United 93 (the unofficial movie theme)
words and music by Dr. BLT (c)2006
http://www.drblt.com/music/unitedninetythree.mp3

One September Mournin’
words and music by Dr. BLT (c)2006
http://www.drblt.com/music/OneSeptMourn.mp3

Autumn’s Castaway
words and music by Dr. BLT & DJ EJ
http://www.drblt.com/music/autumn.mp3

Violence isn’t a human thing, it’s a nature thing. Animals are violent. The real inanity of that statement is that it equates Islam and all other cultures in terms of violence. As if there were no difference between Imperial Japan, or The Romans, or the Aztecs for that matter, and we here in the United States who won’t even execute Mossaoui. Go pick up a book on the history of Islam, it’s a nearly continuous string of warfare and intersectarian violence- the violence ‘of christianity’ pales in comparison. I put it as ‘of christianity’ because many of the violent episodes that are attributed to christianity are almost completely political and not religious at the root. Ireland is a perfect example. It’s not Protestants vs. Catholics really, it’s loyalists vs. nationalists, plain and simple. The rest is just convenience labeling.

I’m not a mean person, but that’s just because it doesn’t make sense to me to apply violence and not intend to kill people. Don’t start fights cause it is fun, and don’t kill people just cause you like it.

It’s not courage to stand up to Spank, that’s just common sense. It takes rather something else, at times in contrast with courage, which is discipline. It takes discipline to deal with children, people who persist in behaving immaturely and insist on personally attacking and tearing down people they don’t like. As a way to show their beer muscles. People get angry when they get targeted like that.

Disciplined people don’t get angry, they get calmer, and that’s what makes them dangerous. They’re not hotheads, they aren’t going to do things cause you make them angry and hurt their feelings.

Oh, I see. Scientifically, it’s a philosophy.

Are you even aware of what you type, or do you just apply your fingers to a keyboard and see what comes out?

But I wonder, Yammer, since you take comfort from following The Way of the Pretend Warrior, or Nerdshido. What have you done to exemplify these qualities, such as courage and virtue?

Bravely standing up to liberals who were making fun of you on an online forum does not count as courage. Sorry, Yammer.

One person’s warrior is the same as another, regardless of skin tone or what defense industry he works for.

I think people might want to help Spank get off his addiction on games and game terminology. Is there a Gamers Anonymous we can send SPank to perhaps?

The warrior ethos isn’t followed much. But scientifically it’s the philosophy that men are expendable and women are not. Or as Bookworm calls it, manly men.

I tend to think if people don’t get it, it doesn’t help much if I try to explain. How do you explain virtue and courage? Other than the usual cliches of course.

I think Spank has taken the “projection” thing to an entirely new psychological level.

Don’t sell youself short. False modesty is an insult to the true nature that exists within the inner being of the Super X-Treme Ninja warrior.

For what it’s worth, I think Ymar makes some good comments here. Not sure the warrior-ethos stuff doesn’t sometimes obscure what he’s really trying to say, though.

I can tell he types a lot faster than I do, though. My skillz must be rusty.

This is where I learned my mad counterinsurgency skillz.

Then we might witness the thrilling spectacle of Spanky vs. Ymarsakar in a gut-wrenching, bone-crunching, fat-rendering test of super x-treme ninja skillz!

Well, I can dream, can’t I?

HA! Yammer, reading about imaginary warriors fighting imaginary wars and following an imaginary philosophy does not, in any way, mean that you follow a philosophy of the warrior. Chances are you have never fought, are not fighting, and will never fight. The very idea of you following “the way of the sword” is just so rediculous I can’t help but laugh.

You follow a simulacrum of an image of a fantasy. Sorry, chum. I know you derive lots of satisfaction from imagining what you would do if you were on that plane and had a lightsaber and all that, but you weren’t and didn’t.

Or, it could be because I didn’t get that feeling of helplessness from watching the end. The philosophy of the warrior and the way of the sword, holds many soothing balmes when you see people meet death fighting instead of cowering.

It’s like religion. You know God’s behind you, so resurrection and good stuff is no big deal.

I can perhaps understand why people may feel strong debilitating emotions. But I’m one of the few that will that my emotions are just as powerful, yet slightly different in harmonics.

To me, Flight 93’s beginning and ending was both fortuitous and by providence. In the end, it was glorious, not sad.

I heard on Fox that some audience member said he wasn’t going to see this because it was the story of a plane crash. No sir, it is a story of a band of brothers and sisters doing their duty to protect their countrymen, and the deaths that they could not avoid when they did their duty. It is not the story of a plane crash.

I salute them, as they richly deserved, for theirs is the honor and the glory, and the power.

The military gives out Medals of Honor for such acts of bravery and the success in saving the lives of their brethren. They do not give out the Medal of Honor for those who succeded in saving themselves, but no others.

Courage isn’t enough. The terroists were scared in the end, yet they did what they saw as their duty, to crash the plane. Courage is not enough, to be a hero.

To me, the people and leaders on Flight 93 deserved the Medal of Honor. Surprise, indeed, is a state of mind.

To get back on the subject, I still have no intention of seeing United 93, nor will I purchase the United 93 coffee-table book, wear a United 93 t-shirt, buy United 93 Action Figures with Smoking Hole Carrying Case, attend the Broadway musical production of United 93, listen to the disco version of the United 93 theme song, or ask for a United 93 Happy Meal at McDonalds.

But I will read the book…

And a few last words of mine, on the subject.

I would like to see the West start regaining, and loving, its own culture again: not just rock and roll, or popular T.V., like American Idol, but our entire cultural history: our literature, our science, our art, all of it, even if that means reading “El Cid” out loud for the fun of it again.

One problem is that so much of it is seen as “politically incorrect” we’ve been discouraged from studying it more deeply.

If you look closely, I didn’t claim Caesar’s buddy used cataphracts when he got ambushed by Parthian horsemen.

If you look closely, I said war changes strategic calculations. The strategic calculation that tanks that don’t move far should not be used.

If Spank actually started thinking instead of being the untrained attack dog that he is, it would be rather simple to realize the logic connections between cataphracts and tanks, and why they were not used and when they were.

But that’s too much to ask, of course. Spank will continue to believe nobody has credibility, Spank will continue to believe everyone is less smart and wise than he is, and Spank will continue to be what is called an immature person.

Personally, I don’t need Spank’s version of credibility, I fear it is rather contagious and very bad.

SB

“The Allies in WWI didn’t use tanks either, cause it couldn’t go very far.”

Yammer, the Allies invented and deployed the first tanks during the First World War One. Here’s a brief list of engagements in that war in which the Allies used tanks:

The Somme
Cambrai
Passchendaele
Amiens
Villers-Bretonneux
The Nivelle Offensive
Spring Offensives, 1918

And so on. Your credibility is now at: zero.

Excuse me? This is news to me, as well as to every light cavalry that ever defeated heavy European cavalry, whether it by the Mongols or the Turks or the Arabs or…

“The Allies in WWI didn’t use tanks either, cause it couldn’t go very far.”

WHAT????????!!!!?????? What are you smoking? The Allies developed and deployed the first tanks ever used during the First World War.

“Those Parthians were hard to crack for the Romans, because the terrain was not very good on the infantry and hell on heavy cataphracts.”

So, the Romans found it difficult to defeat the Parthians because they couldn’t use, presumeably, their heavy calvarly, of which the Romans didn’t make use of for centuries. This sentence doesn’t make any sense unless you are talking about Roman heavy calvary.

And this is where everyone left should stop taking anything Yammer says seriously at all.

To be honest, I think we do need an unbiased, honest Moslem historian to clear this one up, or, at least one better-versed in modern Middle-Eastern folklore, and its transmission.

My understanding, reading western historians such as Bernard Hamilton, et al, is that Saladin was actually a rather mediocre general, and actually less admired than other, more ruthless and successful Islamic generals, such as Baybars; that Saladin was actually more popular with 14th Century Christian minstrels, who helped created the image of the perfect, Saracen Paladin; an image that Sir Walter Scott burnished in his novels about the Crusades.

Certainly, his tomb had fallen into ruin, and he seemed to be barely remembered when Kaiser Wilhelm traveled to the Middle-East, and had it refurbished. (It must be remembered that Saladin was a Kurd, a minority group that was looked down on in the Middle-East back then, the same as now—which makes it so hilarious when somebody like Saddam Hussein, who gassed Kurds, tries to pass himself off as a “Second Saladin.”)

So, some historians have traced Saladin’s Islamic popularity to the 19th Century, rather than the time of the Crusades; however, I don’t speak Arabic, I haven’t been in any Islamic coffee houses recently, it’s quite possible they are telling stories about him. For that, we’d need a friendly Arab folklorist—we’d also need his help on determining how old these tales are; if they really date from the time of the Crusades, or if they’re later inventions, created to boost Islamic self-esteem in the wake of the Arab-Israeli wars, the collapse of the caliphate and the Ottoman empire and other events which Moslems have seen as disastrous.

Just two last points—the real Saladin, as opposed to his legend, is difficult to pin down, and it’s hard to get a picture of the man he really was. When something does come through, it can be rather shocking for those of raised on the image of him as a courtly and merciful Paladin. He did have a cruel strike, and his piety seems almost as rigid as that of, say, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s.

And, lastly, if it is indeed true that Moslems are keeping their history, their heritage alive in stories and popular culture, then it’s time we started to do the same—and not with idiot movies such as, “Kingdom of Heaven” (in fact, it’d probably be better to leave Hollywood completely out of such a revival).

What was the start of all this?
When did the cogs of fate begin to turn?

Perhaps it is impossible to grasp that answer now,
From deep within the flow of time.

But, for a certainty, back then,
We loved so many, yet hated so much.
We hurt others and were hurt ourselves…

Yet, even then we ran like the wind.
Whilst our laughter echoed,
Under cerulean skies…

One of th reasons the Romans adopted heavy cataphracts is because only heavy horse can unseat another heavy horse. The logistics however, remained unchanged. You would have to water and feed the horse as it rode across the sun bleached lands, with the armor soaking up the heat and the thirst. While the Parthians or those who were descended from them, knew all the oasis and secret routes.

They could get to a place of decisive battle the firstest with the mostest. Which is why the land the Parthians had was brutal one cataphracts, of the Roman version, but not the cataphracs the Parthians used.

The Romans didn’t use cataphracts early on precisely because of the logistics and the amount of terrain that had to be traversed.

The Allies in WWI didn’t use tanks either, cause it couldn’t go very far. War changes very many strategic calculations.

If you look closely, I didn’t claim Caesar’s buddy used cataphracts when he got ambushed by Parthian horsemen.

And herein lies the uselessness of trying to apply to history the lense of the immediate present. All Muslims throughout history become terrorists. All interaction with our enemies short of killing them all becomes “appeasement,” because apparently people’s knowledge of the Second World War is limited to a few months in 1938. Our Senate, because we use a similar word, becomes just like the Roman Senate, so of course we should do exactly what they did! Badgers’ snouts, anyone?

“Anyone ever see Joel broadcasted on tv? Christian. Joel Osteen is in front of a big group of people, big. Stadium.”

I love this. In Yammer’s stilted English, he is declaring that Joel Osteen is an icon of “Christian” culture because he speaks in front of a big group of people, big. Stadium.

Considering that the vast majority of people in Western civilization do not attend religious services in big. Stadium. I can only wonder why Yammer thinks this is in someway representative of, say, the varieties of “Christian civilization” as varied as urbanized, secular Americans and rural peasant farmers in Ethiopia. They probably have about as much in common as, say, a Somali suffi, a pious Saudi, a Malay businessman, and a secular, urban Bosnian.

Hence the difficulty and uselessness of speaking in grand, sweeping terms like “Islam” and “Christianity.”

On a side note, Yammer, it was the Parthians, not the Romans, who made use of cataphracts. Cataphracts did not become the mainstay of the Roman military until after the fall of Rome, when every Roman spoke Greek instead of Latin. The Romans of the time of the Parthian wars relied on heavy infantry.

Do you people remember that the US has a Senate. Let me spell it out for you.

SPQR

Senatus Populus Quirites Romanus

Crusader bs. The Crusaders were a bunch of military illterate barbarians and ignoramuses, with no military training and a bunch of retarded stupid thugs as foot soldiers. The Muslims and Americans know better than to compare the US to the crusaders.

America is known for our superior infantry, called the US Marines. Let me translate that as the Roman Legion for you Crusader fans.

There is no such thing as Islamic culture, anymore than there is such a thing as “Christian culture”,

Anyone ever see Joel broadcasted on tv?

Christian

Joel Osteen is in front of a big group of people, big. Stadium.

Btw, when I say Kamel. I pronounce it Camille. Before, I didn’t pronounce it at all, because I can recognize words just by looking at the first 4 letters. So Talkin satisfies the requirements, no need to do the rest (Ymar Sakar works the same way)

Sounds mediterranean, Camille. Not the crusaders though.

We could go all the way back to the Parthians, when they jacked and surrounded Caesar’s triumverate partner and crushed his Legion with massed horse archery fire.

Those Parthians were hard to crack for the Romans, because the terrain was not very good on the infantry and hell on heavy cataphracts.

cataphract sounds like an eye problem, but it’s just knights.

It’s funny. Cause the “Persian dehgans” were like the only people (descended from the Parthains obviously) the Romans had lots and lots of trouble conquering. West and East. 0 Ad or 500 AD.

Now fast foward, The United States Senate is talking about Amannie and how it is hard to deal with him. The more things change, the more things stay the same.

…or it might have something to do with all those American soldiers tromping around in their countries…

Not trying to argue, just trying to understand.

I’m not a ME expert (as you know), but I seem to recall reading somewhere that Arabs still enjoy hearing songs and stories about their “legendary” past - the exploits of Saladin, etc. That is, they have an active oral history that keeps the past alive for them in a way Europeans are no longer familiar with. Our history is relegated to books - theirs is recited and sung every day in coffee houses and other public places.

How many of us sit around reading “El Cid?” out loud for pleasure?

I know this may be a generalization (and you hate those!), but it seems possible for this reason that the Crusades are more relevant to people in the Middle East than they are for Europeans and Americans. Not sure how this applies to more prosperous or “westernized” Arabs and Muslims, though.

I guess what we really need is a Muslim to help us sort out all this info and mis-info.

Volunteers? Anybody?

Apparently, a dim understanding of history isn’t a problem unique to any part of the world.

“Spanky & the Talkin’ Kamel?”

Heh, heh, heh. . .

Seriously, just to add a few more things—the Crusades cannot be reasonably blamed for modern Moslem hostilities against Christians in Indonesia, Nigeria, Black Christians and Animists in the Sudan, Christian Filipinos, Hindus or the Chinese. None of these groups were ever been involved in any sort of Crusading army, or have any connection whatsoever with the noble French houses of the Middle-Ages, who were the ones primarily responsible for organizing the Crusades. Many of these nations didn’t even exist in their modern day form at the time. They certainly did nothing to help the Crusaders in their wars against the Saracens, at any time.

To try and blame the oppression and terrorism they’re subjected to by contemporary Islam, or to excuse it as being an understandable reaction to the actions of European Knights and nobleman hundreds of years ago, is simply absurd.

I don’t think we need part ways on the issue of Islamic culture. And I think the Camel’s way of analyzing the current situation is more productive than talking about the Clash of Civilizations.

(BTW - I think Spanky & The Talkin Camel would be a great name for a sitcom.)

I have to ask, though, what your response would be if someone pointed out that about the first thing Muhammad did after receiving the Holy Koran from God was take up the sword and use it on unbelievers? If the Prophet himself engaged in holy war (not “jihad = self-improvement” but actual blood and conquest), wouldn’t that seem to place religious violence somewhere near the center of Islam’s belief systems? And that, in turn, must have some effect on its practitioners regardless of which of the many “Islamic cultures” they live in?

I guess this is in connection with the “Islam is a religion of peace” line we were endlessly fed after 9/11. One of my pet peeves, actually. If Islam is not monolithic, and you can’t characterize it as a violent religion, then neither can you characterize it as a “religion of peace.” It’s whatever its practitioners make it.

Asking respectfully to continue the discussion - not spanking Spanky.

This film even though realistic qualifies as propaganda, war propaganda. It’s the kind of film that people can watch and identify the good guys and bad guys without any problem. And they want to kill the bad guys and keep the good guys from dying. It’s reality filming and everybody dies and it’s a bummer. Then you realize, hey I’m still alive. People I love are still alive. We really owe those people on that plane.

It’s real, it’s good, it’s propaganda. No contradiction.

I think the current agression and dysfunction rampant in the Arab world today is far more connected to what happened in the 19th-20th Centuries, than it is to the Crusades.

P.S. I’ve always thought it ridiculous to equate modern American Baptists, Islamophilic British Anglicans and the world-weary, not-very-religous French with fighting Crusader Knights of the 11th-12th Centuries. We moderns possess few of their vices—-and few of their virtues, too.

P.P.S. Also, here’s a question I’ve been dying to ask for a long time: how many Americans fought in the Crusades? How many Crusaders did the United States send to the aid of, say, Richard the Lionheart, Frederick Barbarossa, St. Louis or any of the 6 kings of Jerusalem who ruled before the Battle of Hattin?

(The answer, of course, is absolutely none. This, by itself, should be enough to shut up those who want to blame the current war on terror to the Crusades, but, unfortunately, it never does).

P.S. I’m also curious

That really was my point - that the Crusades contained many examples of Christian barbarity - and that this doesn’t mean that you and I have any culpability as the heirs to that culture, and more than anyone is responsible for what anyone did hundreds of years ago.

It really irks me, to no end, when people try to do this - to argue that because Muslims did bad things then, that this explains why other Muslims do bad things now, or that Christians alive today bear some sort of stain for what was done then. But what really, really gets me is the notion that unless you portray history according to rigid, Manichean terms, rather than historical fact, then you’re somehow excusing or justifying terrorism.

Heaven forbid you commit the heresy of pointing out that Christians have commited terrorism, and that Muslims have done good things. Saying these things isn’t an attack on good people or support for bad people - it’s a simple statement of fact. Admitting that the Crusades weren’t an example of Islam’s unrelenting attempts to destroy all that is good and pure in Western Civilization isn’t a statement of anti-American hatred or blah blah blah.

The result of this is the sort of hypervigilance we’re seeing here: if someone has the audacity to portray historical Muslims as anything but slavering monsters out for the blood of innocents, then they’re out to destroy America, or something like that.

“the violence that appears to be a part of Islamic culture”

SB, we’re going to part ways here. There is no such thing as Islamic culture, anymore than there is such a thing as “Christian culture”, except in a way that is so general as to be useless. Violence isn’t a Muslim thing, it’s a human thing, and Islam’s long association with desert nomads ended as soon as it started - the first conquests of Islam rapidly transformed it into an urban civilization. Of course there are still nomads in parts of the Muslim world, just as there are still nomadic Lapps in Finland and Sweden.

Look, if you’re trying to understand terrorist violence, it’s certainly easy to run off ideas like this, but they’re going to be wrong.

I got no problem with your argument against characterizing Muslims as head-choppers and Islam as a naturally head-chopping religion. I agree with it because Mo down at the 7-11 doesn’t chop my head off when I stop by for a Slurpee after work. He is not monolithic, nor is he unitary. I’m not sure whether he’s homogeneous. Frankly, that’s none of my business. He is letting his beard grow, though - so I’m keeping an eye on him.

Maybe I misunderstood your original point, or you missed mine. What I have a problem with is people pointing to the Crusades as an example of Christian barbarity when we’re discussing Muslim barbarity - as if to say “Well, we’re just as bad.” To me, that’s just a non-argument. The same statements you make about Islam can also be made about Christianity - namely that Christianity is not monolithic (it wasn’t in the Middle Ages, either, although Roman Catholicism was certainly dominant), and that more Christians *didn’t* participate in the Crusades, inquisitions, and witch burnings than did.

You could also say that the Old Testament contains at least as many exhortions to slaughter unbelievers as the Koran does, but that despite this people of both faiths have - at certain times and in certain places - managed to live in peace with each other.

I would suggest that the violence that appears to be a part of Islamic culture comes from its long association with warlike desert nomads, not from any characteristic of Islam itself. Christianity + Knights in Shining Armor = Crusades. Difference is, our knights went away a long time ago. The nomads are still alive - in spirit, anyway. And they like it that way.

Does that make any sense at all?

But none of that matters to Tom, whom I’m pretty sure is insane. Tom believes not only that the Democrats don’t care about Darfur, but that they’re somehow using their dark magic to stop Bush from doing or saying things about Darfur. Crazy old coot.

Hey Spanky, looks like Bush is coming through for you. You have to surf over to the Whitehouse site to read all about it. Shall I loan you an “I Like Bush” pin; I’ve got a couple of extras?

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/04/20060428-5.html

Again, this is the problem when you don’t know enough history, so you try to understand everything through a framework of the immediate present. Evil Muslims chop off heads now. A Muslim chopped off heads almost a thousand years ago. Looks like nothing has changed in a thousand years!

This, of course, relies on the premise that Islam is unitary, monolithic, and unchangeing. The circumstances of Salidan’s actions are as different as modern-day jihadi terrorist violence as the atrocities of Cortez are to modern day Spaniards.

But I guess if you’re looking for a simple explanation to complex issues, then it’s really easy to say “Islam is bad, this is why Muslims do bad things.” It’s wrong, of course, to deny that billions of people aren’t and haven’t been chopping off heads while being Muslim, just as it would be wrong to deny that lots of people eat bread without becoming serial killers, but it’s certainly easy.

It has occurred to me before that, in fact, memories of 9/11 are not inherently political; what’s political about them is how we use those memories to say other things.

It is extremely unfortunate — especially to the families of the victims — that 9/11 has become a political football. That someone who opposes the Iraq war could make a solidly affirmative movie about 9/11, and about United 93 in particular, gives me a great deal of hope: perhaps it’s not yet too late to reclaim 9/11 as the property and history of all Americans, not just those who vote a particular way.

I have not seen the movie yet, but I plan to do so. Among other reasons, I believe that we live in an age that has spurned heroes… and that we do ourselves a tremendous disservice by doing so.

I believe that, as human beings, we need to be inspired to greatness… and part of the way we’ve always done that has been through stories of heroes, doing great things that we want to believe we could have done in their place.

(As the Billy Dean song says: “That’s why they call them heroes / And the best thing they ever do / Is point to the best in us all / And say: “If I can, you can too.”)

We already have far more fictional heroes than we could possibly need. I don’t want to go see another movie with James Bond or Indiana Jones or Spiderman; I don’t want to see Bruce Willis or Antonio Banderas or Keifer Sutherland playing yet another fictional hero, forcing me to suspend disbelief yet again in the world around me.

We have heroes, real heroes, who really have faced death knowingly and unflinchingly, to serve a cause bigger than themselves and people they would never meet. Some have lived to tell the tale themselves; some died for us, and need the help of other people to get their story told.

Either way, these are stories that we need to hear.

respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline

Chopping off heads if you don’t wanna play the hostage/ransom game is a very old and valued Arabic custom.

Arguing that we shouldn’t condemn Islamist head-choppers today because some Christians chopped heads eight hundred years ago is asinine. If we don’t hold a grudge against them for brutally attacking and occupying almost two-thirds of Europe, they shouldn’t hold a grudge against us for retaliating in kind.

That was then, this is now.

“Greengrass doesn’t seem to have let his politics interfere with his desire to make this movie. He really does appear to be interested in just presenting the facts, and letting the viewer decide. And that seems both refreshing and unusual to me.”

At first, it was to me too. I have to admit, I’m sort of reflexively distrustful of someone willing to spout off what on the surface appears to be a pithy statement on such a complex situation. But then, I stepped back and thought about it (Yes, it’s possible to do so!). Objectively, murder is murder, and horror is horror; the left and right may differ as to the methods of dealing with such, but in the end, pretty much everyone except psycopaths and criminals agree with that assesment. We share a lot more in common with each other in this country than we’d like to believe, you know.

Neo, the more I think about it, the more I’m not sure Greengrass or anyone else can even be at the point of thinking politics should interfere with the telling of such a story. United 93 was a story of innocent people being murdered by psycopaths with a delusional agenda. That cuts across any political boundary; it’s a sheer human story. Yes, I’m aware that the narrative can be swung to either political wing, or even so far as to idiocies like “we had it coming”, or “kill ‘em all, let God sort them out”. But if a film maker honestly approaches the story for its inherent values, then the final work can transcend any political feelings the individual film maker has. This, BTW, is a criticism I apply to journalists, too: More need to let the details of the story shape their conclusions, rather than the other way around. And that includes the right side of the news spectrum as well as the left. But back to the point: It’s possible for a person to tease out the story behind the event, and let what happened affect the viewers according to their worldviews as opposed to stamping the work with one, single assesment. Not that there’s nothing wrong with that — it’s a legitimate way of presenting a narrative, not to mention celebrated; look at Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky as one example out of the thousands. It’s just that there’s also value in not slathering a work with obvious emotional or political signatures. And one measure of the accomplished storyteller is the ability to present a story that cuts across differences and presents the qualities of the story on their own, to let the audience/viewer/news consumer draw conclusions of their own.

In short, it’s possible for someone to fairly present this kind of story without personal political baggage. I’ll admit, it’s not a common thing to do so — which is probably the source of your “refreshed” surprise, Neo — but it is possible.

————

On a broader topic: Just how different are all of us, really? As another blogger has said:

“By historical terms, there’s nothing “conservative” about my beliefs. And there’s very little that’s “conservative” about America (when was the last time you heard an American politician arguing that we should restore the old monarchy?) We are liberal democrats living in a liberal democracy with a liberal-democratic Constitution that’s one of the world’s finest and most ingenious political documents ever written. America was born out of liberal principles.”

That from a blogger that no one would mistake for being a Democrat or a left-wing writer. Is it really accurate to call someone “conservative” or “Neocon”, or “left wing” or “liberal” on the thin basis of short posts or comments on a small handful of topics? Or is that just our prejudice, as well as our reflex to label, talking?

Here’s something from one of my favorite editorials, ever:

“Their (the terrorists’ and their militant Islamic supporter’s) constant refrain is that America is a country with wealth and power but “no values.” The Islamic terrorists think our wealth and power is unrelated to anything in the soul of this country — that we are basically a godless nation, indeed the enemies of God. And if you are an enemy of God you deserve to die. These terrorists believe that wealth and power can be achieved only by giving up your values, because they look at places such as Saudi Arabia and see that many of the wealthy and powerful there lead lives disconnected from their faith.

Of course, what this view of America completely misses is that American power and wealth flow directly from a deep spiritual source — a spirit of respect for the individual, a spirit of tolerance for differences of faith or politics, a respect for freedom of thought as the necessary foundation for all creativity and a spirit of unity that encompasses all kinds of differences. Only a society with a deep spiritual energy, that welcomes immigrants and worships freedom, could constantly renew itself and its sources of power and wealth.”

That happens to be from a liberal — Tom Friedman — who writes for a liberal source — the New York Times. God knows I’ve wanted to fisk many of his articles many a time before, but fell back, wincing, due to the sheer size of the task. But, it’s a mistake to accuse him of not understanding what our country faces in these times. It’s certainly a mistake to apply any of the standard catch-all criticisms we on the right all too often apply to those on the left. Some of our differences are a matter of degree, not fundamental viewpoint.

Plus, we have in Friedman a liberal who supports the goals of the US in Iraq. Is it fair to tar all liberals with the “anti-war” tag?

Look, my point is that we’re all too often attacking caricatures (< -- God bless spell check!), making comments on the surface appearance of a statement, making assumptions about someone based on "Well, you said this, so you must be that“. Maybe Friedman’s not a good example, since he’s overall been supportive of the US goals in Iraq, if not necessarily the execution of such, and he’s got a very free-market stance on the issue of Globalization (someone with a Times Select subscription can probably provide more context, as I’ve stopped reading him since he’s gone behind the wall). But the point is, he’s not a Neocon, he’s not a Republican, but in that one column he wrote something that cuts across political boundaries and can appeal to any American, regardless of party, and he fearlessly tackles another topic — Globalism — that many don’t view as a liberal cause. Is it really good mental excercise to repeatedly fall back on the same old canards with each other, as too many of us have been doing in this thread?