I saw Good night and Good Luck last night. Yes, I think it deserved an Academy Award for best picture, but this was a frightening movie and without any special effects or giant apes. Very little has changed in the 50 or so years since Joe McCarthy staged his war on communists but what has changed has changed for the worse. Television, as Murrow warned, has become an instrument of isolation and deception and the game is no longer being directed by a crackpot junior Senator, but by the demagogues who control all three branches of the Federal Government.
The game is the same, of course. Whether we’re fighting communists or terrorists or liberals or intellectuals they’re fighting freedom and using fear and patriotism to sell us a war against ourselves. Today we have uncountable institutions smearing and threatening anyone who upholds the truth and our right to know it; launching countless unfounded accusations and fantastic fables. We have a press afraid to expose lies and show us reality out of fear of the advertisers and owners. Today we have a leader who takes pride in ignoring the will of the governed and who has a following who views that with patriotic pride. Little has changed since 1954 except to become worse.
It was never luck we needed, it was courage and instead we showed patriotic arrogance. We needed a public with a will to oppose fear mongers, thieves and liars and instead we have the Superbowl and the X-box and the iPod and American Idol and the rest of the pop-culture opiates.
It’s too late for good luck.
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3 comments:
Good night and good luck will be a classic...so it's all good...
the nominations are meaningful even if it's not the winner.
--RC of strangeculture.blogspot.com
But there is some irony in the fact that GN&GL was made by Warner Bros - part of the big disposable entertainment engine that is Hollywood. I don't know if it's all bad, all downhill...but it was an excellent movie and its message should be taken seriously.
I think American culture, at its core is just as hysterical, just as terrified, ignorant, vicious and prone to mob violence as it ever was. Bush is using fear to cause us to turn against ourselves, against freedom, against honesty itself. I am old enough to remember the McCarthy hearings and I have heard the same outrageous charges of giving aid and comfort to the enemy all my life. We never learn. There's always someone born yesterday.
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