A Blog Around The Clock

Al Gore's movie is opening locally tomorrow (though not in the theater up the street) and I am really looking forward to seeing it. I have just read what is, in my opinion, the best review of the movie: Brokeback Earth by Godfrey Cheshire. It is long but well worth your time.

The first page or so is actually about the movie, about the science behind the movie and about Al Gore himself. The latter part, where it starts delving into politics is perhaps the best. Here is just a tiny little excerpt to whet your appetites:

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By my not entirely scientific calculations, it was circa the onset of the Reagan administration that many Americans traded a rudimentary engagement with unmediated reality for an addiction to feel-good fantasy as contrived and delivered by an increasingly sophisticated alliance of large corporate and right-wing political interests. The result is something that undermines the single most critical component in a democracy: Many people don't vote on the basis of self-interest because they can't identify it. Reality itself has grown malleable. This may be a "soft" Orwellianism, but it's Orwellian nonetheless. Up is down. In is out. Lies are truth. John Kerry is a Vietnam War shirker, George W. Bush a hero of the same fight.
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Likewise, the huge corporate interests that generate our culture's politicized fantasy have done a remarkably good job in convincing at least half the country that, according to many "experts," global warming is "unproven" or "controversial." What chance does a little indie film have against this pervasive climate of disinformation? To put it purely in movie terms, though An Inconvenient Truth's early earnings were impressive, they were dwarfed by those of The Omen, which tells us that recent natural disasters are due to the approach of the End Times.
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