[lbo-talk] Re: "America's pathetic liberals: the sequel"

[Jon Johanning]

On Jul 22, 2004, at 11:58 AM, BklynMagus wrote:

> 1) What is wrong with calculation in a movie?  Have the films of Ozu, 
> Fassbinder,
> Anthony Mann, Hitchcock, Frankenheimer, Murnau not reached Canada yet?
> If not, the leftists of our great neighbor to the north need a cinema 
> intervention
> right away.  They better start going to the Cinematheque in Toronto 
> with
> greater frequency.

LOL! This person's idea of how to make a film must be to start a camera 
and keep it pointed at nothing in particular until you run out of film 
or tape. Anything else, I guess, would be "calculation."

But the reviewer's point seems to be in the following sentence which 
you quote:

> Pictures of a small number of flag-draped coffins appear
> to be almost the only thing fueling America's limp antiwar movement.

There are peace movement members who think that such pictures are the 
foundation of the movement, but that is hardly the opinion of most 
thinking peace people. And polls are showing consistently that U.S. 
troop casualties are hardly the only thing which prompts the public in 
general, outside the movement, to question the war more and more. The 
questions of whether the war was justified in the first place and 
whether the administration has been conducting it properly, even 
assuming it were justified, seem to be in a lot of peoples' minds.

But in the mainstream media it seems to be an article of faith that 
troop casualties are practically the only thing the peace movement has 
going for it. Their assumption seems to be that Americans will 
faithfully "back the troops" (i.e., support the administration's 
policies) until the total reaches some "too high" figure (never 
precisely specified), after which they will quickly start calling for 
"cutting and running." A rather bizarre misreading of how people 
actually think about wars, which in fact is rather more sophisticated 
than the pundits generally suppose.


Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org
__________________________________
When I was a little boy, I had but a little wit,
'Tis a long time ago, and I have no more yet;
Nor ever ever shall, until that I die,
For the longer I live the more fool am I.
-- Wit and Mirth, an Antidote against Melancholy (1684)