August 2nd, 2005
' ... the meta-message of weasel behaviour is always the same: "Go away, you bother me." It is an insult, a way of diminishing the other person until they are left so un-validated that they feel practically worthless. And you know what? They won't stay feeling that way forever. Things boil over. People get angry; they start to feel like they have nothing to lose with you (since they never had any respect for you). It may seem incomprehensible, but we have a lot of evidence in the rapidly-deteriorating societies of this world that weasel behaviour can beget violence. That's what happens when you tell people they don't really exist. It's what happens when you dismiss people as unimportant or a waste of your time ...'
-Me, in my last rant.
(I only repeat it here because my last rant was long enough that I doubt many people had the time or patience to get to this "payoff paragraph".)
A friend of a former friend once described the overwhelming majority of the weak-minded who grew up in the last couple of generations as "TV-trained". That is, what we (yes, "we") saw on television during the years that we grew up informed and controlled our perceptions of the world. This is true even if we looked at it and thought to ourselves, "this is stupid!" I say this because, even when reacting against something, we are being educated and somehow influenced by it. That is, even when you go in the opposite direction to something, you are being controlled by it.
So that is why it took me a long time (until I was an adult, in fact) to realise that, in war, when someone is shot, blown up or otherwise mutilated, they don't just grunt, grasp their non-bleeding chests and fall down until the director yells cut. I was like the others of my boyhood TV-trained clique: I thought that gunshots and grenades, bombs and poison gas were clean ways to die. You just fell with a grimace and your hair remained as kempt as the hairdresser left it. Blood was symbolic, not portrayed in accurate quantities.
I guess it was the movie Platoon which really hit me because it came out at the time I was starting to realise how ugly, messy, disgusting, horrifying it really was when the frail human body was insulted by flying metal and bomb blasts. My father and I watched it together, and he said that it disturbed him because of its accuracy portraying combat. (He should know, he fought in WWII in France and Holland.) And then the movie Saving Private Ryan came out, fulfilling my prediction that someone would finally get around to using CGI to create an ultra-realistic rendering of the destruction of human flesh in historical combat.
I'm not much of a movie critic, so I won't go on about this, but I do want to make the point: The most horrific scene for me was not the D-Day landings at the start of the movie, despite its sheer dreadfulness. I was disturbed at a very primal level by the hand-to-hand fight between the German and American soldier, when the German soldier uses his superior size and strength to pin the American down. There is a look in the American's eyes as he just knows he's losing the fight for his life. And the German speaking to him almost reasonably as he slowly wins the fight. Wow ... bugs me to just dredge up the memory of that scene even now. Well, anyhow, I would argue that the added realism given to Spielberg through CGI made that scene near the end of the movie more dreadful, just because we are so much more immersed in it.
Well, right at this second there are soldiers all over the world killing each other and innocents, and being killed themselves ... so maybe a movie—even a movie with this level of realism—can't make any difference anyhow ... at least not as long as there are weasels fanning the flames.
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