A Mighty Heartlessness

I only know about this kind of stuff because I read the Siren and Edroso, and I trust them, so should you, but apparently one of the many things the Right Wing bloggers who work up the courage to sneak out of their bunkers once in a while to go to the movies, where they risk being blown to bits by the jihadists who are taking over America, hate about Hollyweird is that the cowardly leftist brainwashers who run the place don't make enough films featuring evil Muslim terrorists doing evil Muslim terrorist-y things and getting the shit kicked out of them for it.

Apparently they wanted to see the Fantastic Four take on the Silver Islamofascist and think Megatron should have been re-named Mega bin-Tronin.

By the way.

Transformers?

Awesome.

At any rate, what the Right Winger cineastes think this country needs to make ours a land fit for heroes is more evil Muslims jihading across the screens of our cineplexes.

This generation demands its version of Nips and Krauts to hiss and boo the way the Greatest Generation got to do with theirs, winning their war with popcorn and Jujubees just as the warbloggers are winning ours with Cheetos and Twinkies.

You might think then that they'd have been glad to see A Mighty Heart reach the theaters and they'd be out in force this week to help clear the DVD off the shelves of their local Blockbusters.

After all, the story of Daniel Pearl's kidnapping and murder certainly features some very evil Muslims.

But, as you might already know, the Right Wing Ministry of Culture indexed A Mighty Heart the moment it was announced Angelina Jolie would be playing Mariane Pearl.

They said it was because Jolie wasn't "demure" enough to play Mariane Pearl.  But what's not demure enough for them about Jolie is her politics.

It's not enough that a movie feature commissariat-approved enemies.  It must not contain any counter-revolutionary ideas, like the possibility that our enemies are human beings or that war isn't all skittles and beer and good and bracing for the American soul.  And it cannot star, have been written by, or directed by anyone whose coolness or glamor might cause impressionable young conservatives to think that Liberals aren't all bad and may have a point.

That's why Flags of Our Fathers, which looked to sane people like a rather innocuous and somewhat bland World War II movie about a battle we won, was treated as a work of heresy by the cine-warrior crowd.

Director Clint Eastwood champions the liberal culture of death and screenwriter Paul Haggis thinks there's still racism in America and it's a bad thing.

In A Mighty Heart the terrorists win.

Danny Pearl dies, horribly, and stays dead.

Jack Bauer doesn't torture anybody to find out where the terrorists have stashed Pearl and bust his way in at the last second, guns blazing, to save him.

No heroic Delta Force types arrive to avenge his death by killing hordes of evil Muslims who outnumber them 10 to 1.

And Mariane Pearl, her heart broken, doesn't become a Right Wing angel of vengeance and a neo-con apostle criss-crossing the country preaching a gospel of war, hate, and voting Republican.

What happens in the movie is what happened.  Danny Pearl dies and Mariane Pearl struggles heroically not to let her broken heart kill her or turn her into a monster of anger and hate like the monsters who killed her husband.

Geez.

Reality-based film making.  That's so September 10th.

If the Wingers wanted to know what the war on terror was really like they'd watch the evening news.

They'd pay attention to CBS war correspondent, Lara Logan.

They wouldn't insult the patriotism and courage of real journalists who are over in Iraq getting shot at and killed while they sit safe and snug in their office at the law school typing their cri de guerres:  More rubble, less trouble!

Obviously, they want to see movies in which America isn't just shown to be winning World War Whatever Number They've Given It In Their Tiny Little Minds but in which the evil-doers are shown being bloodily punished for their evil-do-ery.

But I think it's even more childish than that.  They want movies that make them feel as if they themselves are the ones doing the punishing.

I've been trying and trying to understand how so many of the warbloggers have managed to convince themselves that they are doing something as brave and patriotic as actually fighting in Iraq by typing about it.  I'm trying even harder to understand how they could be content with that.

The insane pride they take in their completely vicarious participation in---not the war---the war as they imagine it makes me think that it's not simply a case of cowards trying to puff themselves up.

I think they believe that watching is the same as doing.

Believe is the wrong word.  Belief requires thought and will.  These people are incapable of differentiating between watching and doing, between thinking about a thing and the thing.

Makes me wonder sometimes if the Right Side of the blogosphere self-selects for borderline autistics who are just incapable of getting outside their own heads.

Sometimes.

Clearly, though, what the East end of the bandwidth self-selects for is beta males and cheerleaders, second- and third-raters who long ago learned to compensate for their own mediocrity and failure (or. probably, in the case of some of the women, sublimate their own talents and intelligence) by folding their identities into that of a group and the heroes of that group.

When the alpha-male kills the lion the whole tribe kills the lion.

In the old days, before television and the sports culture took over, the beta males and cheerleaders had to be on the field or in the room to watch the hero score the touchdown or bring home the pretty girls.  Norm and Cliff needed to be in the bar and close to Sam to feel they too had done something grand and special.

Nowdays the closest they need to get is seats on the fifty yard line.  If they're not watching on TV, they can sit in the stands and the roars and whoops and screams of their fellow watchers can make them feel as though they are alive and doing heroic deeds.  The watching, the rituals and fetishes of fandom are the important acts.  The heroes exist and do their mighty deeds to give a reason for the watching.  The game isn't as important or real as the celebrating and the experience of being at the game.

That's been the great obscenity of the Right's chickenhawkery since 9/11.

For them, the war on terror has been one long tailgate party.

Read Mariane Pearl's book, A Mighty Heart

Hat tip Think Progress.

__________________________________________

Related but way off-topic:  Shakespeare's Sister smacks her forehead over Donald Trump's considered opinion that Angelina Jolie is not beautiful.

Fox and the grapes, the Donald.  Fox and the grapes.

Way back in the summer of 2006, when the news about Jolie's playing Mariane Pearl came out, I wrote my own meditation on Angelina and the politics of beauty.

Comments

[SAP]

Damn.

Excellent post, Mr. Mannion.

[Ken Muldrew]

"These people are incapable of differentiating between ... thinking about a thing and the thing."

Some people are really put off by self-referential statements that lead to paradox (e.g. "I am lying"). The easiest way to avoid such statements is to simply assert that self-reference is forbidden. This is not to say that they don't have an internal model of themselves; quite the contrary in fact, the model is the self. This prohibits infinite regress by disallowing a conversation to ever develop between the person and the mental representation of the person. Thus there is just the thing (though it's not a real thing) and thinking about the thing doesn't happen. At the other end of the spectrum are people who are insatiably curious about self-reference. When they look in the mirror, they don't look at the physical characteristics as if they were looking at a painting, they look straight into their eyes and, much like turning a video camera toward the screen where its image is being projected, try to peer down that endless corridor.

It's not just authoritarian-loving wingnuts who don't like self-reference, though. Bertrand Russell laboured mightily to remove self-reference from set theory. But this was to put mathematics on a foundation that did not admit paradox, so that mathematical truth would remain true for all time. It may be that an abhorence of self-reference in logic is quite different from avoiding self-reference with respect to oneself. Russell appears to me to have been highly introspective in his humanist writings.

I've bookmarked Bob Altemeyer's online book about authoritarians,

http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf

but I haven't read it yet. I wonder if this avoidance of personal self-reference is a defining feature of these people. It could explain a lot. One could liken them to the kind of computer programmer who cannot stand the thought of self-modifying code. After all, a computer program obviously needs a strong, authoritarian programmer to decide what it should be doing, and to hunt down any bugs that might keep the program from its appointed task should some noisy external influence show up in the program's environment. And who knows where a program might go once it gets started, if it can modify it's own program? Obviously it will turn itself into gibberish, so what a complete waste of time to allow such frivolity! At the other end of the spectrum are programmers who are immensely curious about what will happen when a program begins modifying its own code. These two types of programmers are worlds apart, but asymmetrically so. The "authoritarian" programmers do not even recognize the recursivists as even being programmers (and after all, if the programs are doing the programming, who can blame them ;-) ?), while the recursivists see the authoritarians as simply focussed on a subset of programming (they wouldn't dream of denying the validity of that focus).

One could get a lot of mileage out of this... (but be careful, recursion can make your head hurt if you're not careful).

[Campaspe]

The one I am trying to figure out now in the odd free moment is the antipathy toward "The Kite Runner," a movie about the horrors visited upon Afghanistan by the Taliban and how some characters eventually find refuge in America. Ah yes, the folks at Libertas are working to free Hollywood from the straitjacket of ideology--that is why they are openly rooting for the movie to tank on the grounds, one can only conclude, that it was made by liberals and contains the occasional nice Muslim.

[Ken Houghton]

Things I learned from the NY Post in the past few days:

(1) It's not that Randi Rhodes was mugged; she "fell."

(2) The Dems failed to "KO" the S-Chip veto (fairness note: the article admits that the bill had "bipartisan support"), and

(3) The attack on Ms. Bhutto yesterday was by Al Qaeda, because she opposes Muslim terrorists and wants to help in the search for ObL.

Consider carefully that last, and you will understand why The Kite Runner is objectionable; it does not allow you to Objectify the Enemy.

[Karen]

Love the post, Lance, and think you're on to something quie true about the Right and its perception that typing is the same as fighting.

But, for what it's worth, Jolie's physical appearance has given me the creeps since she first burst on to the scene. I can't help it. I get why people think she's the hottest thing on two legs, but I literally can't look at her without getting squicked.

Tho' Donald Trump, like the Law, IS a Ass.

[Neil]

Though I'm a fan of Ms. Jolie I wished, after viewing the film, that the film used instead someone like the excellent British actor, Sophie Okonedo, in the lead role. The politics wich ruined the film weren't the politics of the film's subject matter.

[rw]

Thank you for the outstanding post. I've been reading your blog for quite awhile now, and it's time that I thanked you for your excellent work. Please keep it up and know that there are numerous lurkers, like myself, who appreciate your work. Well done sir!