My son’s and I love going to the movies. We don’t have TV at home, so the movies, la radio and books along with sports etc. keep us entertained and intellectually, physically and morally/philosophically fit (sorta sometimes!).
This was my son’s birthday week, and that means a few dollars to buy lunch at school, butter chicken at least once for dinner, strange & gross pizza with bbq sauce and chicken from a joint with a telephone number jingle and movies. Last night we went to a double bill, Milk and The Boy in the Stripe Pyjamas.
Milk was educational, using 70s cinematic techniques combined with archival footage of Castro in San Francisco of the gay and lesbian liberation epoch. Sean Penn’s acting was stupendous and there were tons of shots of sexy hetero men necking. I read a bit too much about it before hand though and the film felt a little like a cinematic wikepedia entry.
The Boy in the Stripe Pyjamas was astounding. Masa and I both left totally stunned and disturbed. We had no idea what to expect and the film delivered the unexpected in the most graphically grotesque and real way possible. As Masa put it, there were multiple ironies.
This led us to discuss til late in the night, Nazi hunters, debating if the genocide in Europe of the Jews done by the Germans that was so scientifically, systematically and technologically done was the same or worse than the recent genocide in Rwanda which was as systematic using social networks and low technologies. If you catch a genocidaire or a nazi do you loose your humanity by torturing them in return? What does it mean when a society reaches impunity, what is justice, are the zionists in Israel justified in what they do to claim a homeland and are the Zionist and orthodox Jews in Israel perpetuating the same inhumanity done to them to the Palestinians? What will it take for us all to change and how to try a society since it is not only individuals responsible, how do humans get this way and how do we ensure we don’t? What does Guantanamo bay idicate about what we have become as a society, what we did to Maher Arar on a lark, what watching our civil liberties means, the irony of letting the terrorists win by allow christian fundamenalism to resurface and to compromise our moral rights to open the door to torture. Who is inhumane?
We also discussed proposition 8 (repeal of gay marriage) and proposition 6 (repeal of equal rights to housing and employment by homosexuals and lesbians), should a civil right be on a ballot, how bigotry returns in different guises, the role of religion to perpetuate hate, should the murderer have gotten off so easily, was justice served, how the hell did a twinky defence pass, should he have gotten the electric chair and would that have changed society, what is the role of the justice system punishment or social change, protection from harm or rehabilitation?
Needless to say i woke up groggy with nothing but more questions. Then the BBC has a piece on the ole notorious torture experiments on my rss feed this morning which reaffirmed that people would be willing to hurt others. Oye veigh!
