> Quoting Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com>:
>
>> But their own understandings of society and humanity were so
>> vastly different than mine
>
> That's because they don't have even the most basic concept of history.
> "There is
> no such thing as society", said Thatcher, and they actually mean that,
> quite
> literally. They hate, fear and repress the past, because it reminds
> them of the
> antagonistic collectivity they only superficially control. To neocons,
> nothing
> can change or is capable of changing: everything has been done
> already, there's
> nothing new under the sun, etc.
y'all know more about neocons and strauss(ians) than i do (although an old politics and public policy prof of mine was a professed and thoroughgoing straussian), BUT i guess i've always thought of it less as a repression of the past than an embrace of "history" (that is, the discipline or process) as a kind of myth-making. in the context of rashomon, it's like saying that they've embraced their subject-positions in their understanding of fact/history and then can externalize that as objective reality.
or something like that. ;-)
if there's anything useful or accurate in what i just said, it may be only that chuck's original point doesn't hold. but i suppose that would also depend on how you undertsand the end of fhe film.
or something . . .
j