Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Documentaries

Talk about a growth industry. A local group shows a different film--from environmentalist harrangues to antiwar polemics--each week, seems like. And I get LinkTV which plays similar fare day, night out. Some of them are fine films, some quite lame, but the latest darling--"Why We Fight"--is analyzed by Justin Raimondo, here, and I gotta tell ya, this sounds to me like a must-see movie.

Raimondo tells of an opening scene in which an American father of a son who works in the Trade Center is on a train toward New York and sees the towers in flames, fears for his son and later learns the worst. His reaction: Blind revenge.

Would that have been mine, in a similar setting, with my daughter in the towers? I don't know, but I do recall distinctly my reaction to the news of the attacks. I learned about them on my computer that morning, early, but I didn't have a TV and so didn't follow along all that day and during the next weeks as I'm told so many Americans did. But my immediate reaction that morning, which has continued to this day: "Well, that's the price of empire." Indeed, I think I even mouthed that phrase when I learned on the Internet about the strike on the second tower. Yup--that's what I felt. Not far from "we had it coming." Closer to "we saw it coming," but still not blind revenge, not at all. That's what the terrorists felt vs. the US, toward our nation's decades of domination and, in their view, corruption.

Anyhoo--I'm going to see "Why We Fight" and will report in due course, of course.

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