...went to see this movie called Milk which, as it turns out, has little or nothing to do with the dairy industry...instead, Sean Penn plays a guy named Harvey Milk who lived a long, long time ago, in an era far different from ours, when, in the state of California, pompous ignoramuses and cowardly bigots hid their hatred and stupidity behind cynical readings of the Bible and ludicrous homilies about protecting the family while pushing meanspirited ballot initiatives meant to deny basic civil rights to people based on sexual orientation....like I said, it was a long time ago....More people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, my friends, that is true perversion.
Hope will never be silent.
Harvey Milk
A blogger friend reamed me in a comment on that last post for using the word paranoid a bit too loosely in these days of ever watchful eyes....and, of course, she’s got a point....far be it from me to say that reality isn’t crazier than even the craziest among us can imagine....and yet...looking at the situation, I see concentric circles of crazed fear...with small time would-be radicals vaingloriously imagining themselves important and dangerous enough to the powers-that-be to be watched, and those very powers seeing danger everywhere, and vaingloriously imagining that they can and should watch everything....Michel Foucault wrote it is not on the fringes of society and through successive exiles that criminality is born, but by means of ever more insistent surveillance, by an accumulation of disciplinary coercion....I’ve read enough of Foucault to see that a) there’s wisdom in what he writes, and b) he’s full of crap...and can only hope that readers of this blog will think the same of me....
13 comments:
Well... I'm not so sure about the commonality of paranoia, but I do see crazy all around me (and I've talked about this on my blog too reviewing Burn After Reading).
Its an everyday act of viewing life through your own personal 'filters' and assuming that's reality and how things are for everyone else too.
From this kind of right-next-to-your-skin crazy (which almost everyone denies), all others escalate, including violence in the name of religion or in the name of anything else for that matter... and paranoia too, right?
Not that I think I'm the sanest person alive or anything like that... I never said that did I? Oh geez, I hope no one thought I said that!!
I saw a video about Prop 8 that had Jack Black as Jesus. A friend posted it on her blog.
http://skyewriter-novemberfifth.blogspot.com/2008/12/prop-8-hummingbird-and-sourpuss.html
Check it out!
A long time ago indeed
...hmmm, so how was the movie? :o)
What I've read here has never indicated you are full of crap... You may think I am after reading this comment, however.
Ooh, the omnipresent panopticon. I confess I am a huge fan of Foucault. My favorite is _Discipline and Punish_. I took a Foucault and Feminism class a couple of years ago that was unbelievable (we skipped _History of Sexuality 1,2,3_; but those were covered in one of my PoMo courses).
His connections to Iran are very interesting, too. Have you read: _Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism_ (Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson), or _Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things_ (Ann Laura Stoler)?
His conception of how power is structured in stark contrast to Marxism is compelling. And how the reiteration of that power is hard to escape.
Blah, blah, blah, right?
Sorry to be such a bore. . .
Glad you liked the video.
Was the movie any good? or just thought provoking? I'll look out for it.
The world is (collectively) insane - so we (human species)will die out and so will all our paranoia. The Universe won't care one jot!
Hmmmmm sounds like another movie I just can't wait
to line up and see. Trust me I can wait a long, long time.
Fear and paranoia, how is that caused?
It may just be an off perception or view of things that causes us to fear and become paranoid.
They are mostly imaginary thoughts, trapped in the closet of our minds.
Even if you are full of crap, you write so eloquently, that it barely even matters!
Can't wait to see the movie... how was Sean? (Is he a good Harvey or is he angling for another Oscar?)
I was living in San Francisco when Harvey Milk died--I was still in adolescence and too full of myself to completely understand the great ramifications of what happened. I remember Dan White's sentencing more--because of the pictures on the television of the overturned police cars and riots up in the Castro district when Dan White, an ex-police officer, infamously got only FIVE years, getting off on the 'twinkie defense.' It was just incredible that someone could receive that light of a sentence for such a terrible crime. Later, I met some people who were actually involved in those riots and one had sustaining injuries from that time.
I really want to see that movie but I haven't had a chance as of yet. Perhaps I will try to go this weekend.
BTW--I really love that quote of Milk.
Take care,
Melinda
Fantastic opener. A long time ago, indeed. I can't wait to see Milk.
How ironic...I just came from a different friend's blog, where he did a whole post about Harvey Milk, discussing everything BUT "Milk." What are the odds?
I've always thought you were full of crap if that makes ya feel any better, LOL.
I do find it odd that this movie comes out now ... just when Prop 8 took away rights. It's like I keep telling my US blogging friends, we've had legal gay marriage here in Canada for a while now and the world hasn't come to an end. The same amount of non-gay marriages are ending in divorce as they were prior to making gay marriage legal. So not to worry.
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