Group Emails Can Be Fun... (every once in a while)
Bussed 80 miles to serve fudge to rich people
I have to say Michael Moore has made a great doc with Bowling for Columbine. Even though I probably agree with him line for line and item by item on most issues, he seems sometimes to not paint a complete picture in order to make his point. But in the case of Bowling For Columbine the adversary uses a whole arsenal of Orwellian tactics for profit and power, rendering Moore's angle pretty appropriate. It's fighting fire with fire, in this creep's (meaning me) view. The obvious target of gun violence to me is not the most powerful message of this film. While Moore's trajectory seems to vector all over the place, he carves out two incredibly resonant images:One, the constant hammering of fear (though he doesn't go into the advertising dollars it generates, which bummed me out, although ... maybe he doesn't have to. I would've if I'd had the balls to make this movie) that in some ways controls us and makes us feel nervous around "the other" and buy lots of guns; and two, the brainwash of society to justify the battle of rich vs. poor by highlighting primarily black crime despite declining crime rates, including the revelation of the true story behind the headline on this page. When a six year old girl was shot by a six year old boy in a school in Moore's home town of Flint, Michigan, the gun used was taken from the house of the boy's uncle, whom the family was staying with after getting evicted. The story Moore shows in the film is the one not covered by the army of "press" lurking outside the schoolhouse -- it's the one in which the mother is bussed 80 miles to a rich, white suburb to work two jobs that did not even generate enough income to pay rent, hence the eviction. These two jobs were "provided" by the state-sponsored welfare-to-work program, which kept the mother away from her children virtually all day. I can't even begin to enumerate the things wrong with that system. And the local county sheriff that Moore interviews on the subject can't either. God bless America, eh?
The film also takes two survivors of the Columbine massacre to K-Mart to see if the chain will take back the K-Mart bullets embedded in their bodies. Talk about the Gift of the Maji. This is one of the film's sweetest moments. All that and bits from Chris Rock and South Park.
My quibbles with the film involve the example of Canada as a peaceable country. While everything Moore shows seems true enough, I wonder how peaceable they'd be if they didn't have such a country that was packed to the gills with thermonuclear weapons right next door. Also, while the film was jam packed with the greed/short-sightedness/culture of fear/rich vs. poor mandate that is tearing this country to shreds; it was short on solutions for individuals who share Moore's concerns and live their beliefs ... short of showing up to K-Mart with bullets lodged between their spine and their aorta. I gotta admit though, of all the corporations featured in this flick, K-Mart comes out looking the best.
But all things equal, Bowling For Columbine is a must-see, in my opinion. If you're reading this site at all it's probably because you have inclinations toward thoughts outside "normal human experience" (ps. write me if you think the same or different (or if you've had any firsthand encounters with the unknown), so I can safely recommend this gem. Here's the release pattern, courtesy of CHUD.com:
October 11th, 2002:
Los Angeles
New York
October 18th:
Boston
Chicago
Philadelphia
Phoenix
San Diego
San Francisco
Seattle
Washington DC
October 25th:
Atlanta
Baltimore
Cleveland
Dallas
Denver
Detroit
Houston
Kansas City
Miami
Minneapolis
Portland
Sacramento
St. Louis
West Palm Beach
November 1st:
Albany
Austin
Buffalo
Charlotte
Cincinnati
Columbus
Grand Rapids
Indianapolis
Las Vegas
Madison
Milwaukee
New Orleans
Pittsburgh
Rochester
San Antonio
Santa Cruz
Syracuse
Tampa
The most amazing site ever...
Remember the old days of the net when you'd discover some obscure website and spend hours pouring over its bizarre and esoteric contents? Then corporate America got a load of the web and suddenly everything was yahoo this and that.com, all of it with an IPO and corporate sponsors, etc. The corporations seemed to absorb the bandwidth of the web like a virus, somehow wiping out or ruining all the old school weirdness that made it so cool.Well, as was said in Jonestown '72, "Gimme dat old time religion." If you haven't seen it, take a look at Anomalies Unlimited.
Ooops! My bad!
You just don't want to believe. I don't anyway. It's easy to handwring or shake your head at the aggressive, continuous decimation of the earth by those who profit from overconsumption, but it's not so easy to live in the future that has arrived -- in which our forests have shrunk by 12% since 1970, and the number of species we grudgingly share the earth with has been cut in half. WWF is releasing a report about our bottomlesss gluttony for eradication, which you can read about by clicking here. Can you tell me this is wrong? We're not corpulent greedheads and we aren't ruining the planet? please do!