With so much of hateful blindness, completely unselfcritical rhetoric of
political morality, ecstatic endorsement of the televisual images (film
analysts have been shown to be mere visceral consumers of the televisual
image and have singularly failed as media critics). With so much passion
being roused, a stray murder or two in the back alleys of Arizona and Texas
go unreported. These gun-wielding goons stalk the streets of Dallas and
Manhattan like the proto-policeman that is being sought to be constructed.
Turbans are suspect. A certain way of speaking (the murderers are suddenly
self-assured phenticians) is taken gleefully to be an endorsement of
identity and a cathartic licence to kill. UN is completely sidelined. US is
merely interested in only ITS war against terrorism. The other/s are
completely forgotten except as targets of annihilation. The urbane film and
media critics want to wait for the moment of objectivity and find the whole
idea of talking about the dangerously aroused emotions puerile and downright
repugnant. They have obviously not heard of the aesthetics of immediacy in
documentary cinema of a certain persuasion and the dire need to intervene.
The moralists - the harbingers of 'good' against 'evil' - are crying blood
and in gleeful perversity advising Noam Chomsky to undergo a sex change and
shift base to Afghanistan. "In the night of their ignorance, all cows are
black." We have indeed fallen on sad days.
Sukhbir
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