
to the site, or would have been pursued by the guards and thrown into
prison. She was thus in an open society able to confirm the use of
the "bad" chromium.
People in the former Soviet Union have in most cases simply no idea of
what environmental hazards they have been exposed to, and as a result
the situation is much worse in Russia. But this does not make the
situation "good" in any absolute or relative sense in the USA. Cancer
is cancer and it's great if you can get five million dollars for your
kids if you have to check out. But to believe that this erases an
absolute injustice is to assent to what Alain Finkelkraut calls the
central nightmare of the 20th century, the denial of tragedy.
This movie has to manipulate real anger in a fashion. It has to be
factual because people in California and on the Internet can check its
facts. But it has to do a very careful job of presenting the facts so
that it does not attack major corporate interests.
For example, the polluter in question is an electric monopoly, and
there is a move afoot towards utility deregulation. By the laws of
competition between oligarchs, in which any weakness is exploited
brutally, the new coding of utilities as "bad old monopolies" which are
represented as being like Communist societies in miniature, means that
they are safer targets. But at this point no Hollywood movie can be
made, or has been made, about the Exxon Valdez incident.
> <<Very many successful torts are won by plaintiffs only to be changed
or
>> reversed on appeal because it is unseemly that ordinary slobs get
>> significant awards, and in many cases awards that survive appeal ARE
>> NOT PAID. None of these realities exist in the world of Brockovich.>>
>
> Then how do you explain the explicit mention of the above fact and
that the
> Love Canal plaintiffs had yet to see a penny of their settlement at
the time of
> the Hinkley suit?
Again, the ordinary citizen in an open society can check public records
so it would be silly of the movie Erin Brockovich to avoid these
facts. But as I have stated, the movie tries to preserve the current
arrangement (in which the civil tort system is the ONLY remaining
protection against environmental injury) by having the plaintiffs
sacrifice their right to trial by jury.
>
> The fact that you deny a major part of the film happened in the film
is a clear
> sign of disengenuousness on your part.
I did not deny it at all. In the post I identify several places where
the film is accurate AT THE LEVEL OF FIRST-ORDER FACTS.
Where it lies is in the presentation of alternatives. At no point does
Erin say, gee, engineers who design holding tanks oughta be free to add
liners so that this never happens again. It assents to men living in
Pacific Heights making decisions that damage kids living in the Central
Valley.
>
> << In the world of Brockovich, a single mother has only to wear sexy
> clothes and to insult fat people and African Americans to get her
way. >>
>
> That plus hard work. I guess you didn't see the movie after all.
The "hard work" on Erin's part consisted in a detour and frolic in
which she followed up on why medical records were in a real estate
file. In most offices employees at her level, and indeed most upper-
level paralegals and attorneys, are expected to work in the office.
Erin was neither a qualified and trained paralegal nor an attorney.
The movie does not make it clear what she is doing when she "opens a
file" by going on an investigatory junket. Law firms retain
specialized (and for that matter licensed) private investigators for
this type of work. Members of juries who engage in Erin-style
investigation are jailed for contempt of court.
I am not saying this is right. We should live in a society where
employees can expand the scope of their job (and where society has not
damaged employees to such an extent, that they typically use this right
to screw around on detours and frolics.) But the fact is that even
trained paralegals do not do this type of investigation without pre-
authorization, and Erin was a clerical employee...not even a paralegal.
The underlying message is that you're a fool if you follow the rules
and eat Krispy Kreme donuts to mask your anger and pain, and that
anything is forgiven...as long as you get your story told on Oprah.
The result isn't justice, it's millions of workplaces structured like
that of Oprah herself, who is herself a workplace tyrant if a recent
story in Chicago's Reader can be credited. The authoritarianism is
manufactured by permitting the ordinary employee to use discourtesy on
the job to "get ahead."
Dammit, my students at DeVry struggled to attain their goals of a
simple college degree which is looked down upon by the software
industry. They can't dress "fly" at work and they don't get anywhere
with me or anyone else by using foul language. They needed, in some
cases remedial work because unlike the "real" Erin Brockovich, who did
have, it appears, a halfway decent education at Kansas taxpayer
expense, their schools have been drained of tax dollars by racist
politicians. They cannot appear collectively on Oprah yet Oprah and
the media do them an injustice by continually personalizing and
retailing the struggle for collective justice, and forcing people into
an exhausting and demeaning struggle for simple fairness and equity.
This is to manipulate a real, and quite legitimate, desire on the part
of people for meaningful participation in their lives by saying, in
effect, that this opportunity already exists, and that you only have to
have great legs and a willingness to insult fat people and African
Americans to exercise this right.
>
>> << Erin Brockovich presents mere fairness and equity as attainable
prizes
>> as long as the social actor has a cute body and a foul mouth: this
is a
>> home-grown form of Fascism, for suppose (imagine) Erin Brockovich had
>> no case, or was fighting an unfair fight for a corporation. >>
>
> Why? Erin Brockovich appeared on lots of talk shows recently to
promote the
> movie and she says that she has a foul mouth. On her TV appearences,
Brockovich
> shows the world her magnificent bod. What the movie shows is that she
got where
> she was DESPITE those things and is shown to be an extremely
intellegent
> person.
I haven't seen "the real Erin" so I will just trust your account that
the movie persona is close to the real person.
The problem is that many people are very intelligent but at the same
time unwilling to be discourteous and to insult fat people and African
Americans to get their way, not because of cowardice but because they
choose not to live in what I can only term an anarchoFascist world: my
neologism is the only word appropriate to homegrown American fascism in
which extreme authoritarianism overcomes our natural distaste by
presenting itself as the reverse.
"Erin Brockovich" is being lauded to the skies as a movie with all the
right notes struck, but I am going to fart in church here. I shall
compare Erin Brockovich, unfavorably, to Joe Esterhazโ 1996 film about
Las Vegas, Showgirls.
Showgirls was far more accurate, on the level of interpretation, of the
real life of the working class than Erin Brockovich. It is said that
Showgirls was a merely tits and ass display made for sleazy guys in pay-
per-view land. What Showgirls actually is, in my opinion, is an
accurate interpretation of working class aspiration.
Naomi Malone, the heroine of Showgirls, does not "win" because like the
working-class hero of the 1950s British film The Loneliness of the Long
Distance Runner, Naomi simply walks away from the prize (imagine Julia
inviting Ed Masryk to shove her bonus check up his butt, or give it to
the poor.) Naomi does so after seeing what the actual corporate system
does to her roommate and her dance teacher...who in Showgirls is forced
to downsize his aspiration from Alvin Ailey to a job in a grocery
store.
In having a downbeat ending in which the "winner" joins the millions
of "losers" by walking away from the prize, Showgirls departed from the
REAL political correctness, which is to lust after the American Dream,
to close off one's alternatives, and to retail one's brutality as
available to power if only power will pay one (for when Erin swears at
her boss early in the film she is in a sense only showing off her
ability to be a centurion in the service of Ed Masryk: she is only
marketing at this point.)
And in Showgirls, there is a telling scene in which one of the dancer's
kids is shocked to hear another dancer use the F-word. The mother is
presented as wanting to give her kids a middle-class refuge and as
working hard to do so, whereas Erin has given up that particular fight.
>
> This has nothing to do with fascism. Calling something fascist which
clearly
> isn't is the leftist way of saying it isn't politically correct.
>
Fascism is neither its presentation in Indiana Jones (Germans dressed
in uniforms and goose stepping) not "anything that is not politically
correct." Showgirls as an example of a movie that is not politically
correct yet profoundly opposed to game show Fascism.
>
> You are implying that "Erin Brockovich" is complete fiction. I think
you should
> go see the movie for the first time. It's clear that you haven't seen
it at
> all.
I'm not implying anything of the sort. I am instead echoing Chomsky's
thesis that media can be and must be factually correct in an open
society (because the citizen can check basic facts) while selling an
underlying and second-order interpretation.
In Erin Brockovich that interpretation is Clinton's centrism which
assents to the right of major corporations to fully dictate working
conditions, to buy and sell the right to foul the environment, and to
treat working class communities like dogshit, while getting the big
corporations, maybe, to pay some medical bills. Now I kind of like
Clinton's centrism: it's better than Reaganism and Bushism. But I can
imagine a society in which engineers would not even think of NOT lining
holding tanks in order to protect ground water supplies. Imagine a
society in which the very idea of being able to BUY the right to
contaminate the environment was laughed at (for our society is one in
which quiet moves are being made towards an environmental "futures
market" in which companies would be able to buy this right.)
Erin Brockovich sells the damaged politics of the overworked single
mother by slyly exploiting our guilt and compassion. The nightmare is
that this reproduces the system which creates the damage.
ELurio
<<
> WARNING, this is a critical review WITH SPOILERS meant to be read
after
> you have seen the film.
>
> >>
>
> << Erin Brockovich attains her goal of providing for her family and
suing
> a major polluter, and this is a true story. This means that the
> audience goes home thinking that the battle for social justice has
been
> won, because they saw it in the movies.>>
>
> You seem to be insinuating that it isn't for some reason.
The untruth is at the level of contextualization. As Noam Chomsky
points out in his bok on media, Manufacturing Consent, it would be
foolish in an open society for the media to present lies, as it does in
totalitarian societies. >>
Snip of large amount of leftie b.s.
The story of the making of the movie: A friend of the producer's wife meets
Erin Brockovitch in a chairopractor's office. They get to talking. "Wow" the
producer's wife, thinks: "What a nifty story!"
She tells her husband, who agrees....yaddayaddayadda...Movie is made and Julia
Robers EARNS her twenty megabucks.
There is NOTHING more. No secret agendas, no crypto-fascism, No untruth is at
the level of contextualization.
Just storytelling.
eric l.
Tony Kondaks
spino...@my-deja.com wrote in message <8bjmj2$nea$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...
You do realize, of course, that there is absolutely no evidence connecting
the cancers in Hinckley with the actions of the electric company?
>
>This movie has to manipulate real anger in a fashion. It has to be
>factual because people in California and on the Internet can check its
>facts. But it has to do a very careful job of presenting the facts so
>that it does not attack major corporate interests.
And what is wrong with "major corporate interests"? You seem to suggest
that there is "us" -- the regular, middle class people -- and then there is
the big bad corporation that is out to get everybody. Well, of course, most
corporations are not owned by the Bill Gates' of the world but by the
pension plans and mutual funds owned for the most part by the middle
class....
>
>For example, the polluter in question is an electric monopoly, and
>there is a move afoot towards utility deregulation. By the laws of
>competition between oligarchs, in which any weakness is exploited
>brutally, the new coding of utilities as "bad old monopolies" which are
>represented as being like Communist societies in miniature, means that
>they are safer targets. But at this point no Hollywood movie can be
>made, or has been made, about the Exxon Valdez incident.
What do you mean "can be made"? Do you think there is some sort of
conspiracy between the evil corporate elite to prevent such a film being
made?
Did you not see "Waterworld" in which the Exxon Valdez appeared as well as
the captain of the ship (whose name escapes me for the moment)?
>
>> <<Very many successful torts are won by plaintiffs only to be changed
>or
>>> reversed on appeal because it is unseemly that ordinary slobs get
>>> significant awards,
"ordinary slobs" usually don't deserve the rediculous windfalls that juries
are eager to give "the little guy".
The $333 million awared in the EB case was about $332 million more than
should have been given, IMHO.
???? Boy, I'd like to hear your reasoning on that one...
>They cannot appear collectively on Oprah yet Oprah and
>the media do them an injustice by continually personalizing and
>retailing the struggle for collective justice,
"collective justice"...that's a most frightening concept...do you believe
that there is such a thing as a collective? Who and what are they?
>and forcing people into
>an exhausting and demeaning struggle for simple fairness and equity.
whatever are you referring to? Examples, please...
I assume you are referring to the Afro-American that appeared in the film
that worked in the law firm. Why in heavens would you focus in on this
person's color? Whatever had it to do with what was going on in the
film?????
>to get their way, not because of cowardice but because they
>choose not to live in what I can only term an anarchoFascist world: my
>neologism is the only word appropriate to homegrown American fascism in
>which extreme authoritarianism overcomes our natural distaste by
>presenting itself as the reverse.
>
>"Erin Brockovich" is being lauded to the skies as a movie with all the
>right notes struck, but I am going to fart in church here. I shall
>compare Erin Brockovich, unfavorably, to Joe Esterhazโ 1996 film about
>Las Vegas, Showgirls.
>
>Showgirls was far more accurate, on the level of interpretation, of the
>real life of the working class than Erin Brockovich. It is said that
>Showgirls was a merely tits and ass display made for sleazy guys in pay-
>per-view land. What Showgirls actually is, in my opinion, is an
>accurate interpretation of working class aspiration.
Would that be the oppressed working classes?
>
>Naomi Malone, the heroine of Showgirls, does not "win" because like the
>working-class hero of the 1950s British film The Loneliness of the Long
>Distance Runner, Naomi simply walks away from the prize (imagine Julia
>inviting Ed Masryk to shove her bonus check up his butt, or give it to
>the poor.) Naomi does so after seeing what the actual corporate system
You seem to hate corporations. Do you hate free enterprise too? What do
you suggest is a better system than what we have?
...and why shouldn't they be able to do that? If a person doesn't want to
work under their conditions, he/she doesn't have to take the employment
offered them...
>to buy and sell the right to foul the environment, and to
>treat working class communities like dogshit,
When does that happen?????
>while getting the big
>corporations, maybe, to pay some medical bills. Now I kind of like
>Clinton's centrism: it's better than Reaganism and Bushism. But I can
>imagine a society in which engineers would not even think of NOT lining
>holding tanks in order to protect ground water supplies.
And what makes you think that happened in the EB case? Just because some
arbitor SAID it occurred??????
hamilton
<tkon...@primenet.com> wrote:
You do realize of course that it is virtually impossible to ever prove
such things with environmental pollution? They dumped a known poison into
the ground water; they lied to the people affected about it; they had a
company policy to cover it up; they got caught. That is as close to truth
of the matter as it is possible to get.
spino...@my-deja.com
Characterizing this as "leftie bs" really confirms my point.
The Fascist mechanism is to co-opt real working class discontent and to
direct it at safe targets, including unpopular utility companies, fat
people and African-Americans. Elites since the start of the last
century (the 20th century) have done this almost unconsciously, and
have had as a result to deal with powerful Fascist and Nazi movements
as a result.
It strains credulity to say that (for example) my point that ordinary
people do NOT get away with dressing fly on the job or working offsite
on unapproved projects is "leftie bs." It happens to be a common
sense, which at one and the same time admits the reality of unjust
arrangements and questions their justice.
The real bullshit is to present the choices of one lucky person who
happened to work in one law office that had one successful lawsuit
against an unpopular company as at all representative of reality.
>
> The story of the making of the movie: A friend of the producer's wife
meets
> Erin Brockovitch in a chairopractor's office. They get to
talking. "Wow" the
> producer's wife, thinks: "What a nifty story!"
>
> She tells her husband, who agrees....yaddayaddayadda...Movie is made
and Julia
> Robers EARNS her twenty megabucks.
>
> There is NOTHING more. No secret agendas, no crypto-fascism, No
untruth is at
> the level of contextualization.
Having worked at Princeton University, the fact that power is capillary
and that for this reason power brokers who are implementing unjust (or
for that matter just) social arrangements do so in the same daily
rounds, essentially, as ordinary slobs has always been fascinating to
me. Gee, I go to the health club and work out, and so does Gordon
Gecko's real life counterpart. But because the creation of the movie
can be narrated in such a way does not mean that these social
structures do not have a reality over and above the capillary
structures of daily life.
It would be surprising if the agenda of power did NOT emerge in the
capillary structures of daily life for that would make powerful people
the sort of people who did not have to go to chiropractors or work out
or floss. But the agenda as an emergent feature of daily life has
literally no other way of operating for somewhat the same reason we
need feet.
Refusing to name these structures because Julia is "just like us, only
richer" and appears on Oprah who is "just like us, only richer" is to
be beguiled, in my view. Alternatively to believe in the Bavarian
Illuminati and other conspiracy theories is to be beguiled precisely
because power emerges in the capillary structures of daily life.
I can create a cellular automaton on a computer, Conway's "Game of
Life" in which it is actually meaningful to say that groups of cells
are "making war" on other groups of cells. This is not irrational even
though the behavior of groups of cells can be more deeply and
exhaustively explained as mere rule-following.
So to say that Julia is unconsciously replicating elite manipulation of
working class hopes, by transforming a working class story into a game
show that conceals millions of "losers" is in one sense just another
way of narrating her career. Your preferred way narrates her career
differently, as someone who goes to the beauty parlor and
chiropractor. Ultimately, I can only make a pragmatic argument for a
manner of speaking, and that is that the colonization of working class
stories by game show thinking...in which the American Dream becomes the
abuse of fat people and African Americans...is stupid and wrong.
Finally, I have no doubt that Julia is "jest folks", for one of the
features of our society is the aggressive selection of a glamorous
ordinariness (or an ordinariness that submits willingly to a regimen of
glamor without trying, as Marilyn Monroe tried so tragically, to escape
to a more authentic existence.) This is coupled with the elimination
of the truly exceptional and also of mere beauty. If you look at Julia
closely, she's grotesque.
>
> Just storytelling.
Yes. But consider that the ways we tell stories around de campfire
makes a significant difference in the rest of our lives.
>
> eric l.
spino...@my-deja.com
"Tony Kondaks" <tkon...@primenet.com> wrote:
>
> spino...@my-deja.com wrote in message <8bjmj2
$nea$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...
>
connecting
> the cancers in Hinckley with the actions of the electric company?
Do you realize that the biggest form of pseudo-science in our legal
system is the fact that owing to a complete misunderstanding of David
Hume, corporations can buy all the suspension of belief they need, and
that the tobacco companies are masters of this art?
There is a legal concept called the moral certainty. Normally applied
in capital cases, it asks the juror in a capital case to be certain on
three levels: (1) certainty as to the facts, (2) certainty as to the
applicability fo the law and (3) โmorallyโ comfortable with the
seriousness and weight of his decision, owing to the fact that it
involves a personโs life.
โMoral certaintyโ is different from scientific certainty. In some
areas it demands HIGHER standards of proof but in others it demands
LOWER standards of proof.
In a capital case it does demand that the jury be very sure of the
facts and the applicabilty of the law. This is the higher standard of
proof, at or above that of science.
But in quantum physics, the scientist is invited to entertain
possibilities and alternatives outside the realm of common sense: the
most famous example is Schrodingerโs cat. In this thought-experiment,
a cat bombarded with radiation inside a sealed container is โneither
alive nor deadโ until the container is opened and inspected. Any LEGAL
argument that used Schrodingerโs cat, such as, โyer honner, the victim
was in a sealed container, and although we admit the murderer bombarded
her with lethal radiation, the container was never openedโ would be
inadmissable.
There was a New Yorker cartoon a few years ago in which a man refuses
to pay a restaurant bill โbecause of the undecidability of mathematics
as proved by Godel.โ Like Schrodingerโs cat, this would be fully
inadmissable in his trial for theft of services.
Moral certainty thus EXCLUDES, or should exclude, as I have shown by
these two examples, evidence from the wilder shores of science. A
murderer cannot plead that he may not have bludgeoned his Mom to death
because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
โMoral certaintyโ is thus used to speed up capital criminal cases where
the defendants are not corporations. This has had the result that
innocent people have been executed.
But note that contentions such as yours, that we cannot โproveโ that
the bad chromium used by P G & E caused the cancers, are essentially
manufactured and bought by deep pockets defendants. The most notable
example is that of the tobacco companies, which employ legions of
consultants to disprove, or render scientifically uncertain, something
which my granny knewโฆthat cigarettes make you sick.
Unlike scientific certainty, moral certainty takes into account the
reality of human mortality. In moral certainty, the right of a murder
victim to redress most assuredly trumps and supersedes the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle and Godelโs proof, simply because mere equity
demands it.
But the pernicious aspect of corporate and in some cases big government
defense is that scientific uncertainty can supersede both victimโs
rights and moral certainty because nowadays scientific certainty can be
purchased. There are powerful, and to me convincing, arguments for
concluding in speedy fashion that the Hinckley FACTS are that lotsa
people got sick and that the applicable moral law is โthou shalt not
kill.โ The fact that I can purchase a scientific whore to question
these using new developments in chemistry, physics and mathematics ad
infinitum is an injustice.
Oliver Stoneโs JFK raises this when Kevin Costner, playing New Orleans
DA Jim Garrison, discusses the โsingle bulletโ theory of JFKโs
assassination. It appears that the power of the government was able to
sell a nonsensical theory to the court in which a pristine bullet
entered the bodies of both JFK and Texas Governor Connally. Note that
money and power can in our society trump a moral certainty, which in a
just society would simply not allow poor and middle class people to be
poisoned by corporations, and which would demand a thorough
investigation after a major assassination.
I am not an expert on the Hinkley case but if the facts are as
presented in the movie, there is a moral certainty, to me, that P G & E
was most grievously at fault. The central problem is the fact that
moral certainty can be purchased by the highest bidder.
>
> And what is wrong with "major corporate interests"? You seem to
suggest
> that there is "us" -- the regular, middle class people -- and then
there is
> the big bad corporation that is out to get everybody. Well, of
course, most
> corporations are not owned by the Bill Gates' of the world but by the
> pension plans and mutual funds owned for the most part by the middle
> class....
This was Peter Drucker's claim in the 1960s. You may be interested to
know that of late Drucker has abandoned this claim and become a sharp
critic of the uncaring ways in which companies TAKE AWAY pension plans
(by laying employees off just before retirement) and the ways in which
ownership of mutual funds has been systematically taken away from most
of the middle class in recent years,
>
> What do you mean "can be made"? Do you think there is some sort of
> conspiracy between the evil corporate elite to prevent such a film
being
 made?
Harold Ramis has for some time wanted to make a film of the life of the
Polish socialist Rosa Luxembourg who before she was murdered by the
German Freikorps in 1918, represented a humanist โthird wayโ to
capitalism and Communism.
Were he, or his agent, to โpitchโ this as a concept to Jack Warner in
the McCarthy era, Warner would say simply enough, no Commie rats are
gonna make films on MY lot.
Today, the objection would be more smooth. It would probably
be โnobody knows who the hell Rosa whatshername is.โ The rhetorical
Hollywood rule is that if one is sufficiently wealthy and powerful one
is permitted to generalize oneโs simple ignorance as an attribute of
the mass.
If the agent were dumb enough to keep talking, heโd mention how when
the โhigh conceptโ is sufficiently arcane, the very unfamiliarity can
morph into marketability as a result of novelty. This, Weirโs
successful 1981 film Gallipoli was advertised as โa story youโll never
forget from a place youโve never heard about.โ The result is that
contemporary Australians and New Zealanders, having seen the movie,
flock to cruises to Turkey to remember their grandfathers who were
sacrificed by the damn British to a foolish offensive that is
memorialised by the film.
But in the REAL Hollywood, the agent is normally smart enough not to
assay the above UNLESS he is real sure of the ground. That is because
the real Hollywood is not a manner of smoke filled rooms. Instead, in
Foucaultian terms, McCarthyism and authoritarianism have seeped into
the capillary structures of everyday dialog and indeed, the hip and the
knowing and the shrewd are the ones who replicate self-censorshipโฆnot
old Jewish guys in steam baths, who have been long since replaced by
Sony and other mega corporations, legal entities which neither smoke,
nor take steam baths.
>
> Did you not see "Waterworld" in which the Exxon Valdez appeared as
well as
 the captain of the ship (whose name escapes me for the moment)?
Give me a break. The infantile wet dream Waterworld was not at all a
criticism of Exxon. Sure, Dennis Hopper was the evil smoker who led
the bad guys, who were all in a bad mood because they could not light
their smokes in the pervasive damp of Waterworld.
This illustrates the infantile way in which social critique self-
defeats in Hollywood. In the 1970s, Silkwood presented the facts,
which were that a whistle-blower was killed. In the 1970s, Chinatown
presented a fictional detective story in which Jake Gittes discovered,
like many of Dashiell Hammetโs 1930s โprivate eyesโ, that no real urban
crime can be โsolvedโ because so many are social in dimension.
Waterworld trivialized our real concern about global warming and was
contrary to the facts, because while global warming would cause local
flooding, it would also cause desertification and possibly its reverse
(a new ice age) because Arctic and Antarctic ice melting would destroy
warm currents. In the same way, Erin Brockovich infantalized our real
concern about social injustice by making it into Who Wants to be a
Millionaire.
>
> "ordinary slobs" usually don't deserve the rediculous windfalls that
juries
 are eager to give "the little guy".
And they donโt get them, either.
>
> The $333 million awared in the EB case was about $332 million more
than
> should have been given, IMHO.
>
If the facts are as presented in Erin Brockovich, then not only should
the sick people be given millions of megabucks, a left-wing, liberal
think-tank should have been funded to oversee P G & Eโs future antics.
Ralph Nader funded his own think tank, Public Citizen, using his award
from the auto companies after it was shown that they tried to screw
Nader after he proved their products were unsafe. This has resulted in
significantly safer cars. Driving practices today (such as high
speeds) can now be used that would have killed millions in the cars of
the 1940s and 1950s, as a result of government mandated safety
features, due to Naderโs pressure.
Effective punishment is not retribution (and only infantile regression
as it operates in the legal sphere convinces people that it is so.) It
is instead something which rectifies the social pathology that produced
the hurt and pain. In the 1950s, the fact was that you could not drive
a car in modern style without significant risk of death, and thanks to
Public Citizen, people now can drive like idiots without dying quite so
frequently.
I even sort of agree with you here. If a person is a victim of unjust
treatment, our tort system continues and does not redress the injustice
by turning it into a game, of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. To turn
justice into a game show obscures the injustice and allows it to
flourish.
If a common street killer is nailed, we do NOT let him get off by
paying the victimโs family a million bucks. Here, our legal system
says, sorry, pal, no matter how rich you are, justice is only served by
you serving time or even losing your own life.
If the facts are as presented, and that P G & E San Francisco corporate
knew that it was washing the parts with bad chromium that is
carcinogenic, the law is clear, for it is based on โthou shalt not
kill.โ Societyโs interest is not only redressing the victims and their
families it is seeing that similar conduct does not occur again. If
this means allowing engineers to add safety factors to their designs in
excess of the demands of the bottom line this is, as Martha Stewart
would say, a good thing.
> >Dammit, my students at DeVry struggled to attain their goals of a
> >simple college degree which is looked down upon by the software
> >industry. They can't dress "fly" at work and they don't get anywhere
> >with me or anyone else by using foul language. They needed, in some
> >cases remedial work because unlike the "real" Erin Brockovich, who
did
> >have, it appears, a halfway decent education at Kansas taxpayer
> >expense, their schools have been drained of tax dollars by racist
> >politicians.
>
 ???? Boy, I'd like to hear your reasoning on that one...
Youโve read my facts and my logic. If you want to โhearโ my reasoning,
then call me on the telephone. Reason happens not to be brutal
individual shrewdness nor brutal defense of big shots.
> "collective justice"...that's a most frightening concept...do you
believe
 that there is such a thing as a collective? Who and what are they?
Collective JUSTICE is the ability to expect fairness and equity in
daily life, without having to pay a damn lawyer.
Collective JUSTICE is what we had before Reaganโฆto the extent that
precisely the same population of shitheads who are now โlibertariansโ
exploited it to the extent that its misuse became an argument for its
repeal. This, these shitheads did not pay their student loans (a
common shithead dodge in the 1970s) yet now would deny loans to my
students at DeVry.
>
> >and forcing people into
> >an exhausting and demeaning struggle for simple fairness and equity.
>
 whatever are you referring to? Examples, please...
(1) In Illinois, child support collection was centralized and
computerised, with the result that awards never reached thousands of
single mothers like Erin. These single mothers were still expected to
pay their rent and their mortgage on time, although the state, with its
powerful computers, could not pay money to the moms that it had
collected, through harsh and punitive measures, from fathers, many of
whom worked at the mininum wage.
Meanwhile, in civilized countries like those of Scandinavia,
politicians donโt talk a good game about family values. Instead, the
state in these happy regions of the world pays the mother no matter
what and pursues the nonpaying father.
(2) Under employment at will, which was a dead letter in the beginning
of the 1980s but which has been revived due to corporate pressure, a
single, working mother or noncustodial parent can lose their only
source of income โfor a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at
all.โ In the antiemployee climate created by employment at will, many
companies consistently fail to pay expenses, vacation pay due, or even
the last paycheck. A frequent scam is to delay the employeeโs first
paycheck by two weeks after hire, and then hope that the employee is
bubble brained enough to forget that sheโs owed a check for two weeks
after termination.
(3) Lawyers work on the basis of 40% of the award only in John
Grisham. REAL laywers ask for hefty retainers in cases like EB.
>
>
> I assume you are referring to the Afro-American that appeared in the
film
> that worked in the law firm. Why in heavens would you focus in on this
> person's color? Whatever had it to do with what was going on in the
> film?????
>
It is a common dodge to be factually racist but leave the racist
interpretation to the audience. Thus, in Sylvester Stallone action
films, the bad guys just happen to be swarthy dudes but the audience
has to be racist because the audience makes the interpretation.
I donโt wanna play this game. The black woman is set at loggerheads
with Julia as a matter of cinematic fact. The African American woman
has on the face of it a legitimate complaint, that Ed Masryk favors
Julia because Julia is thin and white and cute. Julia is in fact
neither a paralegal nor an attorney and thus is completely unqualified
to investigate. In a real office, Julia would have been expected not
only to dress more modestly but also to leave the matter with Ed Masryk.
>
 Would that be the oppressed working classes?
Uh, yeah. The oppressed working classes, ground down by the
imperialist running-dog lackeys of the possessor classes.
The New York Times carried an article last week which described the
very high rate of injury among dancers on Broadway. Apparently, many
audiences of live shows on Broadway come to these performances
expecting to see nonstop Flashdancing as a result of TV and video, on
which dancers appear to be superhuman because of selection and
cutting. According to the article, hundreds of dancers have been
injured as a result.
These dancers can lose their entire livelihood in seconds, and
Showgirls presents this transported to Las Vegas in two incidents.
Itโs just an obscenity that a person who goes against the bubble butt
grain of modern America (in which people are frozen in front of TV, and
computers designed by bubble butts for bubble butts) is forced to
replicate a virtual reality which destroys her joy in movement.
>
> >
> >Naomi Malone, the heroine of Showgirls, does not "win" because like
the
> >working-class hero of the 1950s British film The Loneliness of the
Long
> >Distance Runner, Naomi simply walks away from the prize (imagine
Julia
> >inviting Ed Masryk to shove her bonus check up his butt, or give it
to
> >the poor.) Naomi does so after seeing what the actual corporate
system
>
> You seem to hate corporations. Do you hate free enterprise too? What
do
 you suggest is a better system than what we have?
I love markets and I have worked for thirty years in a free market,
unprotected by unions. Because of the real virtues of markets, I donโt
like entities which dialectially destroy markets by speaking of the
glories of competition while doing all they can to eliminate
competition.
> >In Erin Brockovich that interpretation is Clinton's centrism which
> >assents to the right of major corporations to fully dictate working
> >conditions,
>
> ...and why shouldn't they be able to do that? If a person doesn't
want to
> work under their conditions, he/she doesn't have to take the
employment
 offered them...
Are there no prisons, are there no workhouses, are there no heating
grates.
Taft-Hartley, ironically enough, is a rust-belt law that was developed
under 1948 conditions of the assembly line. Corporations are ready
enough to want us to discard laws coded as out of date and rust belt
when it suits their purpose.
In 1948, companies who had organized production of car and steel using
the assembly line were concerned about the ability of unions to shut
the line down in wildcat strikes based on โfrivolousโ objections to
then new production techniques. They (in part legitimately) pointed
out that the ideas of Frederick Taylor, of โscientific managementโ
could not be grasped by the ordinary worker and that his objections to
having to work in new ways should not hold up production. They werenโt
saying, in many cases, that the worker was dumb: instead, that he did
not have the big picture.
In 1948, one of the most powerful men in the USA was a union man, John
L Lewis, whose guys could shut the entire country down by striking in
the coal mines. At this time coal was a major energy source.
There is some merit in a 1948 production line for not letting the
ordinary worker in on management decisions (although even then smart
companies did allow workers to involve themselves with management
decision, as historian David Noble has documented.)
But now, the situation is completely different. The โordinary workerโ
who is designing a data base is actually participating in management
control in the most direct way possible.
The guy who in 1948 was the skinny guy with the tie and clipboard,
hated by workers and foremen alike because he went around observing and
measuring, now is the central protagonist in the industrial drama,
because computers and machines have replaced the ordinary 1948 worker.
It is thus irrational to subject the โtime motion manโ, or software
designer, to Taft Hartley control and this is probably the reason why
there is a productivity crisis in software development. There is a
productivity crisis in software development because so many software
developers must continually look over their shoulders to make sure that
they are not departing in any way from the ideology of management
control, and adding โunnecessary frillsโ which โdonโt contribute to the
bottom lineโ, including simple transparency and correctness, double
hulls in supertankers, or holding tank linings.
To say that this individual can go elsewhere is to just ignore the
universal reality of the system, which is even harsher in universities
for the reason that the administrators of universities and nonprofits
are so beholden to private funds.
>
> >while getting the big
> >corporations, maybe, to pay some medical bills. Now I kind of like
> >Clinton's centrism: it's better than Reaganism and Bushism. But I can
> >imagine a society in which engineers would not even think of NOT
lining
> >holding tanks in order to protect ground water supplies.
>
> And what makes you think that happened in the EB case? Just because
some
 arbitor SAID it occurred??????
I am not in any way an expert on the EB case but it is consistent with
my own engineering experience, in which the entire focus of
the โrequirements analysisโ process is in making damn sure that no time
is spent on features that wonโt contribute in a provable fashion to the
bottom line.
spino...@my-deja.com
34.bna.bellsouth.net>,
hami...@dnvln.com (hamilton) wrote:>
> You do realize of course that it is virtually impossible to ever prove
> such things with environmental pollution? They dumped a known poison
into
> the ground water; they lied to the people affected about it; they had
a
> company policy to cover it up; they got caught. That is as close to
truth
> of the matter as it is possible to get.
One of the strengths of Erin Brockovich is how it shows the validity of
feminist objections to neo-utilitarian legal philosophy. A mockery of
real science has been used for years to get polluters and tobacco
manufacturers off the hook like you show here.
Martha Nussbaum is a legal philosopher at the University of Chicago who
in a book called "poetic justice" has shown how some forms of
reasoning, notably legal reasoning, CANNOT be RATIONALLY conducted in
the purely emotion free way of natural science. She is a strong critic
of neoconservatives like Richard A Posner.
In Erin Brockovich, some male viewers might think that Julia Roberts
plays unfairly on emotions when she visits the family of the child
dying of cancer. Instead, legal philosophers like Posner would
recommend an emotionless "detachment" as is displayed by the upper
middle class attorneys of the firm retained by Ed Masryk.
These attorneys are shown to be ineffective because their very
detachment causes them not to connect with the victims. That's the
key, for love has reason, reason none, a fundamental asymmetry which
only a Shakespeare could take note of.
In mathematics, in physics, we cannot be swayed by our emotions
(although real scientists including Watson and Crick have shown that
they are influenced by typically "male" emotions of rivalry.)
But "moral certainty" does mean that the fact of our common mortality
has to be taken into account, not in mathematics but in law.
The little girl is dying, but the company can employ legions of
interchangeable and therefore collectively immortal lawyers to
obfuscate her claim. This replaces the Enlightenment, and humanism
itself, with a mediaeval subjection to immortal, almost demonic,
authority that is dressed in the robes of Science but which may as well
be in the robes of the Inquisition, or the Ku Klux Klan.
This illustrates a Dialectic of Enlightenment in which the scientist
turns to designing what is in effect a gas chamber, in the name of the
Enlightenment itself. This illustrates a Dialectic of Enlightenment in
which the cops "prove" that they whacked the suspect in accordance with
procedures.
Liberals need to learn how to talk rationally without special pleading
but with emotion, and Martha Nussbaum shows how to do this. To its
credit, Erin Brockovich does show an opening for emotion, not
contradicting reason, but reinforcing its conclusions.
JFK said "we are all mortal." Many men in our society, many attorneys,
many computer consultants, many intelligence operatives, many snipers,
cannot accept what JFK said in 1963, and some of them cheered when JFK
was shot in Dallas.
These guys cannot be trusted (as the working class guy in Erin
Brockovich can most assuredly be trusted) with a sick child, for that
sick child's possible mortality is unacceptable to the immortal
corporate vision, which has overdominated our discourse because of our
fears of death.
The damaged sentimentality of Erin Brockovich is to think that a check
for two million dollars can put our common mortality under erasure, but
to its credit, the first part does remind us of scenes (such as finding
the children safe after all) which may yet cause death to die.
Edward G. Nilges
ELurio
> Snip of large amount of leftie b.s.
Characterizing this as "leftie bs" really confirms my point.
The Fascist mechanism is to co-opt real working class discontent and to... >>
and calling something "fascist" like that proves mine.
<< It strains credulity to say that (for example) my point that ordinary
people do NOT get away with dressing fly on the job or working offsite
on unapproved projects is "leftie bs." >>
Yet, as Galileo said, it still moves...
<< The real bullshit is to present the choices of one lucky person who
happened to work in one law office that had one successful lawsuit
against an unpopular company as at all representative of reality. >>
Well, since it actually happened pretty much the way the the movie portrays it
isn't bullshit at all. Reality can be pretty strange sometimes.
<< >
> The story of the making of the movie: A friend of the producer's wife
meets
> Erin Brockovitch in a chairopractor's office. They get to
talking. "Wow" the
> producer's wife, thinks: "What a nifty story!"
>
> She tells her husband, who agrees....yaddayaddayadda...Movie is made
and Julia
> Roberts EARNS her twenty megabucks.
>
> There is NOTHING more. No secret agendas, no crypto-fascism, No
untruth is at
> the level of contextualization.
Having worked at Princeton University, the fact that power is capillary
and that for this reason power brokers who are implementing unjust (or
for that matter just) social arrangements do so in the same daily
rounds, essentially, as ordinary slobs has always been fascinating to
me. Gee, I go to the health club and work out, and so does Gordon
Gecko's real life counterpart. But because the creation of the movie
can be narrated in such a way does not mean that these social
structures do not have a reality over and above the capillary
structures of daily life.>>
What does this have to do with the fact that Erin Brockovitch is a real person
and the Hinkely lawsuit was a historical event?
<<It would be surprising if the agenda of power did NOT emerge in the
capillary structures of daily life for that would make powerful people
the sort of people who did not have to go to chiropractors or work out
or floss. But the agenda as an emergent feature of daily life has
literally no other way of operating for somewhat the same reason we
need feet.>>
Sometimes a cigar is merely a cigar.
<<Refusing to name these structures because Julia is "just like us, only
richer" and appears on Oprah who is "just like us, only richer" is to
be beguiled, in my view.>>
We weren't talking about Julia Roberts. She's a very rich actress. We're
talking about Erin Brockovitch, a twice divorced mother of three who managed to
talk her way into a job as a paralegal and then got her employer to start up a
class action suit which got the defendant to cough up three hundred plus
million bucks.
If you think that the plaintiff class in the Hinkley suit should give back all
that money to PG&E because Erin Brockovitch [not Julia Roberts, Erin
Brockovitch] was foulmouthed and unqulified as a paralegal, by all means say
so...
<<Alternatively to believe in the Bavarian
Illuminati and other conspiracy theories is to be beguiled precisely
because power emerges in the capillary structures of daily life.>>
...But don't go using big words to try to prove she's fiction and what she did
was fiction. It makes you look dumb.
eric l.
ELurio
features of our society is the aggressive selection of a glamorous
ordinariness (or an ordinariness that submits willingly to a regimen of
glamor without trying, as Marilyn Monroe tried so tragically, to escape
to a more authentic existence.) This is coupled with the elimination
of the truly exceptional and also of mere beauty. If you look at Julia
closely, she's grotesque.>>
If you look at Julia closely, she's grotesque? How? She's not drop dead
gorgious, but she's pretty. Quite pretty.
So, this is what you're complaining about, then, you just don't like Julia
Roberts......had you said so in the beginning we could have saved tons of
bandwith....
I mean you don't have to go through pages of philosophical hoohah to prove some
cosomlogical point if you don't like Julia Robert's face.
eric l.
Dan Day
>
>One of the strengths of Erin Brockovich is how it shows the validity of
>feminist objections to neo-utilitarian legal philosophy.
Oh, please...
Give it up, folks -- I've run into "spinoaz9999" on other newsgroups,
and his apparent goal is not to have an actual discussion,
but to hear himself talk, at great length, in the name-dropping,
buzzphrase-laden manner of a Sophomore college student overestimating
his own erudition.
But thanks for the line I've quoted above, which is one of the
most pompous pronouncements I've heard in quite some time. I'm
saving it for the next time I need an example of self-important
bullshit.
Tony Kondaks
hamilton wrote in message ...
>such things with environmental pollution?
No, it's not...remember Chernobyl?
>They dumped a known poison into
>the ground water; they lied to the people affected about it; they had a
>company policy to cover it up; they got caught.
Yes...but where is the proof that it was the chemicals that caused the
cancer? Zero proof.
>That is as close to truth
>of the matter as it is possible to get.
I don't think so.
I know it is easy to get angry at the evil American multi-national
money-grubbing corporation but they are simply not to blame...if anything
you should blame bad genes....
Tony Kondaks
spino...@my-deja.com wrote in message <8bm3sc$6n0$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...
>In article <hamilton-2603001120450001@host-209-214-113-
>34.bna.bellsouth.net>,
>hami...@dnvln.com (hamilton) wrote:>
>into
>> the ground water; they lied to the people affected about it; they had
>a
>truth
>> of the matter as it is possible to get.
>
The KKK appeals to irrationality, fear, and ignorance...all qualities that
you yourself appeal to with your writing on this thread, IMHO.
>
>This illustrates a Dialectic of Enlightenment in which the scientist
>turns to designing what is in effect a gas chamber, in the name of the
>Enlightenment itself. This illustrates a Dialectic of Enlightenment in
>which the cops "prove" that they whacked the suspect in accordance with
>procedures.
>
>Liberals need to learn how to talk rationally without special pleading
>but with emotion, and Martha Nussbaum shows how to do this. To its
>credit, Erin Brockovich does show an opening for emotion, not
>contradicting reason, but reinforcing its conclusions.
>
>JFK said "we are all mortal." Many men in our society, many attorneys,
>many computer consultants, many intelligence operatives, many snipers,
>cannot accept what JFK said in 1963, and some of them cheered when JFK
>was shot in Dallas.
>
>These guys cannot be trusted (as the working class guy in Erin
>Brockovich can most assuredly be trusted) with a sick child, for that
>sick child's possible mortality is unacceptable to the immortal
>corporate vision, which has overdominated our discourse because of our
>fears of death.
>
>The damaged sentimentality of Erin Brockovich is to think that a check
>for two million dollars can put our common mortality under erasure, but
>to its credit, the first part does remind us of scenes (such as finding
>the children safe after all) which may yet cause death to die.
>
>Edward G. Nilges
>
>
Tony Kondaks
but quite frankly I don't have the time to respond in a manner that gives
your effort due diligence.
spino...@my-deja.com wrote in message <8bm27e$54c$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...
spino...@my-deja.com
d...@firstnethou.com (Dan Day) wrote:
> On Sun, 26 Mar 2000 22:44:31 GMT, spino...@my-deja.com wrote:
> >
of
> >feminist objections to neo-utilitarian legal philosophy.
>
Hey, Dan, glad to see that you have Moseyed over here. You do know,
don't you, that to Mosey is taken from Col. Aloysius Custis Lee Johnson
Mosey's action at the Battle of Green's Farm in 1863. He got beat,
like most of the rebs most of the time when it matters.
>
> Give it up, folks -- I've run into "spinoaz9999" on other newsgroups,
> and his apparent goal is not to have an actual discussion,
> but to hear himself talk, at great length, in the name-dropping,
> buzzphrase-laden manner of a Sophomore college student overestimating
> his own erudition.
Perhaps. Another possibility is that I am genuinely concerned
about "liberal" movies like Forrest Gump and Erin Brockovich and the
way they cause even educated people to abandon their critical
faculties. I have found that liberal and educated people have turned
into drool-streaked maniacs after seeing movies like Forrest Gump
precisely because Forrest Gump uses such sophisticated ways of
manipulating desires for fairness and for equity in daily life.
And as it happened, in the course of researching a completely separate
issue, that of software correctness, I've read books like Dialectic of
Enlightenment from cover to cover. I was astonished therein to find
ways to address the manipulation to which my own kids were being
subject to by Saturday Night Live and movies like Gump and Brockovich.
This makes me in a negative sense less sophomoric, for I am a little
long in the tooth to be sophomoric, and more an irritating autodidact
in the mold of the late great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould when he
turned from music to a variety of odd subjects on which Gould had
informed himself in his spare time, including shopping malls and the on
the face of it quotidian fact that in Canada it gets cold when you
drive north.
>
> But thanks for the line I've quoted above, which is one of the
> most pompous pronouncements I've heard in quite some time. I'm
> saving it for the next time I need an example of self-important
> bullshit.
It seems that as an unexpected consequence of the replacement of
education by indoctrination the subordinate classes are subjected to a
self-enforced sumptuary law as regards language, where the original
sumptuary laws of the middle ages forbid the ordinary slob from wearing
velveteen tights.
I know of no better way of communicating the idea tersely without using
the big words. As it happens, America is a land in which people THINK
they have absolute individual rights but where, in recent years, the
elite has been attempting to sell a British utilitarianism. In
utilitarianism, the rights of any person can be absolutely violated if
this is the ONLY way of ensuring "the greatest good for the greatest
number." In utilitarianism, all that matters is the
mathematical "Pareto optimality" of the final result and if this
demands (say) human sacrifice, whether religious or (in the case of
Britain) military sacrifices such as the Somme horror of 1916, then the
utilitarian is content.
Feminist philosophy corrects this bullshit by "emotionally" drawing our
attention to individual rights when we have been wrongly persuaded of
the "rationality" of utilitarianism.
As you can see, Dan, the explanation is longer than the original
formulation, so what you object to are the ideas and not the style.
Debate the issues: don't try to be a literary critic.
spino...@my-deja.com
"Tony Kondaks" <tkon...@primenet.com> wrote:>
> The KKK appeals to irrationality, fear, and ignorance...all qualities
that
> you yourself appeal to with your writing on this thread, IMHO.
What ev er. Abe Lincoln once said, if I call a tail a leg, how many
legs does a dog have. When his interlocutor said 5, Honest Abe said,
nope, it has four, Calling it a leg does not make it a leg.
Your name for lack of attention to emotional factors is rationality,
and your name for the accounting for emotions is irrationality. But I
have shown that rationality that through its own mechanisms turns into
its opposite is by a world-historical form of reductio to something not
rationality at all. It's irrational not to compensate the Hinckley
victims because the facts and the law (thou shalt not kill) are clear.
If your word rationality means brutal shrewdness and sucking up to the
powers that be, then I am irrational.
louisa
Arguing that things are so because I really really FEEL strongly that they
are so is the gate to fascism. Being rational has its limits -- being
human has it limits -- but if emotions or feelings of certainty are our
guideline then the only solution to disagreement is warfare.
Thomas Andrews
>In article <38e2ded5....@news.globalcenter.net>,
>d...@firstnethou.com (Dan Day) wrote:
>> On Sun, 26 Mar 2000 22:44:31 GMT, spino...@my-deja.com wrote:
>> >
>> >One of the strengths of Erin Brockovich is how it shows the validity
>of
>> >feminist objections to neo-utilitarian legal philosophy.
>>
>> Oh, please...
>
>Hey, Dan, glad to see that you have Moseyed over here. You do know,
>don't you, that to Mosey is taken from Col. Aloysius Custis Lee Johnson
>Mosey's action at the Battle of Green's Farm in 1863. He got beat,
>like most of the rebs most of the time when it matters.
>>
>> Give it up, folks -- I've run into "spinoaz9999" on other newsgroups,
>> and his apparent goal is not to have an actual discussion,
>> but to hear himself talk, at great length, in the name-dropping,
>> buzzphrase-laden manner of a Sophomore college student overestimating
>> his own erudition.
>
>Perhaps. Another possibility is that I am genuinely concerned
>about "liberal" movies like Forrest Gump and Erin Brockovich and the
>way they cause even educated people to abandon their critical
>faculties. I have found that liberal and educated people have turned
>into drool-streaked maniacs after seeing movies like Forrest Gump
>precisely because Forrest Gump uses such sophisticated ways of
>manipulating desires for fairness and for equity in daily life.
Huh? Most liberals I know think Forrest Gump is manipulative
reactionary dreck. (I felt this way, but I still enjoyed it as
entertainment.)
--
Thomas Andrews tho...@best.com http://www.best.com/~thomaso/
"You have no idea what a poor opinion I have of myself,
and how little I deserve it." - W.S.Gilbert
spino...@my-deja.com
loui...@homeplc.com (louisa) wrote:
>
> Arguing that things are so because I really really FEEL strongly that
they
> are so is the gate to fascism. Being rational has its limits -- being
> human has it limits -- but if emotions or feelings of certainty are
our
> guideline then the only solution to disagreement is warfare.
>
logic" by "pure emotion." Indeed, debate that oversimplifies
alternatives (thought of not as concepts but as symbols for concepts
that occupy "space" and thus mutually exclude) is part of the problem.
You are correctly emphasizing a aspect of Fascism and that is the way
it plays to the emotions in many of its manifestations, especially
Hitler's Nuremburg rallies. But I am not trying to say that Fascism is
the reverse. I am pointing out that Fascism's very irrationality is a
product of Enlightenment and hypostatized rationality.
This analysis of Fascism, held by thinkers of the Frankfurt school like
Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, does not think of Fascism as a
mere return of the repressed barbarian past. Instead it hopes to show
how Fascism is a new thing, unique to the century just ending (and
perhaps continuing into the new century) that constitutes a return to
barbarism caused by hyper-rationality.
The sort of hyper-rationality Adorno and Marcuse had in mind appears to
be a confusion of levels in the administrative mind, which confuses
manipulation of symbols for concepts with actual engagement with
concepts.
Thus the upper-middle-class lawyers in Erin Brockovich fail
to "connect" with the citizens of Hinckley because they are so busy
dotting their i's and crossing their t's that they forget to even see
the sick child...whereas Erin relates instinctively because she's
human, smart, but not indoctrinated by law school training in symbols.
It is true that many Fascisms are arational at the level of the
individual supporter of Fascism. But the actual leaders themselves
were not emotional at all. Hannah Arendt's Adolf Eichmann was a cold
and rational SOB.
Fascism is a complicated and above all dynamic human system which is
oversimplified by trying to freeze it into categories of emotional and
rational. A dialectical logic which narrates how it turns from extreme
rationality into the opposite is the only true narrative of Fascist
movements.
The fragment of Shakespeare I quoted was from one of his poems, The
Phoenix and the Turtle. About the reconciliation of opposing forces
that to Shakespeare is the mark of a successful relationship, the poem
exclaims "love has reason, reason none." Shakespeare seems to me to be
saying that real emotion always takes into account facts and logic
whereas pure logic is inferior in that it does not.
Emotion is always "about" something. There is no pure emotion there is
instead fear, love and so on. These emotions always have a content
consisting of the facts OR our mistaken apprehension of the facts and
thus the emotions can always change and improve until they become
Baruch Spinoza's form of serenity.
Whereas logic is "about" nothing. A person who has logically decided
that the Jews must be eliminated, as did Eichmann, cannot be persuaded
otherwise because in his own eyes he is "forced" to have the view in
question. Eichmann told his executioners in Israel in the early 1960s
that "his best friends were Jews" and that although he regretted having
to send them to death, his logical interpretation of pure duty dictated
that he had to fulfill his job functions: Eichmann actualy used Kant's
ethics in his own defense.
A good person who hates (assuming that this is possible) can learn that
he's just wrong about the facts. This is apparently what happened to
former Alabama governor George Wallace, who ran for President in 1972
on a segregationist ticket but late in life became a strong advocate
for civil rights. Wallace was characterized throughout his life by a
working class emotionalism, but to me he was less to be feared than
Henry Kissinger and Herman Kahn, two liberals who advocated nuclear war
on "logical" grounds.
spino...@my-deja.com
tho...@best.com (Thomas Andrews) wrote:>
> Huh? Most liberals I know think Forrest Gump is manipulative
> reactionary dreck. (I felt this way, but I still enjoyed it as
> entertainment.)
I believe that beginning with Gump there is a genre of film that has
three characteristics:
(1) A centrist liberal orientation
(2) A highly "entertaining" content
(3) A nasty aftertaste
Examples include Gump, Brockovich and Saving Private Ryan.
All three are centrist and liberal. Gump fights in Vietnam but does
not approve of the war. Brockovich is pro-working class. Saving
Private Ryan is violently anti-Nazi.
All three hold one's interest "no matter what." In my experience, all
three are watched with two intelligences: a higher intelligence that
notices the nasty subtext (see below) and a lower intelligence who is
engaged, and says, gawrsh.
All three have an aftertaste. In Ryan, this is the fact that the
viewer is forced to approve a real violation of international law: the
killing of the Germans at D Day. In Gump, this is the fact that the
viewer has to approve a rather challenged mentality. In Brockovich,
this is Erin's complete lack of solidarity with fat people, African
Americans and anybody else who gets in her way.
This results in people who think of themselves as left liberal being
subtly beguiled.
Terence Malick's movie The Thin Red Line is diametrically opposite
these films for it manages, at one and the same time, to be
magnificent, and completely boring. It shows us that being bored is
not necessarily to waste one's time, and that Chicago film critic names
the genre of Ryan, Brockovich and Gump appositely as "entertainment as
oppression."
> --
> Thomas Andrews tho...@best.com http://www.best.com/~thomaso/
> "You have no idea what a poor opinion I have of myself,
> and how little I deserve it." - W.S.Gilbert
>
Sean Patrick
Do you use a random word generator to write this gobbledy-gook? It's
pretty funny stuff.
>Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
>Before you buy.
Sean Patrick [que...@freewwweb.com]
spino...@my-deja.com
que...@freewwweb.com (Sean Patrick) wrote:
>
> Do you use a random word generator to write this gobbledy-gook? It's
> pretty funny stuff.
I respectfully submit that it is at least possible that the randomness
lies in your failure to understand. It is true that a Lisp program can
be written to generate apparently sensible text, and a few years ago a
scientist sent in an essay to a magazine in "postmodern" style that was
a satire of the apparent meaninglessness of academic style.
This satire backfired because it clarified the fact that over and above
syntax and style, there is something called "understanding" which is
present or absent independent of style. The scientist's parody was
seen by many to miss the point.
My pet theory is that because education in recent years has turned
to "teaching to the test" and has become extremely authoritarian, the
students who succeed are those who manage to pass tests but who fail to
comprehend the material at any deep level. The ritual of spring break
may be a deliberate "brain flush" at the level of blood alcohol in
particular and brain chemistry in general, after a sado-masochistic
series of cramming without understanding for examinations.
These students have gone on to become administrators who overuse the
notion of simplicity in writing in self-defense of their own failure to
understand and to parse.
The Minnesota poet and "men's movement" guru Robert Bly has noticed an
increasing failure to merely be able to parse in our society, replaced
by keywords and sound bytes. Erin Brockovich succeeded because she
maintained the ability to parse emotional situations. I suggest that
this ability is one form of a more general ability, which is to connect
to meaning in general.
spino...@my-deja.com
spino...@my-deja.com wrote:>
> Moral certainty thus EXCLUDES, or should exclude, as I have shown by
> these two examples, evidence from the wilder shores of science. A
> murderer cannot plead that he may not have bludgeoned his Mom to death
> because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
A case where modernism in science and culture influenced a criminal
decision and criminal behavior was in Clarence Darrow's successful
1920s defense of two students at the University of Chicago, Leopold and
Loeb, who had engaged in a "thrill killing" influenced by the spirit of
the Jazz Age. Darrow was able to throw up modernist doubt of the
worthwhileness of capital punishment, and destroy the moral certainty
of the jury that "thrill killers" deserved capital punishment.
But note that although these rich kids were able to buy "moral
uncertainty", in the same decade Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian
immigrant anarchists who may or may not have murdered a payroll clerk
in Massachusetts, were executed for their crime of being left-wing,
Italian and immigrants. Thirty years after this Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg of New York City were executed for their "espionage": they
were accused of stealing the secret of the atomic bomb and transmitting
it to the Soviets.
In the case of Leopold and Loeb, and OJ Simpson, deep pockets can buy
suspension of moral certainty...through modernist doubt (influenced by
modern science) in the case of Leopold and Loeb and through anti-racism
in the case of OJ. Note that despite the validity of these factors,
they have to be purchased by a wealthy defense.
Terence P Higgins
> The Minnesota poet and "men's movement" guru Robert Bly has noticed an
increasing failure to merely be able to parse in our society, replaced
Hey, enrico;
some of us don't want to "parse"
we want to talk, fight, converse, flame, explain, share, and
generally act like humans.
maybe you'd like to find a planet where you can "parse" to your
heart's content.
np: "don't fear the reaper"
--
it don't matter if
i get a little tired
i'll sleep when i'm dead
RAnder3127
>Rosenberg of New York City were executed for their "espionage": they
>were accused of stealing the secret of the atomic bomb and transmitting
>it to the Soviets.
They were "convicted" not just accused.
Those ungrateful commie scumbags
got every volt they deserved. New York
and Hollywood were a rat's nest
of subversives from the 1920's
onward.
-Rich
"Death warrants have been issued for N'Sync, S-Club 7, The Backstreet Boys,
Britney Spears, Aqua and Christina Aguilera. Anyone caught listening to this
music will be summarily executed."
-The Coalition Against Bad Music.
Russel Willoughby
>The real bullshit is to present the choices of one lucky person who
>happened to work in one law office that had one successful lawsuit
>against an unpopular company as at all representative of reality.
I don't think the film is intended to make us literally believe that
they we depend upon real-life Robin Hoods to protect us from corporate
manslaughter. Instead, it means to show us that it is _possible_ for a
mere mortal to rise above her "expected" position, and do good for
herself, her children, and other regular folks.
You make many excellent points, and I do not doubt that you have seen
the film. But you seem to be criticizing it because it's not
"Silkwood", which is silly, because we don't need another "Silkwood".
I found "Erin Brockovich" to be fresh, original, intelligent, and
entertaining. I didn't go to this film looking for ideological
instruction; I went to find out about a fascinating character, and I
was captivated by her.
"This grapefruit must be bad--it doesn't taste enough like an orange."
Russel Willoughby
<< rus...@bellsouth.net >>
spino...@my-deja.com
th...@alpha2.csd.uwm.edu wrote:
> From article <8bqmbt$715$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, by spinoza9999@my-
deja.com:
> > The Minnesota poet and "men's movement" guru Robert Bly has noticed
an
> increasing failure to merely be able to parse in our society, replaced
>
> Hey, enrico;
>
> some of us don't want to "parse"
>
> we want to talk, fight, converse, flame, explain, share, and
> generally act like humans.
So do I. But as it happens, to talk and to truly communicate, you have
to parse in the sense of organizing what you say and hear into a
meaningful whole.
Much of what passes for talking is the exchange of loaded keywords.
The sound byte orientation of the media causes people to no longer
listen and to "parse", merely to "save time" by listening for loaded
keywords. What they actually hear are stretches of pure noise in
which sound bytes only appear, in the form of loaded keywords.
For example, some tax attorneys prepare their clients for field audits
by telling them the "right words" in the form of keywords...rather than
doing a thorough investigation. This "saves time."
For example, in job interviews the interviewee is carefully prepped to
use the right words with the result that interview success is only
rarely correlated with good fit for the job.
For example, married couples exchange heated and loaded key words and
fail to actually hear what is important to the other person. "Honey I
hate my job because I can't be creative" is heard as "bzzt fnarp hate
xx job blat kamunkle creative." The response is thus, "I am tired from
my own job, and I don't want to hear how fucking creative you are."
>
> maybe you'd like to find a planet where you can "parse" to your
> heart's content.
I do not mean formal parsing. I simply mean that there is a positive
hatred for mere language (evidenced by the haste in which the mindless
criticism of "wordiness" is used as a dodge for not reading) that
results from the gradual assault on a capability that Noam Chomsky
believes is innate.
For example, a woman attacked me a number of years ago for a bumper
sticker on my car which read "another man against violence against
women." She literally believed that there was an anti-violence group
called "violence against women" and that I was agin it, reasoning from
superficial keywords and my gender.
The media uses our anti-intellectualism against us. It's too much work
to initiate a lawsuit against auto manufacturers and to use the award,
as Nader did with Public Citizen, to materially improve safety of
cars. It's easier to wear micro-mini skirts and to insult fat people
and African Americans.
spino...@my-deja.com
rus...@bellsouth.net (Russel Willoughby) wrote:
> On Sun, 26 Mar 2000 19:49:19 GMT, spino...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> >The real bullshit is to present the choices of one lucky person who
> >happened to work in one law office that had one successful lawsuit
> >against an unpopular company as at all representative of reality.
>
> I don't think the film is intended to make us literally believe that
> they we depend upon real-life Robin Hoods to protect us from corporate
> manslaughter. Instead, it means to show us that it is _possible_ for a
> mere mortal to rise above her "expected" position, and do good for
> herself, her children, and other regular folks.
For too long, media figures like Oprah have had people dine on mere
_possibility_. Their very selectivity destroys solidarity.
The "real Erin Brockovich" was a real person with real struggles at one
point: of this I have no doubt. But now she has been assumed bodily
into the company of the Elect, courtesy of a check for two million
smackers. And note that a necessary precondition was her complete
failure to exhibit true solidarity with her fellow human beings UNLESS
they qualified as victims.
Her empathy with these victims was praiseworthy. But solidarity is not
empathy.
Modern-day empathy seeks out the deserving and we need it. But
solidarity is quite unready to prejudge a person, and it suspends
judgement until the person has walked a mile in the other person's
shoes.
Thus we are invited to laugh at the hapless water board clerk because
he makes the Hollywood mistake of looking like a geek and behaves as a
normal male would when either Julia or the real Erin walked into his
office. He hardly does anything wrong apart from trying to prevent
full access to the records, as probably directed by his manager. He
gets zero empathy because he "doesn't make the cut" of having an
adequate combined victim and glamor score.
Solidarity would assume that he's got his own moral narrative, that it
is probably okay, and that it is simply not our business to either
manipulate his sexuality or to judge him as a nerd.
>
> You make many excellent points, and I do not doubt that you have seen
> the film. But you seem to be criticizing it because it's not
> "Silkwood", which is silly, because we don't need another "Silkwood".
> I found "Erin Brockovich" to be fresh, original, intelligent, and
> entertaining. I didn't go to this film looking for ideological
> instruction; I went to find out about a fascinating character, and I
> was captivated by her.
We have been conditioned by Hollywood to accept an individualist
narrative of winners and losers which ultimately derives from the
religious idea that only a small number of Elect shall be saved, and
that the rest of us are destined for the bad fire.
I was entertained by Erin Brockovich, but I find a steady diet of this
entertainment to be corrupting. That's because my personal religious
conviction is that all people are saved by Jesus' sacrifice on the
cross, including Adolf Hitler, John Wayne Gacy, and Wayne Newton.
Dawn Taylor
> > The Minnesota poet and "men's movement" guru Robert Bly has noticed
>an increasing failure to merely be able to parse in our society, replaced
>
> Hey, enrico;
>
> some of us don't want to "parse"
>
> we want to talk, fight, converse, flame, explain, share, and
> generally act like humans.
Some of us don't want to "grok" anything either.
Dawn
(and don't even get me started on "meme" and "paradigm")
-------------------
It is absurd to divide people into good or bad. People are
either charming or tedious. -Oscar Wilde
spino...@my-deja.com
dawn...@pacifier.com (Dawn Taylor) wrote:
> th...@alpha2.csd.uwm.edu wrote:
>
> >spino...@my-deja.com:
> > > The Minnesota poet and "men's movement" guru Robert Bly has
noticed
> >an increasing failure to merely be able to parse in our society,
replaced
> >
> > Hey, enrico;
> >
> > some of us don't want to "parse"
> >
> > we want to talk, fight, converse, flame, explain, share, and
> > generally act like humans.
>
> Some of us don't want to "grok" anything either.
>
> Dawn
> (and don't even get me started on "meme" and "paradigm")
I sense that the language itself has been colonized, and that people,
exhausted by false promises and true miseries, would prefer to insult
fat people and African-Americans than stand accused of pretentious
language.
That's their choice. And it is my job to point out how this
disempowers people. William S. Burroughs said that "language is a
virus from outer space." William S. Burroughs was wrong.
>
> -------------------
> It is absurd to divide people into good or bad. People are
> either charming or tedious. -Oscar Wilde
>
>
rufie
>
>
> Some of us don't want to "grok" anything either.
>
> Dawn
> (and don't even get me started on "meme" and "paradigm")
>
> -------------------
> It is absurd to divide people into good or bad. People are
> either charming or tedious. -Oscar Wilde
hehe....yet another in a series of great sig quotes......thats
great....can I steal it?
Isn't meme what you sing to warm up in the shower?? and paradigm....well
obviously, that is two digms.
ELurio
yesterday.
eric l.
spino...@my-deja.com
No, I said that a scientist had submitted a parody of postmodernist
style to a learned journal and had it accepted. His action constituted
academic fraud, and was wrong.
3turn
Who else here loves Skittles?
* Sent from RemarQ http://www.remarq.com The Internet's Discussion Network *
The fastest and easiest way to search and participate in Usenet - Free!
Thomas Andrews
>In article <20000329085037...@ng-fm1.aol.com>,
>elu...@aol.com (ELurio) wrote:
>> Didn't you admit the original post was a parody? I distinctly
>remember you did
>> yesterday.
>
>No, I said that a scientist had submitted a parody of postmodernist
>style to a learned journal and had it accepted. His action constituted
>academic fraud, and was wrong.
>
No, it wasn't, because it had an academic point - the ease with which
meaningless gobbledy-gook can be published.
I can't see how this could be considered wrong. It's fraudulent
in a way - in the same way as a reporter who checks herself into
a mental hospital then reports on it. It isn't immoral.
If you are going to run a journal which publishes academic papers,
and you publish any old gobbledy-gook, you get what you deserve.
I just wish I had thought of it first.
spino...@my-deja.com
tho...@best.com (Thomas Andrews) wrote:
> In article <8btsbr$qju$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, <spino...@my-deja.com>
wrote:
> >In article <20000329085037...@ng-fm1.aol.com>,
> >elu...@aol.com (ELurio) wrote:
> >> Didn't you admit the original post was a parody? I distinctly
> >remember you did
> >> yesterday.
> >
> >No, I said that a scientist had submitted a parody of postmodernist
> >style to a learned journal and had it accepted. His action
constituted
> >academic fraud, and was wrong.
> >
>
> No, it wasn't, because it had an academic point - the ease with which
> meaningless gobbledy-gook can be published.
>
> I can't see how this could be considered wrong. It's fraudulent
> in a way - in the same way as a reporter who checks herself into
> a mental hospital then reports on it. It isn't immoral.
>
> If you are going to run a journal which publishes academic papers,
> and you publish any old gobbledy-gook, you get what you deserve.
> I just wish I had thought of it first.
"Academic" fraud is modified with "academic", and therefore does not
seem to be realy fraud, or actually immoral. This is because of
indoctrination that "real" fraud must involve only the unjust taking of
private property.
We have a moral responsibility to tell the truth, and the scientist who
submitted the fraudulent postmodern article was a liar. His lie did
not "hurt anyone" except insofar as he lowered the journal's
credibility.
His excuse was that he was serving a higher goal, that of "truth." The
problem is in the circular reasoning, because you have to accept his
claim...that postmodernists are bullshitters and that natural
scientists aren't, as a precondition for approving his action, which
was supposed itself to demonstrate his claim.
However, a complex mathematical paper is in the same category as a
wordy postmodern essay. It, too, makes no sense to people outside the
mathematical specialty. The fraud's case rests upon the highly
questionable assertion that for some reason articles on film theory and
literary criticism should be always readable by the general reader,
whereas work in the sciences does not have to be.
The scientist proved nothing by his action except that he was an
academic fraud and a buffoon. And in actuality, most postmodern work
in film theory and other areas is serious and useful. Administrative
and scientific barbarians call it "unreadable" because this charge
means that the administrative or scientific barbarian doesn't have to
read the goddamn paper, or engage its issues...which, much to the
annoyance of the administrative/scientific barbarian/mandarin class, is
left-wing. The charge ends dialog.
Jon Rosenbaum is a working Chicago film critic who publishes readable,
and practical, essays on film for the Reader. He explicitly uses film
theory yet is able, for some silly reason, to provide useful
information to ordinary filmgoers. His pithy phrase, "entertainment as
oppression" sounds to administrative mind like mere paradox. But any
parent to whom the release of a new Disney megamovie is an occasion of
dread because of the demands the marketing will generate in her kids
knows exactly what entertainment as oppression is. Erin Brockovich is
entertainment as oppression, which destroys solidarity by showing how
to get ahead...by insulting fat people and African Americans.
Avoid normal situations.
[..]
: If power,
: as Foucault say, operates in a capillary fashion,
Huh?
--
alt.flame Special Forces
"I'm sorry I missed." -- Squeaky Fromme
Helen & Bob
"Avoid normal situations." wrote:
> Dan Day <d...@firstnethou.com> wrote:
> : On Sun, 26 Mar 2000 22:44:31 GMT, spino...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> [..]
>
> :>One of the strengths of Erin Brockovich is how it shows the validity of
> :>feminist objections to neo-utilitarian legal philosophy.
>
> : Oh, please...
>
> : Give it up, folks -- I've run into "spinoaz9999" on other newsgroups,
> : and his apparent goal is not to have an actual discussion,
> : but to hear himself talk, at great length, in the name-dropping,
> : buzzphrase-laden manner of a Sophomore college student overestimating
> : his own erudition.
>
> For the record, I would just like to say that Mr. Nilges's comments add
> a much-needed boost to the intellectual content of this group even when he's
> completely wrong. I, for one, welcome them.
>
> P.S.: ObOnTopic: Are Duncan Shepherd and myself the only people who groan
> at the injustice and humiliation of a great actor like Albert Finney being
> subordinated to Julia Roberts?
>
Yes, subordinated into winning an Oscar. Sorry, but your last sentence is pure
horseshit.
Bob
Helen & Bob
"Avoid normal situations." wrote:
> spino...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> [ stuff about fascist propaganda in seemingly liberal films, deleted ]
>
> : All three have an aftertaste. In Ryan, this is the fact that the
> : viewer is forced to approve a real violation of international law: the
> : killing of the Germans at D Day.
Not, not forced to approve of it. Forced to realize that it sometimes happened.
>
>
> I disagree. IMHO the whole point of the scenes of Americans shooting
> German soldiers who were trying to surrender in the post-invasion sequences
> was to, as Peter Reiher put it, have a more complex view of war than the usual
> rah-rah stuff to which we Americans are used in war films in general and in
> WW2 flicks in particular. Many other non-flag-wavey bits in the film support
> this notion.
>
> --
> alt.flame "of course, Samuel Fuller did this much better with _The Big Red
> One_, but praise the Lord Mr. Spielberg still has some artistic ambition"
Tony Kondaks
Avoid normal situations. wrote in message
<8cgm61$ls2$1...@slb1.atl.mindspring.net>...
>Dan Day <d...@firstnethou.com> wrote:
>: On Sun, 26 Mar 2000 22:44:31 GMT, spino...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> [..]
>
>:>One of the strengths of Erin Brockovich is how it shows the validity of
>:>feminist objections to neo-utilitarian legal philosophy.
>
>: Oh, please...
>
>: Give it up, folks -- I've run into "spinoaz9999" on other newsgroups,
>: and his apparent goal is not to have an actual discussion,
>: but to hear himself talk, at great length, in the name-dropping,
>: buzzphrase-laden manner of a Sophomore college student overestimating
>: his own erudition.
>
> For the record, I would just like to say that Mr. Nilges's comments add
>a much-needed boost to the intellectual content of this group even when
he's
>completely wrong. I, for one, welcome them.
>
> P.S.: ObOnTopic: Are Duncan Shepherd and myself the only people who groan
>at the injustice and humiliation of a great actor like Albert Finney being
>subordinated to Julia Roberts?
I disagree...good performances -- in this case by both Julia Roberts and
Finney -- only serve to complement each other.
Take for example, Finney's performance in "The Playboys", with Robin Wright
who was just SUPER in this part. This was pre-Forest Gump ("Run, Forest,
Run!") and she was not well known at the time (indeed, although she appears
about 3 times more on the screen than Finney he got top billing). Yet her
performance only made his better.
>
>--
>alt.flame "pompous they may be, but they beat the stuffing out of the
all-too-
>frequent 'Jennifer Love Hewitt is a babe'-type posts" Special Forces
Tony Kondaks
Avoid normal situations. wrote in message
>spino...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> [ stuff about fascist propaganda in seemingly liberal films, deleted ]
>
>: All three have an aftertaste. In Ryan, this is the fact that the
>: viewer is forced to approve a real violation of international law: the
>: killing of the Germans at D Day.
>
>German soldiers who were trying to surrender in the post-invasion sequences
>was to, as Peter Reiher put it, have a more complex view of war than the
usual
>rah-rah stuff to which we Americans are used in war films in general and in
>WW2 flicks in particular. Many other non-flag-wavey bits in the film
support
>this notion.
...yet "Ryan" continued the American Cinematic tradition of promoting the
notion that Americans won the war single-handedly. Of course, by war's end,
80% of Germany's troops were fighting the Russians...
>
>--
>alt.flame "of course, Samuel Fuller did this much better with _The Big Red
>One_, but praise the Lord Mr. Spielberg still has some artistic ambition"
Avoid normal situations.
: On Sun, 26 Mar 2000 22:44:31 GMT, spino...@my-deja.com wrote:
[..]
:>One of the strengths of Erin Brockovich is how it shows the validity of
:>feminist objections to neo-utilitarian legal philosophy.
: Oh, please...
: Give it up, folks -- I've run into "spinoaz9999" on other newsgroups,
: and his apparent goal is not to have an actual discussion,
: but to hear himself talk, at great length, in the name-dropping,
: buzzphrase-laden manner of a Sophomore college student overestimating
: his own erudition.
For the record, I would just like to say that Mr. Nilges's comments add
a much-needed boost to the intellectual content of this group even when he's
completely wrong. I, for one, welcome them.
P.S.: ObOnTopic: Are Duncan Shepherd and myself the only people who groan
at the injustice and humiliation of a great actor like Albert Finney being
subordinated to Julia Roberts?
--
alt.flame "pompous they may be, but they beat the stuffing out of the all-too-
frequent 'Jennifer Love Hewitt is a babe'-type posts" Special Forces
Avoid normal situations.
[ stuff about fascist propaganda in seemingly liberal films, deleted ]
: All three have an aftertaste. In Ryan, this is the fact that the
: viewer is forced to approve a real violation of international law: the
: killing of the Germans at D Day.
I disagree. IMHO the whole point of the scenes of Americans shooting
German soldiers who were trying to surrender in the post-invasion sequences
was to, as Peter Reiher put it, have a more complex view of war than the usual
rah-rah stuff to which we Americans are used in war films in general and in
WW2 flicks in particular. Many other non-flag-wavey bits in the film support
this notion.
--
alt.flame "of course, Samuel Fuller did this much better with _The Big Red
One_, but praise the Lord Mr. Spielberg still has some artistic ambition"
Avoid normal situations.
: From article <8bqmbt$715$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, by spino...@my-deja.com:
[..]
:> The Minnesota poet and "men's movement" guru Robert Bly has noticed an
: increasing failure to merely be able to parse in our society, replaced
: Hey, enrico;
: some of us don't want to "parse"
: we want to talk, fight, converse, flame, explain, share, and
: generally act like humans.
: maybe you'd like to find a planet where you can "parse" to your
: heart's content.
Excuse me... I don't mean to be rude, but do you realize what you've
written here? "How DARE you try to raise the tone of this newsgroup"?
I dare say that what you meant to say in your next to last sentence
was, "we want to talk, fight, converse, flame, explain, share, and
generally act like the people i see on tv".
If you must flame somebody, please at least don't assume you are speaking
for everybody when you post something like this.
Good day.
ObErinBrockovich: O, for less Julia and more Tracey Walter.
--
alt.flame "John Wayne was a..." Special Forces
Tom Cervo
>: viewer is forced to approve a real violation of international law: the
>: killing of the Germans at D Day.
Dreadful! And all the poor Germans wanted was to be left in peace!
A piece of France, a piece of Poland . . .
Geoff
Tom, you may be on AoHell, but yer okay in my book. I haven't heard that
joke in years, and you made me laugh all over again. Thanks!
Regards,
Geoff "Hitler was a doofus anyway."
"Words, words. They're all we have to go on."
--Guildenstern, in Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"
KatieVer1
>...yet "Ryan" continued the American Cinematic tradition of promoting the
>notion that Americans won the war single-handedly. Of course, by war's end,
>80% of Germany's troops were fighting the Russians...
Why do idiots still insist that SPR be about the ENTIRE WWII experience?
These people want to make 4 hour Kevin Costner movies...
Katie
"I forgot my one line, so I just said what I felt"
P.W
ICQ# 54464582
Jeffrey Davis
> tkon...@primenet.com wrote:
>
> >...yet "Ryan" continued the American Cinematic tradition of promoting the
> >notion that Americans won the war single-handedly. Of course, by war's end,
> >80% of Germany's troops were fighting the Russians...
>
> Why do idiots still insist that SPR be about the ENTIRE WWII experience?
> These people want to make 4 hour Kevin Costner movies...
There are simply people who prefer history to art. Plato, remember,
banned poets from his Republic. Of course, there are 10 people who read
The Illiad for every reader who makes it through The Republic. Maybe
Plato simply wanted to even the odds.
--
Jeffrey Davis <da...@ca.uky.edu> Lots Available
Giftzwerg
> : All three have an aftertaste. In Ryan, this is the fact that the
> : viewer is forced to approve a real violation of international law: the
> : killing of the Germans at D Day.
>
> I disagree. IMHO the whole point of the scenes of Americans shooting
> German soldiers who were trying to surrender in the post-invasion sequences
> was to, as Peter Reiher put it, have a more complex view of war than the usual
> rah-rah stuff to which we Americans are used in war films in general and in
> WW2 flicks in particular. Many other non-flag-wavey bits in the film support
> this notion.
We could peel away another layer and theorize that the point was nothing
more than simple, stark realism; the "too late, mate" test for the the
shooting of prisoners is applicable to every armed force that ever took
the field. To expect soldiers in the white-hot heat of actual battle to
show mercy towards an enemy who - right up until the point he ran out of
ammo, generally - was only seconds ago trying his best to butcher them or
their fellows is expecting a little too much from mortal man.
I think the point RYAN is trying to make is not that we're asked to
"approve" of such conduct, merely to see, acknowledge, and understand
such conduct.
--
Giftzwerg
***
"For every problem, there is one
solution which is simple, neat and wrong."
-- H. L. Mencken
Giftzwerg
> ...yet "Ryan" continued the American Cinematic tradition of promoting the
> notion that Americans won the war single-handedly. Of course, by war's end,
> 80% of Germany's troops were fighting the Russians...
Kinda hard to work the Red Army into a film about an American squad in
Normandy, isn't it?
Movies are about what they're about. Don't foolishly criticize them
because they're not about something else.
Geoff
newsgroup
>>...yet "Ryan" continued the American Cinematic tradition of promoting the
>>notion that Americans won the war single-handedly. Of course, by war's end,
>>80% of Germany's troops were fighting the Russians...
Of course, this had nothing to do with the fact that the Red Army was closer to Berlin than the rest
of the Allied armies, or that the Germans had shot their last wad in the Ardennes and gotten their
asses roundly kicked. SPR in no way supports your notion of the "American Cinematic tradition."
It is an American film dealing with American troops in a very particular locale of the European
Theater of Operations. It makes no statement whatsoever about who "won" WWII.
Regards,
Geoff "But, without the US, the Russians would have been dead meat."
Helen & Bob
Tony Kondaks wrote:
> Avoid normal situations. wrote in message
> <8cgnfk$ls2$2...@slb1.atl.mindspring.net>...
> >spino...@my-deja.com wrote:
> >
> > [ stuff about fascist propaganda in seemingly liberal films, deleted ]
> >
> >: All three have an aftertaste. In Ryan, this is the fact that the
> >: viewer is forced to approve a real violation of international law: the
> >: killing of the Germans at D Day.
> >
> > I disagree. IMHO the whole point of the scenes of Americans shooting
> >German soldiers who were trying to surrender in the post-invasion sequences
> >was to, as Peter Reiher put it, have a more complex view of war than the
> usual
> >rah-rah stuff to which we Americans are used in war films in general and in
> >WW2 flicks in particular. Many other non-flag-wavey bits in the film
> support
> >this notion.
>
> ...yet "Ryan" continued the American Cinematic tradition of promoting the
> notion that Americans won the war single-handedly. Of course, by war's end,
> 80% of Germany's troops were fighting the Russians...
>
Gee, Tony, I cannot believe that the Worlds Greatest Defender of Big Business
would support the Commies in WW2.
Bob
Tony Kondaks
KatieVer1 wrote in message <20000406104136...@ng-cs1.aol.com>...
> tkon...@primenet.com wrote:
>
>
>>...yet "Ryan" continued the American Cinematic tradition of promoting the
>>notion that Americans won the war single-handedly. Of course, by war's
end,
>>80% of Germany's troops were fighting the Russians...
>
>These people want to make 4 hour Kevin Costner movies...
Katie, it is not so much that I want to insist that SPR be about the ENITRE
WWII experience...but from ALL the publicity on TV and other media that it
generated, that is PRECISELY what the impression that was given, especially
by Messrs. Hanks and Spielberg.
You know, while that anti-semite idiot Joe Kennedy was doing his darnest to
convince FDR and the rest of America that Hitler wasn't so bad and that
America shouldn't get involved, my father and tens of thousands of other
Canadians were drafted into the Canadian army in 1939 to fight
Hitler...almost three years before Pearl Harbor when America finally got
involved.
Prior to the landing at Normandy, the subject of SPR, there was a landing at
Dieppe in which almost 100% of the Canadians landing were slaughtered before
they even got to the beach. Thousands of Canadians died. Indeed, the
Normandy landing probably wouldn't have either happened or been successful
had Dieppe never occurred (which allowed the Allies to "go to school" and
learn about German reactions to landing).
Now, I am not saying that there should be a movie about Dieppe made by
Spielberg...but a little less American jingoism and the propaganda that it
was ALL America would be nice....
Grimfarrow
Tony Kondaks wrote:
> ...yet "Ryan" continued the American Cinematic tradition of promoting the
> notion that Americans won the war single-handedly. Of course, by war's end,
> 80% of Germany's troops were fighting the Russians...
Yawn...........
Apparently understanding the concept of a movie CONCENTRATING
on one front isn't getting through here.
One can "argue" that the "war" also consisted of the Japanese, which was not
portrayed at all in the film. Does that make it bad? Or biased, as you seem to
suggest?
There are films about the Soviet front, and I don't seem to find any Americans
at all! OH my!!!! What biased tripe!!!!
Grimfarrow
ingrid
>
>
> Prior to the landing at Normandy, the subject of SPR, there was a landing at
> Dieppe in which almost 100% of the Canadians landing were slaughtered before
> they even got to the beach. Thousands of Canadians died.
Indeed, Dieppe was a monumental disaster and nobody should ever minimize
what happened there, but for the record, nowhere near 100% of Canadians
died there. Exaggerating doesn't make your case stronger. The truth is
bad enough. My father was one of the lucky Canadians who DID survive
and he was never the same afterwards.
Fact is that of the 6,100 troops that embarked for Dieppe in August
1942, (5,000 Canadians, 1,100 Brits) about 2,500 returned, plus about
1,000 who never actually landed on the shores. The other 2,600 troops
were killed or captured. An appallingly high figure for one day's
operation.
The actual number of Canadians who died at Dieppe was about 1000, or
20% of the Canadian troops who went in. The rest who died were mostly
Brits, though I think there were also a handful of Americans who also
went in.
ing
Andrew
: KatieVer1 wrote in message <20000406104136...@ng-cs1.aol.com>...
:> tkon...@primenet.com wrote:
:>
:>
:>>...yet "Ryan" continued the American Cinematic tradition of promoting the
:>>notion that Americans won the war single-handedly. Of course, by war's
: end,
:>>80% of Germany's troops were fighting the Russians...
:>
:> Why do idiots still insist that SPR be about the ENTIRE WWII experience?
:>These people want to make 4 hour Kevin Costner movies...
: Katie, it is not so much that I want to insist that SPR be about the ENITRE
: WWII experience...but from ALL the publicity on TV and other media that it
: generated, that is PRECISELY what the impression that was given, especially
: by Messrs. Hanks and Spielberg.
Can you give specific examples of things they have said that indicate
they think America won the war all by itself? Sure American TV/media
focuses on American soldiers in that war. What do you expect? The
survivors and decendents of those people live in America. People like
to hear about things that happened to their own families. My grandfather
was wounded in Europe during WWII. I'm interested in all aspects of
the war, but I care most about the areas he was involved in.
"Saving Private Ryan" moved me and seemed real to me because of my
grandfather's connection to it. Suddenly, I could imagine that people
I knew had to make incredible sacrifices only a few decades ago. If I
were Jewish, I might feel a similar way about "Schindler's List".
But, I'm sure a lot of Americans felt as I did about SPR. That's why
we're interested in a film about Americans. That doesn't mean we
think Americans won the whole war.
Don't complain about the "impression" you got that America won the war
all by itself. Try not reading so much into the "impression".
<snip>
: Now, I am not saying that there should be a movie about Dieppe made by
: Spielberg...but a little less American jingoism and the propaganda that it
: was ALL America would be nice....
Again, where is all this "jingoism" and "propoganda" you are
imagining? SPECIFIC examples, please.
To say "Thousands of American soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice at
Normandy" and portraying their sacrifice (and theirs alone) in a film
should not take away one iota from Canadians or Russians or anyone
else who died in WWII. American men died bravely in that war, and
they should be remembered for it. "Saving Private Ryan" is about
them, not about Canadians or Russians.
Andrew
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
andr...@bizave.com ** Portland, Oregon Web Site: http://www.bizave.com
The Movie Pundit - http://www.moviepundit.com
Geoff
newsgroup
>>Katie, it is not so much that I want to insist that SPR be about the ENITRE
>>WWII experience...but from ALL the publicity on TV and other media that it
>>generated, that is PRECISELY what the impression that was given, especially
>>by Messrs. Hanks and Spielberg.
Baloney.
>>You know, while that anti-semite idiot Joe Kennedy was doing his darnest to
>>convince FDR and the rest of America that Hitler wasn't so bad and that
>>America shouldn't get involved, my father and tens of thousands of other
>>Canadians were drafted into the Canadian army in 1939 to fight
>>Hitler...almost three years before Pearl Harbor when America finally got
>>involved.
Late 1938? What, before the Germans even invaded Poland?
Not likely.
>>Prior to the landing at Normandy, the subject of SPR, there was a landing at
>>Dieppe in which almost 100% of the Canadians landing were slaughtered before
>>they even got to the beach. Thousands of Canadians died. Indeed, the
>>Normandy landing probably wouldn't have either happened or been successful
>>had Dieppe never occurred (which allowed the Allies to "go to school" and
>>learn about German reactions to landing).
Do your homework before you spout off. Dieppe was, indeed, a "test" of
Allied amphibious operations, but hardly one that enabled Normandy.
August 19, 1942. 907 Canadians were killed.
Here's an excellent reference about the battle...
http://www.harrypalmergallery.ab.ca/galwardieppe/galwardieppe.html
>>Now, I am not saying that there should be a movie about Dieppe made by
>>Spielberg...but a little less American jingoism and the propaganda that it
>>was ALL America would be nice....
Actually, I believe there was a film made about the Dieppe raid. The imdb
only lists a (Canadian--imagine that!) Bernard Devlin film, Retour รก Dieppe.
No info provided on this one, unfortunately.
As for your complaint about "American jingoism and...propaganda:"
Make your own movie!
Regards,
Geoff "Blame Canada!"
Gordon Stokes. King of Gordonia
>Dieppe in which almost 100% of the Canadians landing were slaughtered before
>they even got to the beach. Thousands of Canadians died. Indeed, the
>Normandy landing probably wouldn't have either happened or been successful
>had Dieppe never occurred (which allowed the Allies to "go to school" and
>learn about German reactions to landing).
>
>Spielberg...but a little less American jingoism and the propaganda that it
>was ALL America would be nice....
It *was* ALL America - the subject of the first part of SPR was Omaha Beach,
which was an American landing point. British and Canadian forces landed at
other beaches - but SPR's focus was about American soldiers who landed at
Omaha.
There are literally thousands upon thousands of stories to be told about WWII.
This was one of them. Others can tell the rest.
Gordon Stokes
Other notable Gordons include: Flash Gordon, Commissioner Gordon, Gordon Jump,
Gordon Lightfoot, Gordon "Gordie" Howe, G. Gordon Liddy, Artemus Gordon, Gale
Gordon, General "Chinese" Gordon and "Gordon" by Barenaked Ladies.
Sean Patrick
>KatieVer1 wrote in message <20000406104136...@ng-cs1.aol.com>...
>> tkon...@primenet.com wrote:
>>>...yet "Ryan" continued the American Cinematic tradition of promoting the
>>>notion that Americans won the war single-handedly. Of course, by war's
>end,
>>>80% of Germany's troops were fighting the Russians...
>>
>> Why do idiots still insist that SPR be about the ENTIRE WWII experience?
>>These people want to make 4 hour Kevin Costner movies...
>
>Katie, it is not so much that I want to insist that SPR be about the ENITRE
>WWII experience...but from ALL the publicity on TV and other media that it
>generated, that is PRECISELY what the impression that was given, especially
>by Messrs. Hanks and Spielberg.
You seem to have a complaint about the media misrepresenting the film,
not the film itself.
Also- Hanks and Spielberg never said or implied that SPR was about the
entire WWII experience, unless you missunderstood general statements
about 'the horrors of war' being applied to all who fought as a secret
propaganda message. Nothing about the film promoted any idea related
to the U.S. winning the war alone. It did not even directly address
the matter of victory in the war.
>You know, while that anti-semite idiot Joe Kennedy was doing his darnest to
>convince FDR and the rest of America that Hitler wasn't so bad and that
>America shouldn't get involved, my father and tens of thousands of other
>Canadians were drafted into the Canadian army in 1939 to fight
>Hitler...almost three years before Pearl Harbor when America finally got
>involved.
>
>Prior to the landing at Normandy, the subject of SPR, there was a landing at
>Dieppe in which almost 100% of the Canadians landing were slaughtered before
>they even got to the beach. Thousands of Canadians died. Indeed, the
>Normandy landing probably wouldn't have either happened or been successful
>had Dieppe never occurred (which allowed the Allies to "go to school" and
>learn about German reactions to landing).
>
>Now, I am not saying that there should be a movie about Dieppe made by
>Spielberg...but a little less American jingoism and the propaganda that it
>was ALL America would be nice....
SPR makes no claims, and does not imply, that the U.S. won the war
alone. It shows one small portion of one important battle
(specifically shot in a style to communicate a personal and limited
view) and than follows several soldiers on an extremely unlikely
mission unrelated to the outcome of the war. I don't remember it even
addressing the issues of strategy and international contribution as
they were not the subject of the film. To attribute more to it than
that is evidence of an agenda overwhelming your ability to reason.
It sounds as if you don't like the idea of U.S. film studios
producing films that praise the U.S.
That is an issue of human nature, not attitudes particular to the U.S.
alone.
Sean Patrick [que...@freewwweb.com]
Reagen Sulewski
>On Thu, 6 Apr 2000 11:26:29 -0700, "Tony Kondaks"
><tkon...@primenet.com> dropped into this here newsgroup
>
>>>You know, while that anti-semite idiot Joe Kennedy was doing his
>>>darnest to convince FDR and the rest of America that Hitler wasn't so
>>>bad and that America shouldn't get involved, my father and tens of
>>>thousands of other Canadians were drafted into the Canadian army in
>>>1939 to fight Hitler...almost three years before Pearl Harbor when
>>>America finally got involved.
>
>Late 1938? What, before the Germans even invaded Poland?
>Not likely.
Besides, there was no conscription in Canada in WW II, if I remember my social studies
correctly. At least not early in the war.
>>>Now, I am not saying that there should be a movie about Dieppe made by
>>>Spielberg...but a little less American jingoism and the propaganda
>>>that it was ALL America would be nice....
>
>Actually, I believe there was a film made about the Dieppe raid. The
>imdb only lists a (Canadian--imagine that!) Bernard Devlin film, Retour
>รก Dieppe. No info provided on this one, unfortunately.
There was also a miniseries about it which aired 5 or so years ago on CBC, but the name of it
escapes me.
--
You've touched me deep within my cold, tin heart.
Helen & Bob
Tony Kondaks wrote:
> KatieVer1 wrote in message <20000406104136...@ng-cs1.aol.com>...
> > tkon...@primenet.com wrote:
> >
> >
> >>...yet "Ryan" continued the American Cinematic tradition of promoting the
> >>notion that Americans won the war single-handedly. Of course, by war's
> end,
> >>80% of Germany's troops were fighting the Russians...
> >
> > Why do idiots still insist that SPR be about the ENTIRE WWII experience?
> >These people want to make 4 hour Kevin Costner movies...
>
> Katie, it is not so much that I want to insist that SPR be about the ENITRE
> WWII experience...but from ALL the publicity on TV and other media that it
> generated, that is PRECISELY what the impression that was given, especially
> by Messrs. Hanks and Spielberg.
>
> You know, while that anti-semite idiot Joe Kennedy was doing his darnest to
> convince FDR and the rest of America that Hitler wasn't so bad and that
> America shouldn't get involved, my father and tens of thousands of other
> Canadians were drafted into the Canadian army in 1939 to fight
> Hitler...almost three years before Pearl Harbor when America finally got
> involved.
>
> Prior to the landing at Normandy, the subject of SPR, there was a landing at
> Dieppe in which almost 100% of the Canadians landing were slaughtered before
> they even got to the beach. Thousands of Canadians died. Indeed, the
> Normandy landing probably wouldn't have either happened or been successful
> had Dieppe never occurred (which allowed the Allies to "go to school" and
> learn about German reactions to landing).
>
> Now, I am not saying that there should be a movie about Dieppe made by
> Spielberg...but a little less American jingoism and the propaganda that it
> was ALL America would be nice....
>
Tony, I am going to say this one more time. Open your ears. The film is about
Omaha beach, and the American soldiers that landed there. The Canadian soldiers
were at a different beach. There have been several films about the Deippe
raid. YES, Dieppe contributed to the landings. It showed the Allies ( You
know, Canada, Britain, America, France, Australia, etc, what they did wrong.
NOBODY is denigrating the Canadians in any way shape or form. IF you want a
film that shows everybody, go rent THE LONGEST DAY. Fine film. Now, to say
that SPR is jingoism is an insult to every American buried at Normandy. Its also
an insult to every soldier of every nation that landed there that day.
Bob
Tony Kondaks
Andrew wrote in message ...
>Tony Kondaks <tkon...@primenet.com> wrote:
>
>: KatieVer1 wrote in message
<20000406104136...@ng-cs1.aol.com>...
>:> tkon...@primenet.com wrote:
>:>
>:>
>:>>...yet "Ryan" continued the American Cinematic tradition of promoting
the
>:>>notion that Americans won the war single-handedly. Of course, by war's
>: end,
>:>>80% of Germany's troops were fighting the Russians...
>:>
>:> Why do idiots still insist that SPR be about the ENTIRE WWII
experience?
>:>These people want to make 4 hour Kevin Costner movies...
>
>: Katie, it is not so much that I want to insist that SPR be about the
ENITRE
>: WWII experience...but from ALL the publicity on TV and other media that
it
>: generated, that is PRECISELY what the impression that was given,
especially
>: by Messrs. Hanks and Spielberg.
>
>they think America won the war all by itself? Sure American TV/media
>focuses on American soldiers in that war. What do you expect? The
>survivors and decendents of those people live in America. People like
>to hear about things that happened to their own families. My grandfather
>was wounded in Europe during WWII. I'm interested in all aspects of
>the war, but I care most about the areas he was involved in.
>
>"Saving Private Ryan" moved me and seemed real to me because of my
>grandfather's connection to it. Suddenly, I could imagine that people
>I knew had to make incredible sacrifices only a few decades ago. If I
>were Jewish, I might feel a similar way about "Schindler's List".
>But, I'm sure a lot of Americans felt as I did about SPR. That's why
>we're interested in a film about Americans. That doesn't mean we
>think Americans won the whole war.
>
>Don't complain about the "impression" you got that America won the war
>all by itself. Try not reading so much into the "impression".
>
><snip>
>
>: Spielberg...but a little less American jingoism and the propaganda that
it
>: was ALL America would be nice....
>
>imagining? SPECIFIC examples, please.
Virtually every single promotion and appearance by Hanks and Spielberg to
promote the movie.
>
>To say "Thousands of American soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice at
>Normandy" and portraying their sacrifice (and theirs alone) in a film
>should not take away one iota from Canadians or Russians or anyone
>else who died in WWII. American men died bravely in that war, and
>they should be remembered for it. "Saving Private Ryan" is about
>them, not about Canadians or Russians.
Well, then, you can have your Private Ryan movie with its $150 million
budget and its world-wide exposure that, literally, 100s of millions of
people will see and I'll have this little corner of the internet that maybe
50 people will see.
>
>Andrew
>--
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tony Kondaks
ingrid wrote in message <38ECDD...@sympatico.ca>...
>Tony Kondaks wrote:
>>
>
>>
>> Prior to the landing at Normandy, the subject of SPR, there was a landing
at
>> Dieppe in which almost 100% of the Canadians landing were slaughtered
before
>> they even got to the beach. Thousands of Canadians died.
>
>
>what happened there, but for the record, nowhere near 100% of Canadians
>died there. Exaggerating doesn't make your case stronger. The truth is
>bad enough. My father was one of the lucky Canadians who DID survive
>and he was never the same afterwards.
>
>
>Fact is that of the 6,100 troops that embarked for Dieppe in August
>1942, (5,000 Canadians, 1,100 Brits) about 2,500 returned, plus about
>1,000 who never actually landed on the shores. The other 2,600 troops
>were killed or captured. An appallingly high figure for one day's
>operation.
>
>The actual number of Canadians who died at Dieppe was about 1000, or
>20% of the Canadian troops who went in. The rest who died were mostly
>Brits, though I think there were also a handful of Americans who also
>went in.
Thank you for correcting me...I was honestly under the impression that
almost all of the troops landing WERE killed.
Nevertheless, as you point out, the loss was appallingly large and the
sacrifice great. All the more reason that we hear more about it...
>
>ing
Tony Kondaks
Sean Patrick wrote in message
<38ecf8e7...@news-east.usenetserver.com>...
>On Thu, 6 Apr 2000 11:26:29 -0700, "Tony Kondaks"
><tkon...@primenet.com> wrote:
>
>>KatieVer1 wrote in message
<20000406104136...@ng-cs1.aol.com>...
>>> tkon...@primenet.com wrote:
>
>>>>...yet "Ryan" continued the American Cinematic tradition of promoting
the
>>>>notion that Americans won the war single-handedly. Of course, by war's
>>end,
>>>>80% of Germany's troops were fighting the Russians...
>>>
>>> Why do idiots still insist that SPR be about the ENTIRE WWII
experience?
>>>These people want to make 4 hour Kevin Costner movies...
>>
>>Katie, it is not so much that I want to insist that SPR be about the
ENITRE
>>WWII experience...but from ALL the publicity on TV and other media that it
>>generated, that is PRECISELY what the impression that was given,
especially
>>by Messrs. Hanks and Spielberg.
>
>not the film itself.
>Also- Hanks and Spielberg never said or implied that SPR was about the
>entire WWII experience, unless you missunderstood general statements
>about 'the horrors of war' being applied to all who fought as a secret
>propaganda message. Nothing about the film promoted any idea related
>to the U.S. winning the war alone. It did not even directly address
>the matter of victory in the war.
>
to
>>convince FDR and the rest of America that Hitler wasn't so bad and that
>>America shouldn't get involved, my father and tens of thousands of other
>>Canadians were drafted into the Canadian army in 1939 to fight
>>Hitler...almost three years before Pearl Harbor when America finally got
>>involved.
>>
at
>>Dieppe in which almost 100% of the Canadians landing were slaughtered
before
>>Normandy landing probably wouldn't have either happened or been successful
>>had Dieppe never occurred (which allowed the Allies to "go to school" and
>>learn about German reactions to landing).
>>
>>Spielberg...but a little less American jingoism and the propaganda that it
>>was ALL America would be nice....
>
>alone. It shows one small portion of one important battle
>(specifically shot in a style to communicate a personal and limited
>view) and than follows several soldiers on an extremely unlikely
>mission unrelated to the outcome of the war. I don't remember it even
>addressing the issues of strategy and international contribution as
>they were not the subject of the film. To attribute more to it than
>that is evidence of an agenda overwhelming your ability to reason.
>
>It sounds as if you don't like the idea of U.S. film studios
>producing films that praise the U.S.
No, I will be the first to say that people should be allowed to do any type
of films they like in the quantity that they want.
It would just be nice to hear a little more about others' contributions,
that's all. How should that be done? Maybe the only outlet is this very
forum here...I don't know...
Tony Kondaks
Geoff wrote in message <38ecf82b$0$13...@news.voyager.net>...
>newsgroup
>
ENITRE
>>>WWII experience...but from ALL the publicity on TV and other media that
it
>>>generated, that is PRECISELY what the impression that was given,
especially
>>>by Messrs. Hanks and Spielberg.
>
>
>>>You know, while that anti-semite idiot Joe Kennedy was doing his darnest
to
>>>convince FDR and the rest of America that Hitler wasn't so bad and that
>>>America shouldn't get involved, my father and tens of thousands of other
>>>Canadians were drafted into the Canadian army in 1939 to fight
>>>Hitler...almost three years before Pearl Harbor when America finally got
>>>involved.
>
>Not likely.
who said anything about 1938?
>
>>>Prior to the landing at Normandy, the subject of SPR, there was a landing
at
>>>Dieppe in which almost 100% of the Canadians landing were slaughtered
before
>>>they even got to the beach. Thousands of Canadians died. Indeed, the
>>>Normandy landing probably wouldn't have either happened or been
successful
>>>had Dieppe never occurred (which allowed the Allies to "go to school" and
>>>learn about German reactions to landing).
>
>Do your homework before you spout off. Dieppe was, indeed, a "test" of
>Allied amphibious operations, but hardly one that enabled Normandy.
Who said anything about "enabling"? Read what I wrote: "probably wouldn't
have either happened or been successful".
>
>August 19, 1942. 907 Canadians were killed.
>
>Here's an excellent reference about the battle...
>
>http://www.harrypalmergallery.ab.ca/galwardieppe/galwardieppe.html
>
>>>Now, I am not saying that there should be a movie about Dieppe made by
>>>Spielberg...but a little less American jingoism and the propaganda that
it
>>>was ALL America would be nice....
>
>Actually, I believe there was a film made about the Dieppe raid. The imdb
>only lists a (Canadian--imagine that!) Bernard Devlin film, Retour รก
Dieppe.
>No info provided on this one, unfortunately.
>
Tony Kondaks
Helen & Bob wrote in message <38ED3164...@ix.netcom.com>...
>
>
>Tony Kondaks wrote:
>
>> KatieVer1 wrote in message
<20000406104136...@ng-cs1.aol.com>...
>> > tkon...@primenet.com wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> >>...yet "Ryan" continued the American Cinematic tradition of promoting
the
>> >>notion that Americans won the war single-handedly. Of course, by war's
>> end,
>> >>80% of Germany's troops were fighting the Russians...
>> >
>> > Why do idiots still insist that SPR be about the ENTIRE WWII
experience?
>> >These people want to make 4 hour Kevin Costner movies...
>>
ENITRE
>> WWII experience...but from ALL the publicity on TV and other media that
it
>> generated, that is PRECISELY what the impression that was given,
especially
>> by Messrs. Hanks and Spielberg.
>>
to
>> convince FDR and the rest of America that Hitler wasn't so bad and that
>> America shouldn't get involved, my father and tens of thousands of other
>> Canadians were drafted into the Canadian army in 1939 to fight
>> Hitler...almost three years before Pearl Harbor when America finally got
>> involved.
>>
at
>> Dieppe in which almost 100% of the Canadians landing were slaughtered
before
>> they even got to the beach. Thousands of Canadians died. Indeed, the
>> Normandy landing probably wouldn't have either happened or been
successful
>> had Dieppe never occurred (which allowed the Allies to "go to school" and
>> learn about German reactions to landing).
>>
>> Spielberg...but a little less American jingoism and the propaganda that
it
>> was ALL America would be nice....
>>
>
about
>Omaha beach, and the American soldiers that landed there. The Canadian
soldiers
>were at a different beach. There have been several films about the Deippe
>raid. YES, Dieppe contributed to the landings. It showed the Allies ( You
>know, Canada, Britain, America, France, Australia, etc, what they did
wrong.
>NOBODY is denigrating the Canadians in any way shape or form. IF you want
a
>film that shows everybody, go rent THE LONGEST DAY. Fine film. Now, to
say
>that SPR is jingoism is an insult to every American buried at Normandy. Its
also
>an insult to every soldier of every nation that landed there that day.
Well, if you interpret what I said as an insult to every soldier buried
there, then the VERY obvious DISPROPORTIONATE attention paid in the popular
culture to the American's contribution is a million times more an insult to
all the non-Americans buried there...
Tony Kondaks
Giftzwerg wrote in message ...
>Tony Kondaks (tkon...@primenet.com) writes;
>
>> ...yet "Ryan" continued the American Cinematic tradition of promoting the
>> notion that Americans won the war single-handedly. Of course, by war's
end,
>> 80% of Germany's troops were fighting the Russians...
>
>Normandy, isn't it?
>
>Movies are about what they're about. Don't foolishly criticize them
>because they're not about something else.
If it was JUST SPR, I wouldn't have a problem. But it seems to be EVERY
movie....
Tony Kondaks
Reagen Sulewski wrote in message ...
>><tkon...@primenet.com> dropped into this here newsgroup
>>
>>>>darnest to convince FDR and the rest of America that Hitler wasn't so
>>>>bad and that America shouldn't get involved, my father and tens of
>>>>thousands of other Canadians were drafted into the Canadian army in
>>>>1939 to fight Hitler...almost three years before Pearl Harbor when
>>>>America finally got involved.
>>
>>Not likely.
>
social studies
>correctly. At least not early in the war.
Well, he was drafted at some point, which I understood to be 1939. If I am
inaccurate on that, then it was 1940, but well before the Americans got
involved...
>
>>>>Now, I am not saying that there should be a movie about Dieppe made by
>>>>Spielberg...but a little less American jingoism and the propaganda
>>>>that it was ALL America would be nice....
>>
>>Actually, I believe there was a film made about the Dieppe raid. The
>>imdb only lists a (Canadian--imagine that!) Bernard Devlin film, Retour
>>รก Dieppe. No info provided on this one, unfortunately.
>
Sean Patrick
<tkon...@primenet.com> wrote:
>
>Andrew wrote in message ...
>>Again, where is all this "jingoism" and "propoganda" you are
>>imagining? SPECIFIC examples, please.
>
>Virtually every single promotion and appearance by Hanks and Spielberg to
>promote the movie.
You have apparently misunderstood that question. Odd, as it seemed
quite clear. It was not a request to repeat the same vague,
unsubstanciated accusations, rather, it required a particular example
(quote or *accurate* paraphrase) of what was said to back up your
claim of jingoism and propaganda. Without this very basic and easily
presentable evidence of what you say took place your view on the
matter must be dismissed by all without further consideration.
>>
>>To say "Thousands of American soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice at
>>Normandy" and portraying their sacrifice (and theirs alone) in a film
>>should not take away one iota from Canadians or Russians or anyone
>>else who died in WWII. American men died bravely in that war, and
>>they should be remembered for it. "Saving Private Ryan" is about
>>them, not about Canadians or Russians.
>
>
>Well, then, you can have your Private Ryan movie with its $150 million
>budget and its world-wide exposure that, literally, 100s of millions of
>people will see and I'll have this little corner of the internet that maybe
>50 people will see.
And what will you do with this little corner of the internet? Avoid
the truth, misrepresent what others say, skew statistics to support
exaggerated claims, libel millions, 'misunderstand' the obvious only
when it serves your agenda, rewrite history...
So admirable. You are surely a prized asset to whichever groups you
associate yourself.
Sean Patrick [que...@freewwweb.com]
Sean Patrick
<tkon...@primenet.com> wrote:
>Sean Patrick wrote in message
>>
>>It sounds as if you don't like the idea of U.S. film studios
>>producing films that praise the U.S.
>
>No, I will be the first to say that people should be allowed to do any type
>of films they like in the quantity that they want.
>It would just be nice to hear a little more about others' contributions,
>that's all. How should that be done? Maybe the only outlet is this very
>forum here...I don't know...
But why attack a film with false representations of what it is, what
it says, and the nation as a whole that produced it in the process?
You would find many open, attentive ears eager to support and concur
with you if you simply removed such things from your discussions.
I would like to see more films produced in the U.S. that give greater
focus to the world as a community of equals rather than a collection
of nationalistic interests as well. I am personally ashamed the U.S.
didn't enter WWII sooner and I also take the many propaganda films of
past eras (and recent) with less than a grain of salt, but they are
the product of the times they were made and that media practice is
common to all nations.
There is plenty I would quickly slight the U.S. for, but not as part
of a concerted effort to demonize it. I do not engage in that
behaviour when speaking of other nations and surely will not support
or tolerate it when directed at mine.
It is however impossible to get to the the things a great many people
of any nation would agree with when first a variety of unsupported and
exagerrated statements must be addressed.
Rambo films= jingoism and propaganda
SPR doesn't even address the issues necessary to become those things.
And I don't even like the damn movie.
>
Sean Patrick [que...@freewwweb.com]
ConnMoore
>culture to the American's contribution is a million times more an insult to
>all the non-Americans buried there...
>
I remember when Spike Lee was being interviewed about "Do the Right Thing" and
people were giving him huge amounts of grief that the film never touched on the
drug problem in the inner city......Lee tried to point out that the movie was
NOT ABOUT DRUGS!!! If Zealots are to be listened to then EVERY movie made has
to touch on every possible aspect of that time and place. Personally I dont
want SPR lengthened out to 17 hours because some whiney Canadian thinks his
crappy country has been slighted in the great historical tome that is
Hollywood. It is a movie about a specific time and place.....I dont know why
that is so hard for some simple minded people to accept......
Giftzwerg
> >Kinda hard to work the Red Army into a film about an American squad in
> >Normandy, isn't it?
> >
> >Movies are about what they're about. Don't foolishly criticize them
> >because they're not about something else.
>
> If it was JUST SPR, I wouldn't have a problem. But it seems to be EVERY
> movie...
BATTLE OF BRITAIN?
SINK THE BISMARCK?
STALINGRAD?
DAS BOOT?
THE CRUEL SEA?
Of course, you can probably name 100 movies about Americans for each one
of these ... but then the American cinema industry probably makes 100
times as many films about *anything*.
Yes, American movies tend to be about Americans. Specifically, most of
them tend to be about Americans who live in California.
Fancy that...
--
***
Hugh Bonney
: One of the strengths of Erin Brockovich is how it shows the validity of
: feminist objections to neo-utilitarian legal philosophy. A mockery of
: real science has been used for years to get polluters and tobacco
: manufacturers off the hook like you show here.
: Martha Nussbaum is a legal philosopher at the University of Chicago who
: in a book called "poetic justice" has shown how some forms of
: reasoning, notably legal reasoning, CANNOT be RATIONALLY conducted in
: the purely emotion free way of natural science. She is a strong critic
: of neoconservatives like Richard A Posner.
: In Erin Brockovich, some male viewers might think that Julia Roberts
: plays unfairly on emotions when she visits the family of the child
: dying of cancer. Instead, legal philosophers like Posner would
: recommend an emotionless "detachment" as is displayed by the upper
: middle class attorneys of the firm retained by Ed Masryk.
: These attorneys are shown to be ineffective because their very
: detachment causes them not to connect with the victims. That's the
: key, for love has reason, reason none, a fundamental asymmetry which
: only a Shakespeare could take note of.
: In mathematics, in physics, we cannot be swayed by our emotions
: (although real scientists including Watson and Crick have shown that
: they are influenced by typically "male" emotions of rivalry.)
: But "moral certainty" does mean that the fact of our common mortality
: has to be taken into account, not in mathematics but in law.
: The little girl is dying, but the company can employ legions of
: interchangeable and therefore collectively immortal lawyers to
: obfuscate her claim. This replaces the Enlightenment, and humanism
: itself, with a mediaeval subjection to immortal, almost demonic,
: authority that is dressed in the robes of Science but which may as well
: be in the robes of the Inquisition, or the Ku Klux Klan.
: This illustrates a Dialectic of Enlightenment in which the scientist
: turns to designing what is in effect a gas chamber, in the name of the
: Enlightenment itself. This illustrates a Dialectic of Enlightenment in
: which the cops "prove" that they whacked the suspect in accordance with
: procedures.
: Liberals need to learn how to talk rationally without special pleading
: but with emotion, and Martha Nussbaum shows how to do this. To its
: credit, Erin Brockovich does show an opening for emotion, not
: contradicting reason, but reinforcing its conclusions.
: JFK said "we are all mortal." Many men in our society, many attorneys,
: many computer consultants, many intelligence operatives, many snipers,
: cannot accept what JFK said in 1963, and some of them cheered when JFK
: was shot in Dallas.
: These guys cannot be trusted (as the working class guy in Erin
: Brockovich can most assuredly be trusted) with a sick child, for that
: sick child's possible mortality is unacceptable to the immortal
: corporate vision, which has overdominated our discourse because of our
: fears of death.
: The damaged sentimentality of Erin Brockovich is to think that a check
: for two million dollars can put our common mortality under erasure, but
: to its credit, the first part does remind us of scenes (such as finding
: the children safe after all) which may yet cause death to die.
: Edward G. Nilges
This posting is fun because it could be a parody of a particular
style, as that famous journal article was. Maybe it is a parody and
a troll, maybe not. Is there really an M. Nussbaum, or did he invent
her as Borges invented characters in his footnotes? When we read these
paragraphs, we want to see meaning because seeing pattern is such a
basic mental activity for us. So we see also pictures in clouds and
"poetry" in computer generated word lists. The posting is also short
enough to read and enjoy, unlike the Archimedes Plutonium word collections
that used to appear on Usenet.
With our complicity, the writer seems to have mastered the forms
of meaningfulness without, of course, any particular meaning. This
makes his paragraphs a sort of verbal equivalent of abstract painting.
His above paragraphs are a rather good example of this kind of thing
so I hope the author will continue to write from time to time.
H.---
Helen & Bob
Tony Kondaks wrote:
>
> Well, he was drafted at some point, which I understood to be 1939. If I am
> inaccurate on that, then it was 1940, but well before the Americans got
> involved...
>
>
Wouldn't it be a bit, just a bit, fairer to say "before America was ATTACKED?
Before Germany declared war on America? Re: Involvement. You should REALLY
read a bit more history. "Read about Lend Lease." Read about 50, count 'em,
50 destroyers given to Britain. Read about American warships sunk by German
Subs PRIOR to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Tony, there is obviously a LOT you do not know about re: the subject of WW2.
Bob
Helen & Bob
very weak defense. If you truly feel as you say you do, you should have a
better defense. what you say here shows that what you are doing is America
baiting because you hate the USA. THAT will not stand you in good stead. IF
you want to make valid arguments, fine, no problems. but this simply is too
weak to be considered.
Bob
Tony Kondaks wrote:
> Andrew wrote in message ...
> >Tony Kondaks <tkon...@primenet.com> wrote:
> >
> >: KatieVer1 wrote in message
> <20000406104136...@ng-cs1.aol.com>...
> >:> tkon...@primenet.com wrote:
> >:>
> >:>
> >:>>...yet "Ryan" continued the American Cinematic tradition of promoting
> the
> >:>>notion that Americans won the war single-handedly. Of course, by war's
> >: end,
> >:>>80% of Germany's troops were fighting the Russians...
> >:>
> >:> Why do idiots still insist that SPR be about the ENTIRE WWII
> experience?
> >:>These people want to make 4 hour Kevin Costner movies...
> >
> >: Katie, it is not so much that I want to insist that SPR be about the
> ENITRE
> >: WWII experience...but from ALL the publicity on TV and other media that
> it
> >: generated, that is PRECISELY what the impression that was given,
> especially
> >: by Messrs. Hanks and Spielberg.
> >
> >Can you give specific examples of things they have said that indicate
> >they think America won the war all by itself? Sure American TV/media
> >focuses on American soldiers in that war. What do you expect? The
> >survivors and decendents of those people live in America. People like
> >to hear about things that happened to their own families. My grandfather
> >was wounded in Europe during WWII. I'm interested in all aspects of
> >the war, but I care most about the areas he was involved in.
> >
> >"Saving Private Ryan" moved me and seemed real to me because of my
> >grandfather's connection to it. Suddenly, I could imagine that people
> >I knew had to make incredible sacrifices only a few decades ago. If I
> >were Jewish, I might feel a similar way about "Schindler's List".
> >But, I'm sure a lot of Americans felt as I did about SPR. That's why
> >we're interested in a film about Americans. That doesn't mean we
> >think Americans won the whole war.
> >
> >Don't complain about the "impression" you got that America won the war
> >all by itself. Try not reading so much into the "impression".
> >
> ><snip>
> >
> >: Now, I am not saying that there should be a movie about Dieppe made by
> >: Spielberg...but a little less American jingoism and the propaganda that
> it
> >: was ALL America would be nice....
> >
> >Again, where is all this "jingoism" and "propoganda" you are
> >imagining? SPECIFIC examples, please.
>
> Virtually every single promotion and appearance by Hanks and Spielberg to
> promote the movie.
>
> >
> >To say "Thousands of American soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice at
> >Normandy" and portraying their sacrifice (and theirs alone) in a film
> >should not take away one iota from Canadians or Russians or anyone
> >else who died in WWII. American men died bravely in that war, and
> >they should be remembered for it. "Saving Private Ryan" is about
> >them, not about Canadians or Russians.
>
> Well, then, you can have your Private Ryan movie with its $150 million
> budget and its world-wide exposure that, literally, 100s of millions of
> people will see and I'll have this little corner of the internet that maybe
> 50 people will see.
>
> >
Helen & Bob
Tony Kondaks wrote:
> Helen & Bob wrote in message <38ED3164...@ix.netcom.com>...
> >
>
> >>
> >
> >Tony, I am going to say this one more time. Open your ears. The film is
> about
> >Omaha beach, and the American soldiers that landed there. The Canadian
> soldiers
> >were at a different beach. There have been several films about the Deippe
> >raid. YES, Dieppe contributed to the landings. It showed the Allies ( You
> >know, Canada, Britain, America, France, Australia, etc, what they did
> wrong.
> >NOBODY is denigrating the Canadians in any way shape or form. IF you want
> a
> >film that shows everybody, go rent THE LONGEST DAY. Fine film. Now, to
> say
> >that SPR is jingoism is an insult to every American buried at Normandy. Its
> also
> >an insult to every soldier of every nation that landed there that day.
>
> Well, if you interpret what I said as an insult to every soldier buried
> there, then the VERY obvious DISPROPORTIONATE attention paid in the popular
> culture to the American's contribution is a million times more an insult to
> all the non-Americans buried there...
You really need to get the wax pulled out of your ears. Do you think that SPR
is the only film ever made about WW2? About D-Day? Get real, Tony. How about
this. Let some Canadian film company make a film about the Canadian landings
on D-Day, and the sacrifices the Canadian Soldiers made that day.
The movie is made just about the Canadians that day. Nobody else. Then, All the
Americans can write about the jingoism of Canadians. How they ignore everybody
else.
Tony, your objections are all hot air, and have no validity.
Helen & Bob
> Tony Kondaks (tkon...@primenet.com) writes;
>
> > If it was JUST SPR, I wouldn't have a problem. But it seems to be EVERY
> > movie...
Tony. WHEN did it become incumbent upon the American Film Industry to make
films from the viewpoint of everybody else in the world? Do you fault the
Indian film industry about making every film about India? Do you fault the
Japanese film industry for making all those films about Japan? You know, I
truly doubt that the Brits are going to make a film about the American Civil
War. Somehow, I doubt the Canadians are going to make a film about the Flying
Tiger in 1940 and 41 fighting against Japan. WHY do I doubt that the Aussies
are going to make a film about American Stock Car racing. Get a grip, Tony.
If you want a film extolling the Canadian contribution to WW2, its going to
have to come out of Canada. Don't point your finger at Hollywood. ITS NOT
THEIR RESPONSIBILITY. Its YOURS. You're the Canadian. You want the film.
Work your ass off and make the film yourself. Don't complain that the
Americans wont do it for you.
Bob
Helen & Bob
Sean Patrick wrote:
Just a comment. Sean and I have gone round and round re: SPR vis a vis TTR. I
was surprised to see him in this discussion, much more surprised to see his
comments. Now, I am sure that someday, Sean and I will argue about some other
film, and be just as passionate about our different views of a film as we were
on this one. But, he is telling the truth when he says he did not like SPR. He
made that very clear in our exchange. I say this so that Tony will take what he
says seriously. He means every word.
Bob
Tony Kondaks
Sean Patrick wrote in message
>On Thu, 6 Apr 2000 23:36:58 -0700, "Tony Kondaks"
><tkon...@primenet.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>Andrew wrote in message ...
>
>>>imagining? SPECIFIC examples, please.
>>
>>Virtually every single promotion and appearance by Hanks and Spielberg to
>>promote the movie.
>
>quite clear. It was not a request to repeat the same vague,
>unsubstanciated accusations,
I do not have transcripts of even one appearance by either of these
gentlemen. I assumed that most people reading this thread had been exposed
to the onslaught of publicity those two individuals made regarding this
movie when it came out...they were everywhere.
Did YOU not see them promoting this movie? All I am saying is that I think
it would be nice to hear, once in a while, the contributions of others. I
enjoyed SPR, as I do almost all Spielberg movies. But I do have the
impression that so much that comes out of Hollywood on WWII is just: The
Americans won the war all by their lonesome.
>rather, it required a particular example
>(quote or *accurate* paraphrase) of what was said to back up your
>claim of jingoism and propaganda.
I thought I made it clear that I was referring to the overall effect of
everything...not JUST the movie SPR, but the publicity surrounding that
movie and all other movies that come out of Hollywood.
>Without this very basic and easily
>presentable evidence of what you say took place your view on the
>matter must be dismissed by all without further consideration.
And, yes, if we were having a formal debate in a legislative assembly, I
should come up with the kinds of quotes that you are asking for. I really
believe, however, that my general observation that American movies (i.e.
practically all movies) put forward the notion that Americans won the war
all by themselves is self-evident and doesn't need any corraborating
evidence because it is so obvious. It would be like stating that
"communists believe in government intervention in the economy" and having
someone respond: "Hey, show me a statement made by Marx or Lenin in which
they ever claimed that". Hey, it's so obvious.
>>>
>>>To say "Thousands of American soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice at
>>>Normandy" and portraying their sacrifice (and theirs alone) in a film
>>>should not take away one iota from Canadians or Russians or anyone
>>>else who died in WWII. American men died bravely in that war, and
>>>they should be remembered for it. "Saving Private Ryan" is about
>>>them, not about Canadians or Russians.
>>
>>
>>Well, then, you can have your Private Ryan movie with its $150 million
>>budget and its world-wide exposure that, literally, 100s of millions of
>>people will see and I'll have this little corner of the internet that
maybe
>>50 people will see.
>
>And what will you do with this little corner of the internet? Avoid
>the truth, misrepresent what others say, skew statistics to support
>exaggerated claims, libel millions, 'misunderstand' the obvious only
>when it serves your agenda, rewrite history...
Hey, I made a simple observation and let off steam (and quite justifiably,
IMHO). As for rewriting history, yes, I got some statistics wrong and when
it was pointed out to me, I accepted it and stood corrected. But it still
doesn't take away from the main thrust of the argument.
>
>So admirable. You are surely a prized asset to whichever groups you
>associate yourself.
Well, one of those groups is "rec.arts.movies.current-films"...one in which
YOU belong to...
>
>
>
>Sean Patrick [que...@freewwweb.com]
Tony Kondaks
Sean Patrick wrote in message
>On Thu, 6 Apr 2000 23:40:29 -0700, "Tony Kondaks"
><tkon...@primenet.com> wrote:
>
>>Sean Patrick wrote in message
>>>
>>>producing films that praise the U.S.
>>
>>No, I will be the first to say that people should be allowed to do any
type
>>of films they like in the quantity that they want.
>
>>It would just be nice to hear a little more about others' contributions,
>>that's all. How should that be done? Maybe the only outlet is this very
>>forum here...I don't know...
>
>But why attack a film with false representations of what it is, what
>it says, and the nation as a whole that produced it in the process?
Hold on here a moment! When did I ever "attack...the nation as a whole"????
I think you are overreacting JUST a wee bit! Yes, I may have stated some
statistics incorrectly which one poster corrected me on and I admitted
(e.g., the number and percentage killed at Dieppe). Indeed, I really like
the film as well, as I do most other Spielberg films.
>You would find many open, attentive ears eager to support and concur
>with you if you simply removed such things from your discussions.
>
>I would like to see more films produced in the U.S. that give greater
>focus to the world as a community of equals rather than a collection
>of nationalistic interests as well. I am personally ashamed the U.S.
>didn't enter WWII sooner and I also take the many propaganda films of
>past eras (and recent) with less than a grain of salt, but they are
>the product of the times they were made and that media practice is
>common to all nations.
>
>There is plenty I would quickly slight the U.S. for, but not as part
>of a concerted effort to demonize it.
I believe it was you who asked me to cite specific things Spielberg or Hanks
said that supported my argument and I was not able to. You have the benefit
of what I have said on this subject right there in front of you on this
thread. Please show and cite to us ANYTHING I wrote that demonstrates that
I "demonized" the U.S.
I stated an opinion and an emotion...I didn't demonize anybody...and quite
frankly I feel a bit silly having to defend myself on this point.
>I do not engage in that
>behaviour when speaking of other nations and surely will not support
>or tolerate it when directed at mine.
>
>It is however impossible to get to the the things a great many people
>of any nation would agree with when first a variety of unsupported and
>exagerrated statements must be addressed.
>
>Rambo films= jingoism and propaganda
>
>SPR doesn't even address the issues necessary to become those things.
I thought I made it quite clear that I was NOT talking JUST about SPR but
about the WHOLE body of WWII films coming out of Hollywood AND the
publicities surrounding them...
Tony Kondaks
Helen & Bob wrote in message <38EDEC89...@ix.netcom.com>...
>Tony. I am emailing this, as it need not be on the net.
>very weak defense. If you truly feel as you say you do, you should have a
>better defense. what you say here shows that what you are doing is America
>baiting because you hate the USA.
First of all, Bob, I did NOT receive it as e-mail and I am responding on the
newsgroup because that is where I see it. I am sure that you did not do it
intentionally, but here it is.
Secondly, it doesn't bother me that this is appearing on the newsgroup
because I am 180 degrees opposite from being an "America baiting" person and
hating the USA. I LIVE in the USA (Mesa, Arizona) and consider it the
greatest country in the world (precisely because I can made observations
such as I did without some Castro-type coming to my door and telling me that
I can't). And as YOU well know, Bob, from other postings that you and I
have participated in, I am a big proponent of free enterprise and
capitalism...and the USA is the home and protector of capitalism in the
world...so it would be strange indeed if I "hated" America!
>THAT will not stand you in good stead. IF
>you want to make valid arguments, fine, no problems. but this simply is
too
>weak to be considered.
Well, obviously I am VERY alone on this one (including one Canadian who took
me to task for getting some facts wrong). I was attempting to express an
emotion that I felt and that I have had others express.
>Bob
>
>Tony Kondaks wrote:
>
>> Andrew wrote in message ...
>> >Tony Kondaks <tkon...@primenet.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >: KatieVer1 wrote in message
>> <20000406104136...@ng-cs1.aol.com>...
>> >:> tkon...@primenet.com wrote:
>> >:>
>> >:>
>> >:>>...yet "Ryan" continued the American Cinematic tradition of promoting
>> the
>> >Again, where is all this "jingoism" and "propoganda" you are
>> >imagining? SPECIFIC examples, please.
>>
>> Virtually every single promotion and appearance by Hanks and Spielberg to
>> promote the movie.
>>
>> >
>> >To say "Thousands of American soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice at
>> >Normandy" and portraying their sacrifice (and theirs alone) in a film
>> >should not take away one iota from Canadians or Russians or anyone
>> >else who died in WWII. American men died bravely in that war, and
>> >they should be remembered for it. "Saving Private Ryan" is about
>> >them, not about Canadians or Russians.
>>
>> Well, then, you can have your Private Ryan movie with its $150 million
>> budget and its world-wide exposure that, literally, 100s of millions of
>> people will see and I'll have this little corner of the internet that
maybe
>> 50 people will see.
>>
>> >