what is it about aussie movies like picnic at hanging rock and walkabout and all the rest that depress the hell out of me? i suppose it must be the geography; the land (and the sea) always seems to win.
[3 netflix stars]
picnic at hanging rock
September 19, 2008 · 1 Comment
Categories: movies
Tagged: picnic at hanging rock, walkabout
1 response so far ↓
pags // September 21, 2008 at 12:49 am |
So.
My mother was born in Hamburg in 1938. Her earliest memories are of being put on a train heading east, to be spared of the Allied bomber offensive against western German cities. Her next memories are of being shipped back west, because it was better to be firebombed by Americans than raped and bayonetted by our Russian allies.
Ja — the Nazis made the calculation that being raped and stabbed was worse than being suffocated in a firestorm. Works for me. Is being firebombed worse than being waterboarded? Hmm…
I get it. “We don’t torture.’ I don’t want us to: moving forward, I hope we find a better way to defend ourselves. I hope we find a better way than to kill the occasional women and children in a “surgical” bombing run. But I can’t get overly worked up about waterboarding a few dozen terrorists, because I know my mom still cringes on the Fourth of July — not because she doesn’t love this country, even after we sent bombers after her — she emigrated here as soon as she could, at 16, without a word of English at her command. She cringes because the bang of fireworks brings back horrible memories.
So. Don’t torture. *I get it.* But I’m struggling with the indignancy against waterboarding, but the antipathy against the millions of German and Japanese (not to mention Korean and Vietnamese, though the latter get more press) women and children we’ve bombed in living memory. Why aren’t we locking up all the WWII bomber pilots who pulled the trigger?
I know why; there’s evil, and there’s the lesser of two evils. We killed millions of German and Japanese women and children because it spared other millions.
I hope it gets better (it has); I hope we do better. I’ll help work towards realistically making things better. But, in the mean time: if waterboarding bothers you that much, get on your fukking high horse and ride down here and apologize to my mother, because she sure as hell didn’t do anything to deserve getting the crap bombed out of her. By Us.