A Convenient Distraction ©

by Lauren Elise Daniels

A year ago, when a friend of mine back in the States said she didn’t like Michael Moore or any of his movies, I was surprised at her blanketing statement. I asked her, ‘Did you see Bowling for Columbine?’ ‘No,’ she answered. ‘Fahrenheit 9-11?’ ‘No,’ she repeated. I abandoned the conversation the way one leaps from a sinking dock. If you stay on it, you know you’ll just get wet and cold.

A couple of weeks later, I was listening to another friend, a Catholic and a former priest, tell me that Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ angered him. ‘It was repulsive. It focused primarily on violence,’ he said. ‘I felt manipulated. How many times do we have to kill God?’

The glimpses I’d seen of the film infuriated me as well and after a childhood spent long ago at the mercy of nuns marketing guilt, misery and fear as a form of religion, I purposefully refused to see it. But eventually the conversation with my former priest friend echoed of the Michael Moore conversation, and to avoid hypocrisy, I rented the The Passion. Granted, I waited until Dollar Tuesday to give Mel the smallest possible return. And I stomped around the house for three days afterwards swearing a lot. I didn’t feel inspired, I felt nauseous. But I had earned my nausea fair and square. And when I expressed my irritation at Mel’s need to practice childish, violent reductionism with complex ideas, I was justified.

And so now it’s that time again with Al Gore’s film on environmental changes and global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. While about 129 countries have ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or UNFCCC’s Kyoto Protocol, the U.S. and Australia are the last two major powers refusing to follow suit. Refusing to ratify means that despite a global majority who agree that there is a problem and are willing to do something about it, our countries will not commit to the reduction of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse emissions [Wikipedia].

Already there are certain American and Australian politicians poo-pooing the film without even seeing it. When asked if he would watch it to weigh Gore’s message for himself, George W. Bush answered, ‘Doubt it.’ John Howard won’t see it either.

They’d rather distract us from an environment in distress with threats of terrorism. And link the war on Iraq with fighting the Nazis. And link Iraq with Afghanistan in the first place. And instruct us to put duct tape around our windows in case of a biological attack. Seriously, see the White House Website at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030207-10.html if you think I’m just spreading anti-Bush propaganda.

So where does that leave us?

Here. No one can tell us what to think, not the Michael Moores or the Mel Gibsons, the George W. Bushes or the John Howards. Not even the Al Gores. But you can smell truth when you smell it. And you can smell a lie. See it for yourself and make up your own mind, even if it makes you nauseous.

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Published in Global Paradigm Magazine, September 2006