In Reply to: A couple of other links posted by padreken on May 24, 2004 at 16:10:12:
Moore is a polemicist, not a documentarian-he just happens to work primarily in the medium of film.Polemicist, yes, but I see him as a decent documentarian with some questionable research skills and a star complex.
I read that Kopel piece. Talk about a polemicist! And not a very good one. He firstly assumes that the people that went to see Spinal Tap concerts and buy the records were all too stupid to get the joke. Perhaps thay saw the satire being carried further? Naw, no one's THAT stupid.
He proceeds to intimate that Marylin Manson and video games WERE soley to blame. Then he obviously doesn't "get" why Moore bought the rifle in the bank by opening an account. The segment was about the far reaching implications that yes, you can EVEN get a gun at a bank. This Kopel guy has no sense of the absurdity of it all. Don't YOU?
The Lockheed sequence: His insistence that "While one killer's father once served in the Air Force, neither family worked in the defense industry." Well, no kidding. That was never really implied in the movie. Kopel's trying to whitewash over the fact Moore was really showing- that we are, as a society numbed by the fact that even our corporate culture revolves around weapons, violence and killing of other humans.
So what if that exact B52 didn't kill those people on Xmas in Viet Nam? Does that mean that no B52 killed them all? Kopel's line of reasoning is a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater that I keep talking about.
The rest of the article is literally packed with this same sort of half baked research and self-serving conservative corporate rhetoric, but I'm gonna stop here because the point I'm really trying to make here is not that Moore is more correct than Kopel, but that Kopel is guilty of the SAME kind of slanderous polemics.
It just depends WHO'S polemics you care to believe in.
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Follow Ups
- Re: A couple of other links - Troy 22:35:05 05/24/04 (0)