Right Hook
JJ McCullough, OP Columnist

 

One of the great ironies of our time is that while political
activism has never been more popular and fashionable in
name, it has become increasingly irrelevant in practice.
North America probably has more political activists per
capita than ever before in history, yet in many ways our
political discourse remains as stagnant as ever. The under-
lying explanation for this apparent contradiction is rather
predictable. The more mainstream the abstract concept of
activism gets, the more redundant the actual activist causes
themselves become. When everyone wants to be an
activist, in other words, the actual issues becomes irrele-
vant.

At it stands today, what passes for meaningful political
activism is really little more than a narrow focus on a
handful of obscure, esoteric, and often dated pet causes.
Rather than trying to forge new fronts of change and
provocation on some of contemporary society’s biggest
social, political, and global challenges, much of the self-
proclaimed activist community seems content to remain
permanently focus on an extremely narrow set of issues
which they know they can always win.

Case in point: the recent Academy Awards. All sorts of

Faking controversy, Hollywood style

major entertainment media outlets breathlessly praised this
year’s crop of Oscar-nominated films for being some of
Hollywood’s most activist, political works in decades. The
Best Picture lineup in particular was supposed to represent
a uniquely profound collection of stories designed to col-
lectively challenge and shock the continental theater-going
public. And perhaps they would have, in 1960.

In the 21st Century, however, these supposedly
provocative nominees failed to elicit much more than a
collective yawn from the general public—a fact well
reflected by their low box office receipts. Just to review
Hollywood’s profound offerings for 2005: we had Crash,
which taught us that American inner cities can be a hotbed
of racial tension; Good Night, and Good Luck, which showed
that Joseph McCarthy was a bit of a demagogue at times;
Munich, which demonstrated that the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict is complicated; and Brokeback Mountain, which
taught its viewers that rural Wyoming in the 1960s was not
a particularly tolerant community for gay men. Deep les-
sons, all.

It’s a rather telling fact that of the five best picture
nominees, only one—Crash—was set in the present day.
Contemporary Hollywood’s idea of political activism
apparently consists of re-fighting the already long resolved
political battles of decades past rather than trying to deal
with the far more thorny issues of the present. Years from
now, when movie critics look back at our decade they’ll no
doubt be scratching their heads at the sheer incoherence of
it all. At a time when our planet is facing no shortage of
new, challenging problems to address—the rise of Islamic
extremism, the resurgence of anti-Western terrorism, the
spread of HIV/AIDS, tensions of new immigration pat-
terns, and the strains of globalization, to name but a few—
it’s a bit perplexing that the world’s best and brightest film-
makers are choosing to spend their time rehashing matters

like McCarthyism.

Actually, it’s not surprising at all. Today’s problems are
far too difficult and controversial to tackle head-on, at least
by Hollywood standards. After all, if someone wanted to
make a film about, say, the rise of radical Islamism in
France, he or she might run the risk of actually offending
someone presently living, which of course would never do.
A young director in Holland named Theo Van Gough tried
making an indie art film about the treatment of women
under Islamic fundamentalism and he wound up lying on
the streets of Amsterdam with his throat slit. A bunch of
cartoonists in Denmark similarly tried to poke fun at the
absurdity of certain doctrinaire Muslim teachings, and they
are now guarded round-the-clock by a team of bodyguards.
Were such acts in bad taste? Perhaps, but if nothing else
these European artists were being genuinely provocative,
challenging, and political. They wanted to get people think-
ing and talking, and like it or not, they succeeded. By con-
trast, a movie like Brokeback Mountain provoked nothing,
other than murmurs of support from audiences who
agreed with the film before they even saw it.

The tenuous political overtones of this year’s Oscar
nominees thus exist as little more than exercises in shallow
self-aggrandizement. Making films about gay cowboys or
Golda Meier’s foreign policy in the year 2006 may give
wealthy American liberals a chance to pat themselves on
the back for being bold and controversial, but in the end,
all it really does it cheapen the definition of those terms.

Winning an Oscar may be a lot of things, but an act of
political activism it ain’t.

 

What Iraq Needs Now, Is Love Sweet Love

   
   

  

Left Overs

lain Reeve, OP Fella

 

There are many bad places to live on this planet of ours.
From the ghettos of Rio, to the drenched plains of
Bangladesh, to the famine-stricken lands of Central Africa,
there are many places that I would not desire to spend any-
thing more than a short amount of time in.

However, there is currently nowhere that puts the same
dramatic fear of God in its citizens as Iraq. While many of
the other places mentioned experience the slow burn of
poverty and starvation, Iraq has the potential to help most

of its citizens develop a decent life. That is, if they can get
past the current state they rest in—embattled by terror
attacks, lingering in political limbo, and teetering on the
edge of civil war. This provides a dangerous dichotomy for
people trying to build a normal life: stability one day, terror
the next.

Even the most stalwart supporters of the Iraq invasion
have begun to question the utility of an invasion which has
left the state in tatters, has yielded no real government, and
has created an instability that continues to endanger the
population on a daily basis. Yes, Saddam was removed and
is standing trial; but the chances of him being sentenced
before croaking due to old age seems unlikely. It’s not even
worth commenting on Iraq from a security position any-
more; everyone knows the WMD justification was bunk.
So last on the list of reasons is the creation of a democrat-
ic Iraqi state. Not only has this process been slow and
arduous, the likelihood of creating a unified Iraqi state is
quickly slipping from unlikely, to not even desirable to
most of the residents.

No justice, no threat, no democracy. What the hell was
the point? While I admit the temptation, being the stuck-
up presumptuous lefty I am, is to just sit back and scoff at
the horrid failure the operation has been, there are people
suffering here and that isn’t cool. Therefore, I have to

 

accept the situation as it is and try and think of ways to get
Iraq and America out of this mess. At this point, it seems
that the only salvageable goal is making life better for the
Iraqi people than it was before. So how do we do that?
Possibility one: America stays the course. This has the
advantage of perhaps eventually creating a government.
But it has many disadvantages. These include the continu-
ing inhumane abuse of prisoners, a state fashioned around
American interests and values (if it materializes at all), and
a continued incentive for anti-western fueled terrorism.
Possibility two: full withdrawal—let them suss out their
own mess. At the risk of infuriating my friends on the far
left, this position is totally Looney Tunes to me. I don’t
adhere to the whole “states must go through bloody war
and painful development the same way we did” argument.
Even if the American model will create a super pro-
America, semi-colonial puppet state, that is still better than
power vacuums, civil war, and a pile of dead Iraqis visible
from space. Good luck telling me I’m wrong on that one.
The best solution lies elsewhere. It’s time for other
states to do what I have done in this article: getting over

99?

their “I told you so’s” and getting in there and helping peo-
ple. The countries that opposed the war lost that fight, but
it doesn’t mean that they should sit back and ignore areas

where they could be of help. A genuinely international

Continued: P.9