Watched Fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday. First time in ages. (Am in love with the ubiquitous “Redbox” and their free codes, too – but that’s a whole ‘nuther story.)
All the usual scenes in F 9/11 inspired the same feelings of rage and frustration, sorrow and despair. Good to know the movie still works, so to speak. Mostly, though, what it did was take me back a few years to the film’s release — its vehement, vociferous detractors as well as the long lines of converts.
Back then we were reading – in foreign papers, of course – the first rumblings of an impending recession and then depression, based on a falsely-inflated housing market, construction based not on the laws of supply and demand but only as “stimulus” and a host of our foreign creditors just beginning to feel weak in the knees about investing any further in the United States.
Kind of makes me long for those halcyon days, looking around. Who knew they’d be right?
Well, me, for starters. Maybe you, too.
But when I’d go to the Fahrenheit board at IMDB and raise these issues, did I ever get trashed and vilified. Granted, I was pretty in your face with everything, mostly from a sense of panic. Imagine Henny Penny before taking Lexapro and before anyone else ever saw the damn sky starting to slump a little. (She’s on Lexapro, hear tell. I’m not, but maybe all this anxiety is trying to tell me something.)
Regardless how it was presented, though, I still suspect that these naysayers, these pie-in-the-sky, wholesale swallowers of Bush rhetoric, would still attack. Somewhere today they are still trying to play Colorforms with the Emperor’s plastic, one-dimensional likeness. A hobby becoming increasingly futile with every passing news article, every Bear Stearns bailout, every sub-prime lending horror story.
Yet they’re determined to keep that man and his minions dressed in the finest shiny fake clothing – reality be damned.
Wish I could say I felt better, being right about the Iraq war back then, being on the dollar with regard to said dollar’s endless decline. Wish it gave me the tiniest little cheap thrill to feel vindicated about an economic (then) future on the verge of collapse. Partly wish it just because it would serve as inexpensive entertainment — and America’s short on that, too. When food is getting too expensive, at least the Bush supporters have their crow to eat. What do the rest of us have?
Fact is, I don’t feel better. Nobody was listening to all the measured voices raising at that time, except Moore’s. Thank God, some of them stopped cheer-leading long enough to let the Fahrenheit message – flawed and imperfect as it was – seep into consciousness. We didn’t oust the thieves on their collective asses in 2004, as was necessary. That act, that one evening, forever changed my heart as I knew it. Sure, cue-up the violins, but it’s true: I woke-up a different person the day after the election. For the first time, but unfortunately not the last, a sense of futility set-in, along with the feeling I’d overestimated our human desire to seek truth rather than slumber along, happily.
So, here we are in 2008. It’s not a huge time for me to go tilting at windmills, anymore. Gave up that desire to dig, unearth and expose the failings, frauds and criminal missteps of this administration that same morning and haven’t really looked back. And absolutely everything about the housing market, the dollar and an inevitable decline in American power as a direct result of the Iraq war folly has come true. Because we get what we accept in this world, and we get most of it from failing to ask the hard questions or look beyond the superficial crooning lullabies of our leaders. . .it’s all okay. . .go back to sleep. . .go back to sleeeeep.
The morning after the election, I decided we get what we believe we deserve. No more, no less. Didn’t slumber, exactly. Just stopped singing a morning alarm. It was clear we wanted to sleep-in a little longer.
But now, we’re awake. Well, I certainly am. A little scared, but awake. Being correct on all those issues raised an entirely new fear: that many of us were right on so many other issues, too. FISA, damage and abuse of the Constitutional rights, a power-grab for the Executive office that leaves future Senators and House members toothless against abuses of that office, the damage done by greatly-weakened ecological laws. Not paranoia – we’ve already seen substantial evidence.
Question is, can we face these realities together and work to fix them? Twelve years with our collective heads buried in the sand is twelve years too many. Now we must stand sober, contrite and thoughtful, admit we made a series of horrible mistakes in policy, judgment and leadership, and do the necessary repairs.
Trust me. I’m usually right about these things.
