Poor poor piteful me...or whinging

[shadowkat]

(Poor poor piteful me is from an old, 1970s, Linda Rondstadt
song that I last heard when I was 8, fits today.)



Well, I *finally* got hold of the cable company. Appears it's not just a general outtage, it's just my cable that is out, in which case they need to send a technician. Of course the
earliest was Tuesday at 10-noon. Nope. Sorry. Finally got a temp job, can't afford to stay home and play with the cable repair man. So they scheduled an appointment for Saturday at
2-6pm. What this means is - I won't be able to watch Nip/Tuck, The 4400, Rescue Me, or The Dead Zone this week. Or anything else I was watching. The only channels I get are unnecessary ones such as 21, the Food Channel, a couple of foreign language channels, and TV Guide Channel. The good news is they will credit my account for the period of the outtage.
The bad news, I'm without my distracting/comforting toy for the week. Oh well, should probably do more reading and writing anyway. Only one problem, I think I hurt my back last week at work - it feels like someone hit me real hard in the middle of my back and my left calve muscel is still pretty tight. And since I'm doing the same things this week that I did last week, ie. lots of bending and filing, and the computer screen/desk top is way below eye level - this may be a problem.
So coming home, relaxing on sofa, with heating pad would have been ideal solution - harder to do without tv.

Why is it when one thing works out, another falls apart? Want to explain that one to me? Why can't everything work at once?
Yes, I know, whine, whine, whine. I'm frigging lucky to have air conditioning, plenty of books to read, a computer, and wait, a temporary job! What's a little back pain? Or tv outtage?



Oh for anyone who's seen Farenheit 9/11 on my Flist? Check out ginmar's take - this is from someone who is actually in Iraq.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/ginmar/288220.html?view=3137756#t3137756

Have to say she does a good job of pin-pointing what it is that bugs
me about Michael Moore. I wish he would stop manipulating and editing facts to persuade people and just let the facts speak for themselves.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like Bush. But whenever I watch a Michael Moore documentary, I'm aware of the manipulation behind the scenes, I can feel him pulling my string and that makes me uneasy. It also makes him more of a propagandist than a documentarian in my opinion.

Comments

On Michael Moore and Robert McNamara

[cjlasky.livejournal.com]

'Kat:

Just got finished viewing the DVD of "The Fog of War," Erroll Morris' riveting documentary on former defense secretary Robert McNamara, who went down in history (infamy?) as the architect of the Vietnam war. This is an especially enlightening doc in the context of the current Iraqi situation, and sheds a lot more light on the thinking of American presidents and their cabinets than Moore's fulminations.

McNamara's recounting of the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis is nothing short of terrifying. But Morris' main focus is Vietnam, and even if Defense Secretary McNamara (DSM) is a bit slippery on his culpability here (he doesn't remember authorizing Agent Orange?), there's still plenty of juicy material for political junkies to chew on. DSM tells how a supposed torpedo attack in the Gulf of Tonkin (Aug. 1964) was probably an illusion, and could in no way justify the ensuing escalation of the conflict. There are also interesting snippets of audio tape of DSM talking to President Johnson about Vietnam, and stating bluntly that it's a no-win situation. (So why did Johnson insist on going ahead with full U.S. involvement? There's little here beyond DSM's point of view.) The parallels between Vietnam in 1964 and Iraq in 2003 keep piling up (the faulty intelligence, the ignorance of the region and its politics, the American tendency to think global but ignore the local) and Morris (who's definitely as anti-war as Moore) scores consistently without the need for Moore's theatricality.

And yet....

Which movie has garnered all the attention? Which movie has put the anti-Bush agenda in the forefront? Morris' subtle and more well-crafted argument against imperial hubris, or Moore's shallow piece of rabble-rousing?

Much as I dislike some of Moore's cheap stunts, he's got something. He's taken the stuff tucked away in left-wing websites and brought it out into the light of day. Nobody else, left or right, has been able to get the Bush family's all-too-cozy relationship with the Saudis into the mainstream of political discourse. Nobody else has pointed out with such power that the security on our coastlines is alarmingly thin. Nobody else has dared, DARED to suggest in public that the Terror Alert system is an Orwellian attempt to keep the citizenry cowed and pacified. (Violently disagree? Fine. But somebody had to say it.) The sequence where military recruiters cruise the poorer neighborhoods of Flint, Michigan is nearly pornographic. Riveting and repulsive. I'm sorry, but that's just great cinema.

Yes, there are sequences I would consider crassly manipulative: I, for one, hate "crying mother" shots. They tell you NOTHING about a situation. A man could go on a murder spree across 25 states, kill dozens of people with a smile on his face, then get shot by federal agents at his home--and the camera can click on just as his mother races to cradle his perforated body, tears streaming down her cheeks. (In my darkest moods, I sometimes think two sides of a war should decide it with a maternal cryoff--best weeping mother shot for the camera wins.) Yes, everybody is somebody's child. That's always good to remember. But that's all I'm willing to draw from it. I dislike the "Bonanza" parody and the pointless cheap shots of the Bush crew primping before the camera during the credits; I dislike that the history of Fahrenheit 9/11 starts with Bush and election 2000, and Moore seems as ignorant of the history of the region as those he criticizes.

But again, he comes up with good material almost despite himself. In one memorable sequence, he's interviewing Craig Unger, author of "House of Bush, House of Saud" in front of the Saudi Embassy. Unger isn't saying anything particularly interesting, but suddenly, a Secret Service agent drives up, chats amiably with Moore, and sends Moore a very polite message of "we're watching you" before he departs. It's not as if there's any possibility that the Washington PD thought there were terrorists hanging outside the Embassy; it's clearly Michael Moore and his camera crew. With Dubya's help, Moore creates the illusion of himself as populist champion.