Miscellaneous rants and musings
Mar. 9th, 2004 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capri0mniThe new Bush campaign ads:
Okay, to be fair, I do not have cable, and therefore, have not seen the ads. I tried to look for screenshots of the ads online, but my monitor is so dark, they just come out looking like black squares ... However, I have heard and read descriptions of the ad, and I base my criticisms on those descriptions.
Reason #1: Osama Bin Laden is still at large and the Taliban, while deposed from open rule in Afghanistan, is still active. Perhaps the committee to reelect the president is correct, and the Bush administration has every right to use images that remind people of how great a leader he has been in response to the crisis. But being a true leader takes more than simply making some impressiive speeches when your audience (captive, I might add) is most desperate to hear them. And he has not succeeded in overcoming the terrorist threat. Almost as soon as our troops took control of Kabul, the Administration turned our attention to Iraq, claiming that Saddam Hussain posed such a threat to our security that the horror 9/11 would fade in our memory if he succeeded in his goals. Now, even they are backing off those claims, while every few months we hear of "chatter" (such a vague and amorphous term!) from terrorists and of cancelled flights from Europe as followers of bin Laden try again to do us harm. Those images from 9/11 do not remind us of our greatness as a people, so much as they bathe us in our own fears. And for Bush to use those fears to glorify himself is just ... :::Shudder:::
Reason #2: The ads, according to descriptions (one of which is a recent online article from cnn.com, include a shot of firefighters bearing away a flag-draped victim. That's a real person under that flag -- someone who suffered real pain, and died a real death. Is there really a world of difference between use of that image and one, say, of a corpse not draped in the flag? In all the reports about this ad, I have not heard anything from anyone claiming to be a family member or friend of that victim ... surely, they must be out there, somewhere. I'd be surprised if they don't know about it, or the postmortum appearance of their loved one therein. Did anyone involved in making the ad ask their permission before using the image? Did anyone ask the permission of the firefighters who appear in the ad? If the answer is "yes," and permission was granted, I wouldn't be as critical as I am. I just don't know. Does anybody reading this know?
Reason #3: Bush's own disregard of foreign policy may have made the attacks on 9/11 easier in first place.
In recent week, Steve Coll has been making the interview rounds promoting his book Ghost Wars. I've heard two of those interviews, one on Fresh Air and one on Charlie Rose. One thing Coll reiterated in both interviews was that Clinton administration officials warned their counterparts in the Bush administration about bin Laden, telling them that he had to be the focus of their attention, but that Bush's people all but ignored those warnings. Now, it may be true that The Washington Post (where Coll is managing editor), NPR and PBS are all hopelessly biased liberals, and can't be trusted. But I personally remember reports from the Associated Press at the time about the missile attacts on bin Laden's suspected hideout that Clinton ordered, and how Rebuplican congressmen accused him of making up a false enemy in order to distract from the "real issue" of whether or not he had oral sex and lied about it. I don't think anyone would accuse the AP of making up reports out of the whole cloth. I also remember how Bush promised not to get involved in international affairs during his early days in office.
Now, I'm sure Clinton made mistakes in both judgement and execution in his administration's attempts to capture bin Laden. And there is no saying for sure that if the Supreme Court had sided with Gore (and the people who were warning Bush about bin Laden had kept their jobs) the 9/11 attacks wouldn't have happened in the first place. But I am not confident that Bush did everything possible to prevent them.
For him now to use images of death from 9/11 to tout his own success is just so ... wrong ... on so many levels.
The New 'Doctor Who'
Last night (March 8) in the IRC room Drwhochat, someone (I believe it was a person going by the nickname of Xanta_Claus, but my memory may be faulty) brought our attention to this article from the Sunday Times, sparking off a long discussion / debate / rant of what what the new version of Doctor Who may or may not be like, and whether or not we dare watch it.
Firstly -- my instinct is to adapt advice my grandmother gave my mother and my mother gave to me when shool started again each fall, and I was wondering if I'd like my new teacher or not: Don't decide until you've had your third encounter. Whatever your first impressions are, they are likely to be opposite on the second impression. It's not until you've seen a person / experience / tv show three times that your experience outweighs your expectations. As there hasn't even been one episode, much less three, I'm willing to reserve judgement for a while, yet.
Secondly -- while the headline quip about the Doctor being a sex machine is salacious, it's the headline writer's job to grab the reader's attention. And the headline writer is not the same person as the reporter covering the story. My mother was a reporter for various small town papers while I was in college, and I remember at least one time when she got in serious trouble, and got accused of bias because of an inaccurate headline that someone else had written, and people were judging the article on that headline.
The gist of the article itself (kind of hard to read, onscreen) implies that the Doctor will be sexier than he was in the past, but sexier than what? The First Doctor had a granddaughter, and nearly got married in The Aztecs, and while the action is more paternal / avuncular than romantic, the Second Doctor rubs Zoë's sore feet in Mind Robber -- something that I'm sure would have been considered far too sexually vague for the Fifth Doctor to do for one of his companions, especially a female one.
And while I dread the idea of the Doctor having a sexual / romantic relationship with one of his companions (Far too incestuous, if you ask me, even if it isn't technically incest-- sort of like Woody Allen and his wife's adopted adult daugher [Sun-Li?] -- not to mention opening the floodgates for bad marysues in fanfic), I have no objections to him forming a relationship and/or pining for someone back on Gallifrey.
Thirdly -- the article mentions that due to copyright issues, the Daleks, and maybe even the musical theme, may have to be dumped (interesting, about the latter, since Big Finish uses the old theme, or versions thereof). But rubber monsters, title music, cliffhangers -- all of those things are just superficial, in my mind. The core of of Doctor Who is its philosophy, which has been there from the very start: present the audience with stories that encourage an open mind, and thinking about philosophical and moral ideas, through the subjects of science and history, and maybe dream. As long as it continues to do that, it will still be Doctor Who to me.
Gallifrey One -- afterthoughts:
It has been said that: "Whoever represents himself in court has a fool for a lawyer" Those who indulge in self-analysis probably have a fool for a therapist. Be that as it may...
Back on January 30, when Gallifrey was still just an idea in my head, I wrote:
In a real way, I see this trip as a major crossroads. I either go, and potentially change the direction and scope of my life, or I don't, and my life stays the same as it is now until I die.
Well, now I've gone and returned, and I can't say for sure whether my life has changed direction or not. Because I made a choice and acted on it, I can't compare what my life is now to what it would have been if I hadn't made that choice.
I had no tremendous, mind-boggling flashes of insight during the trip. If Cupid shot an arrow at me over Valentine's weekend (whether of gold or lead), he missed his mark. On the whole, I don't feel all that different, I think....
But Dad was here last week, visiting, and helping me register the new van, and he said something very interesting.
We left for California on Sunday morning. On Tuesday morning, Dad had an "uh-oh" moment when he realized he wrote down the information about the AirTel hotel as being near the Burbank airport, and had visions of Audrey and me driving around LA, lost. Through a series of phonecalls, Audrey's boss was finally able to call her on her cell phone, and relay Dad's message, and I called him that night from our motel, and assured him that we indeed knew it was the Van Nyes airport, instead.
From that moment on, Dad said, until I called him again after I got back home, he knew that I was truly on my own, and for the first time since I was born 40 years ago, he did not have a worry in his mind about my fate, and there was an empty space in his mind where that worry used to be.
In other words, I went from being "his child-daughter" to being an adult in my own right. My only regret is that it has come so late, when Mortality is approaching me from behind and gaining fast, and I'm not sure how much adulthood I have left to enjoy. And I can't help but wonder if it has come too late for me to create familial bonds of my own choosing.
But late or early, the shift has come. Whatever repercussions follow on that shift remain to be seen.
One thing: I'm all ready anticipating next year's Gallifrey, with less trepidation. :-)
Okay, to be fair, I do not have cable, and therefore, have not seen the ads. I tried to look for screenshots of the ads online, but my monitor is so dark, they just come out looking like black squares ... However, I have heard and read descriptions of the ad, and I base my criticisms on those descriptions.
Reason #1: Osama Bin Laden is still at large and the Taliban, while deposed from open rule in Afghanistan, is still active. Perhaps the committee to reelect the president is correct, and the Bush administration has every right to use images that remind people of how great a leader he has been in response to the crisis. But being a true leader takes more than simply making some impressiive speeches when your audience (captive, I might add) is most desperate to hear them. And he has not succeeded in overcoming the terrorist threat. Almost as soon as our troops took control of Kabul, the Administration turned our attention to Iraq, claiming that Saddam Hussain posed such a threat to our security that the horror 9/11 would fade in our memory if he succeeded in his goals. Now, even they are backing off those claims, while every few months we hear of "chatter" (such a vague and amorphous term!) from terrorists and of cancelled flights from Europe as followers of bin Laden try again to do us harm. Those images from 9/11 do not remind us of our greatness as a people, so much as they bathe us in our own fears. And for Bush to use those fears to glorify himself is just ... :::Shudder:::
Reason #2: The ads, according to descriptions (one of which is a recent online article from cnn.com, include a shot of firefighters bearing away a flag-draped victim. That's a real person under that flag -- someone who suffered real pain, and died a real death. Is there really a world of difference between use of that image and one, say, of a corpse not draped in the flag? In all the reports about this ad, I have not heard anything from anyone claiming to be a family member or friend of that victim ... surely, they must be out there, somewhere. I'd be surprised if they don't know about it, or the postmortum appearance of their loved one therein. Did anyone involved in making the ad ask their permission before using the image? Did anyone ask the permission of the firefighters who appear in the ad? If the answer is "yes," and permission was granted, I wouldn't be as critical as I am. I just don't know. Does anybody reading this know?
Reason #3: Bush's own disregard of foreign policy may have made the attacks on 9/11 easier in first place.
In recent week, Steve Coll has been making the interview rounds promoting his book Ghost Wars. I've heard two of those interviews, one on Fresh Air and one on Charlie Rose. One thing Coll reiterated in both interviews was that Clinton administration officials warned their counterparts in the Bush administration about bin Laden, telling them that he had to be the focus of their attention, but that Bush's people all but ignored those warnings. Now, it may be true that The Washington Post (where Coll is managing editor), NPR and PBS are all hopelessly biased liberals, and can't be trusted. But I personally remember reports from the Associated Press at the time about the missile attacts on bin Laden's suspected hideout that Clinton ordered, and how Rebuplican congressmen accused him of making up a false enemy in order to distract from the "real issue" of whether or not he had oral sex and lied about it. I don't think anyone would accuse the AP of making up reports out of the whole cloth. I also remember how Bush promised not to get involved in international affairs during his early days in office.
Now, I'm sure Clinton made mistakes in both judgement and execution in his administration's attempts to capture bin Laden. And there is no saying for sure that if the Supreme Court had sided with Gore (and the people who were warning Bush about bin Laden had kept their jobs) the 9/11 attacks wouldn't have happened in the first place. But I am not confident that Bush did everything possible to prevent them.
For him now to use images of death from 9/11 to tout his own success is just so ... wrong ... on so many levels.
The New 'Doctor Who'
Last night (March 8) in the IRC room Drwhochat, someone (I believe it was a person going by the nickname of Xanta_Claus, but my memory may be faulty) brought our attention to this article from the Sunday Times, sparking off a long discussion / debate / rant of what what the new version of Doctor Who may or may not be like, and whether or not we dare watch it.
Firstly -- my instinct is to adapt advice my grandmother gave my mother and my mother gave to me when shool started again each fall, and I was wondering if I'd like my new teacher or not: Don't decide until you've had your third encounter. Whatever your first impressions are, they are likely to be opposite on the second impression. It's not until you've seen a person / experience / tv show three times that your experience outweighs your expectations. As there hasn't even been one episode, much less three, I'm willing to reserve judgement for a while, yet.
Secondly -- while the headline quip about the Doctor being a sex machine is salacious, it's the headline writer's job to grab the reader's attention. And the headline writer is not the same person as the reporter covering the story. My mother was a reporter for various small town papers while I was in college, and I remember at least one time when she got in serious trouble, and got accused of bias because of an inaccurate headline that someone else had written, and people were judging the article on that headline.
The gist of the article itself (kind of hard to read, onscreen) implies that the Doctor will be sexier than he was in the past, but sexier than what? The First Doctor had a granddaughter, and nearly got married in The Aztecs, and while the action is more paternal / avuncular than romantic, the Second Doctor rubs Zoë's sore feet in Mind Robber -- something that I'm sure would have been considered far too sexually vague for the Fifth Doctor to do for one of his companions, especially a female one.
And while I dread the idea of the Doctor having a sexual / romantic relationship with one of his companions (Far too incestuous, if you ask me, even if it isn't technically incest-- sort of like Woody Allen and his wife's adopted adult daugher [Sun-Li?] -- not to mention opening the floodgates for bad marysues in fanfic), I have no objections to him forming a relationship and/or pining for someone back on Gallifrey.
Thirdly -- the article mentions that due to copyright issues, the Daleks, and maybe even the musical theme, may have to be dumped (interesting, about the latter, since Big Finish uses the old theme, or versions thereof). But rubber monsters, title music, cliffhangers -- all of those things are just superficial, in my mind. The core of of Doctor Who is its philosophy, which has been there from the very start: present the audience with stories that encourage an open mind, and thinking about philosophical and moral ideas, through the subjects of science and history, and maybe dream. As long as it continues to do that, it will still be Doctor Who to me.
Gallifrey One -- afterthoughts:
It has been said that: "Whoever represents himself in court has a fool for a lawyer" Those who indulge in self-analysis probably have a fool for a therapist. Be that as it may...
Back on January 30, when Gallifrey was still just an idea in my head, I wrote:
In a real way, I see this trip as a major crossroads. I either go, and potentially change the direction and scope of my life, or I don't, and my life stays the same as it is now until I die.
Well, now I've gone and returned, and I can't say for sure whether my life has changed direction or not. Because I made a choice and acted on it, I can't compare what my life is now to what it would have been if I hadn't made that choice.
I had no tremendous, mind-boggling flashes of insight during the trip. If Cupid shot an arrow at me over Valentine's weekend (whether of gold or lead), he missed his mark. On the whole, I don't feel all that different, I think....
But Dad was here last week, visiting, and helping me register the new van, and he said something very interesting.
We left for California on Sunday morning. On Tuesday morning, Dad had an "uh-oh" moment when he realized he wrote down the information about the AirTel hotel as being near the Burbank airport, and had visions of Audrey and me driving around LA, lost. Through a series of phonecalls, Audrey's boss was finally able to call her on her cell phone, and relay Dad's message, and I called him that night from our motel, and assured him that we indeed knew it was the Van Nyes airport, instead.
From that moment on, Dad said, until I called him again after I got back home, he knew that I was truly on my own, and for the first time since I was born 40 years ago, he did not have a worry in his mind about my fate, and there was an empty space in his mind where that worry used to be.
In other words, I went from being "his child-daughter" to being an adult in my own right. My only regret is that it has come so late, when Mortality is approaching me from behind and gaining fast, and I'm not sure how much adulthood I have left to enjoy. And I can't help but wonder if it has come too late for me to create familial bonds of my own choosing.
But late or early, the shift has come. Whatever repercussions follow on that shift remain to be seen.
One thing: I'm all ready anticipating next year's Gallifrey, with less trepidation. :-)
