Want Off The Bus

Conditions: Cold, Some Warmth.

Roll On Freedom Train


Thomas L Friedman has written an op-ed on the anniversary of the Iraq war in which he's considering the voting Iraqis, and how much freedom they're taking for themselves now, and waxing philosophical.

Of all the pictures I saw from the Iraqi elections last weekend, my favorite was on nytimes.com: an Iraqi expatriate mother, voting in Michigan, holding up her son to let him stuff her ballot into the box. I loved that picture. Being able to freely cast a ballot for the candidate of your choice is still unusual for Iraqis and for that entire region. That mother seemed to be saying: When I was a child, I never got to vote. I want to live in a world where my child will always be able to.

God bless her. This was a very good day for Iraq.

Now I can agree that the voting process is indeed a good thing in Iraq, no problem with that. But of course we can't just leave things there, can we. No of course not.

Former President George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right. It should have and could have been pursued with much better planning and execution. This war has been extraordinarily painful and costly. But democracy was never going to have a virgin birth in a place like Iraq, which has never known any such thing.

Some argue that nothing that happens in Iraq will ever justify the costs. Historians will sort that out. Personally, at this stage, I only care about one thing: that the outcome in Iraq be positive enough and forward-looking enough that those who have actually paid the price — in lost loved ones or injured bodies, in broken homes or broken lives, be they Iraqis or Americans or Brits — see Iraq evolve into something that will enable them to say that whatever the cost, it has given freedom and decent government to people who had none.

- nytimes.com/

See the most dangerous part in that sentence is the phrase "whatever the cost", as if no matter how many died, that as long as the survivors are freely democratic then "it" was worth it. It doesn't really take a lot of imagination to wonder where that kind of attitude can lead us. Frankly it's the exact same kind of attitude that lead us into this God-awful situation in the first place, hundreds of thousands are dead, countless more are injured, lives torn apart, infrastructures destroyed, and who really knows what the future implications will be. It's a strong indicator that despite it all, despite it all, some still *somehow* just haven't learnt the damn lesson, and so will never learn the lesson, and so will always believe that there is one pure right way to live, and that anyone who is not living that one right way is wrong, and must be "helped" into conforming. No matter the cost.

This is one of those moments where one's faith in the human species and our grand civilisation just kind of crumbles away, and the hard-edged reality gleams through from underneath. We really aren't going to learn, are we? We really are just going to do all this again, a few decades or so down the line, aren't we?




Film Review: Law Abiding Citizen

You know, films can be so frustrating sometimes. Films that come along that have a great premise, top actors, a good budget, and yet somehow manage to be less than the sum of their parts. Like this film, for example. On paper this promises to be brilliant stuff. Gerard Butler plays a father who takes revenge on the entire American legal system after the thug who kills his family in front of him is given a light sentence as part of a deal with hot shot prosecutor Jamie Foxx. It's a very familiar scenario to those of us who watch Law & Order, where a prosecutor has to make deals with murderers to get some kind of justice.

Denied true justice for so heinous a crime, Gerard then plans an elaborate revenge against not just the bad guys but also the entire legal system, a revenge that escalates even as he's put into jail. The plot is a cracker, but unfortunately the execution has not been carried out as well it might have. There are many places, and moments where they could have pushed things a little more, gotten some more from the actors, turned up the music a little louder, made the camera move a little more, really wring out the tension and the drama that's bubbling away beneath the surface here. Gerard's in his element as a brilliant engineer twisted by his need for revenge and desire to bring the system down. Jamie Foxx can do stylish hotshot lawyer with one arm tied behind his back, but what we really needed was a better sense of anguish as he sees this man start undermining his career, and his life, all with a demented grin on his face.

A final confrontation between the two is provided, but somehow the heat has come out of it, like a kettle taken off the boil. And while the conclusion itself is somewhat satisfying, it too is not fully explored, and it's frustrating seeing how good this film could have been if the director had just pushed things a little more, had wrung some more out of this than what we end up with. Three and a half fake mustaches out of Five.


- Peace out.