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6.25.4

Putting the jie in jiehun

It's 2am and we just got back from Fahrenheit 911. The movie itself seems like just a blur to me now, followed as it was by three hours of spirited discussion outside the theater. (A.'s friends talk a lot.) I had already decided before going in that I wasn't concerned with the artistic value of the movie so much as its ability to sway swing voters, so I felt above the discussion of means and ends. (Is it moral to create a movie that is pure propaganda, etc. etc.)

My favorite criticism of the movie, though, was that it implicitly encouraged the thoughtless, visceral, passive approach to politics, instead of elevating the level of discourse. This guy felt that the idea of rationality is more important in the long term than the ideal of the liberal/Democratic party, or that the former leads to a pure version of the latter. The idea that debate could lead to a universal, or at least more universal set of moral values, is alien and precious to me. Philosophy is an area I have pretty much wholly ignored, excepting Montaigne I guess.

Well, I am not a debater or a rationalist. I am a quiet appreciater. Montaigne, there you and I differ.

Few seemed interested in my view that the difference between a liberal and a conservative approach to politics is that liberals will look at, say, a homeless guy and think "That could be me," while conservatives look at the same guy and think "That will never happen to me because I [have a strong work ethic, believe in Jesus, have a moral life, am a different person, would never let myself stoop that low, etc.]"

By the way, "Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten" is one of my favorite pieces of music ever, but it never occurred to me that the piece was a sort of anti-"Music for Airports" until this night.

And hooray, my brother ("the littlest Gaw", but not-so-little anymore) has a blog now. So far in just a couple entries he's used phrases from four languages, Chinese, Japanese, German, and Spanish/Esperanto, I think. Five if "a shout-out to my man" counts as a foreign language: is it? Anyway... way to go, bro!

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