Might-have-been's become never-to-be's;
Possibilities unforeseen
Bloom and fade.
The growth of an idea, a question, a phoneme.
Sound waves bounce images black and white,
Growth truncated by blight.
Count to sleep under the surgeon's knife,
Wake up to emptiness.
Lie weak and weary.
Drink soursop tea,
Creole sensibilities,
Radiance, resonance and revenants.
Natal day shared with Poe.
Six paperwhite bulbs,
Winter forcing in Deco glass.
Holly tree outside the window.
Roman shades, color of creme brulee.
Lustre of raw silk,
Baby's sigh and rumble of passing train.
Prismatic water droplets shatter
Mosaic tile of celadon and bleached bone,
Shifting patterns of light.
Thursday, January 22, 2004
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
Headscarves and the French Secular State
Recently Andy and Kame both blogged about this issue, haven't checked Merde in France yet, but I'm sure he has an opinion as well. The topic is hardly recent. I remember in the late eighties, Mitterand's wife was in the news a bit for supporting the rights of Muslim girls to wear headscarves in the French public schools.
The issue of outlawing religious references in children's clothing does seem very exotic to Americans. In Atlanta, some of the public schools (sorry all you English people, but the logical association of the word public is "freely available to the general public"--it doesn't make sense to use that term for exclusive private schools) have gone to mandatory uniforms. This has to do with some studies showing a correlation between mandatory uniforms and children's academic performance. I don't remember reading too much there, but I think the reasoning went that the clothing lent a "professional" association to the idea of school. You remove clothes as a major distraction and way of children establishing their identity and you reinforce some minimum standards. American parents are more concerned about having little Brianna not adopt the baby Britney pre-teen slut look or preventing ittle Johnny from wearing his jeans hip hop style, floating around his knees.
Why do the French care? It's a good question, and one on which I can only give an outsider's perspective. I can only imagine this goes back to France's long history of having Roman Catholicism as the state religion and the corresponding abuses that accompany that level of power and influence, so that following the French Revolution there was a very strong secular backlash. I remember reading that at some time in the post-Revolution period, it was requested that taxpayers list their religious affiliation on their tax returns so that they could be assessed a tax for the upkeep of their religious institution, and that it was the state who paid the salary of the Catholic priest, the Protestant pastor or the rabbi. This is more involvement than I would have imagined a secular state would want to have in religion, albeit the strategy was probably about control. There is a balance. I also remember in the Mitterand years that some of the religious schools in France were receiving state subsidies. They were upset when the government started intervening and telling them what they could teach. Yet, at the same time, they were taking the government money, so it was only a question of time before that sort of conflict arose.
I was surprised to hear my husband say that in France, the state schools are considered to be the best and that it is the private schools, which are often seen as a refuge for people who couldn't hack it in the competitive public school system--or for those whose parents have strong feelings about their children receiving a religious education. I don't think I could say the same for quality of American public schools, or at least the secondary schools in the city or state where I live. On a national level, one also reads that American children tend be among the lowest scoring in standardized tests compared to the rest of the world; certainly the political agendas of the Democratic and Republican parties pay lip service to concerns about the qualilty of public education in this country.
Thus, the general quality of French public schools is, I think, an important issue. While it would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds for children to have access to free, excellent public schooling, that is simply not the case in many places, certainly not in many parts of America. Ideally, free excellent quality public education would be a right, but in the real world it appears to be more of a priviledge. In France, one could argue that the quality of the public school system is very much the result of a centralized social and political agenda enacted by a government strongly entrenched in a secular tradition.
Are children in school to express their individuality? If they are in private school and that's what their parents are specifically paying for, yes. However, I'm not sure this is the case for public school, which we all pay for, but which must strive for standards that are acceptable to the majority. I've only seen his show once or twice but I'm sure some conservative American pundit like Bill O'Reilly would be pretty ambivalent here. If it was about little Maggie being prevented from wearing a discreet (read not the Madonna fashion statement) cross to public school, he and the religious right would be in an uproar. However, I can see him being sympathetic to the issue of uniforms in public schools and the policing of some minimum standards in attire.
Where are the people protesting for the right to religious expression in French public school coming from, specifically as it concerns Muslim headscarves? First, let's factor out those with no religious feelings about the issue at all who are simply protesting for the sake of protesting (ironically, the religious protestors are aligning themselves with a popular, secular French cultural trend there). Second, I cannot exactly know the feelings of the true protestors. Growing up, I never really knew how to interpret the practice of women wearing headscarves or sort of loose coats to go out, in certain Islamic countries. With an American girl's sensibility, it seemed oppressive, but I lacked reference points outside my own culture to gain a better understanding of this phenomenon. This confusion would have been heightened by the fact that both countries I chiefly read about, growing up in the US in the eighties, represented politicized Islam--Saudi Arabia and Iran.
It wasn't until I read the Iranian writer and literary critic, Azar Nafisi's book "Reading Lolita in Tehran" that I gained a sense of how a woman who grew up in a secular culture in an Islamic country (pre-Revolutionary Iran) would approach the same theme. Her take is that Islamic women who cover their hair and wearing loose-fitting long clothing do so as a personal expression of religious piety. When Islamic states require that women adopt this style of clothing and remove the element of personal choice in that decision, she feels they render the gesture meaningless. Well that I could understand better, or at least I could sympathize with choices people might make on an individual level. Admittedly, the sort of paternalistic sensibility conveyed by a phrase like "men have the eyes of wolves" doesn't really strike a chord with me or maybe I wouldn't peg the susceptibility to visual stimulation as a uniquely masculine trait and, at any rate, people will always find something to fixate on. After all, hadn't my English Lit friends and I had a good laugh about who was capable of finding the more "racy" parts of Spenser's Fairie Queene and I remember an older Spanish gentleman commenting on some earlier part of the last century, when women did dress more modestly: "ah, the rapture of an ankle!" The issue only becomes problematic when a gesture originally meant to reflect individual modesty or piety becomes viewed as a politicized statement.
If I were to go to Saudi Arabia, I would consider it normal to comply with their laws as regards women's clothing. If I were Saudi, the fact that Saudi Arabia is not exactly a democratic government is another issue, although some evidence suggests that if it were more democratic, the resulting government might be even more fundamentalist. So I'm not sure that would do anything to free up the dress code. At any rate, it's not my government or my culture, and I would be respectful of their laws if I were there. Correspondingly, the French government ban on religious expression in public schools is not a law that I would necessarily have supported were I French. However, I can understand where this law is coming from and that is something I can respect. Like it or not, public education is not about honoring the individual preferences of every single citizen, but about promoting the ideals of the state that supports it. In France, that is about the strong commitment to secularism in public institutions.
The issue of outlawing religious references in children's clothing does seem very exotic to Americans. In Atlanta, some of the public schools (sorry all you English people, but the logical association of the word public is "freely available to the general public"--it doesn't make sense to use that term for exclusive private schools) have gone to mandatory uniforms. This has to do with some studies showing a correlation between mandatory uniforms and children's academic performance. I don't remember reading too much there, but I think the reasoning went that the clothing lent a "professional" association to the idea of school. You remove clothes as a major distraction and way of children establishing their identity and you reinforce some minimum standards. American parents are more concerned about having little Brianna not adopt the baby Britney pre-teen slut look or preventing ittle Johnny from wearing his jeans hip hop style, floating around his knees.
Why do the French care? It's a good question, and one on which I can only give an outsider's perspective. I can only imagine this goes back to France's long history of having Roman Catholicism as the state religion and the corresponding abuses that accompany that level of power and influence, so that following the French Revolution there was a very strong secular backlash. I remember reading that at some time in the post-Revolution period, it was requested that taxpayers list their religious affiliation on their tax returns so that they could be assessed a tax for the upkeep of their religious institution, and that it was the state who paid the salary of the Catholic priest, the Protestant pastor or the rabbi. This is more involvement than I would have imagined a secular state would want to have in religion, albeit the strategy was probably about control. There is a balance. I also remember in the Mitterand years that some of the religious schools in France were receiving state subsidies. They were upset when the government started intervening and telling them what they could teach. Yet, at the same time, they were taking the government money, so it was only a question of time before that sort of conflict arose.
I was surprised to hear my husband say that in France, the state schools are considered to be the best and that it is the private schools, which are often seen as a refuge for people who couldn't hack it in the competitive public school system--or for those whose parents have strong feelings about their children receiving a religious education. I don't think I could say the same for quality of American public schools, or at least the secondary schools in the city or state where I live. On a national level, one also reads that American children tend be among the lowest scoring in standardized tests compared to the rest of the world; certainly the political agendas of the Democratic and Republican parties pay lip service to concerns about the qualilty of public education in this country.
Thus, the general quality of French public schools is, I think, an important issue. While it would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds for children to have access to free, excellent public schooling, that is simply not the case in many places, certainly not in many parts of America. Ideally, free excellent quality public education would be a right, but in the real world it appears to be more of a priviledge. In France, one could argue that the quality of the public school system is very much the result of a centralized social and political agenda enacted by a government strongly entrenched in a secular tradition.
Are children in school to express their individuality? If they are in private school and that's what their parents are specifically paying for, yes. However, I'm not sure this is the case for public school, which we all pay for, but which must strive for standards that are acceptable to the majority. I've only seen his show once or twice but I'm sure some conservative American pundit like Bill O'Reilly would be pretty ambivalent here. If it was about little Maggie being prevented from wearing a discreet (read not the Madonna fashion statement) cross to public school, he and the religious right would be in an uproar. However, I can see him being sympathetic to the issue of uniforms in public schools and the policing of some minimum standards in attire.
Where are the people protesting for the right to religious expression in French public school coming from, specifically as it concerns Muslim headscarves? First, let's factor out those with no religious feelings about the issue at all who are simply protesting for the sake of protesting (ironically, the religious protestors are aligning themselves with a popular, secular French cultural trend there). Second, I cannot exactly know the feelings of the true protestors. Growing up, I never really knew how to interpret the practice of women wearing headscarves or sort of loose coats to go out, in certain Islamic countries. With an American girl's sensibility, it seemed oppressive, but I lacked reference points outside my own culture to gain a better understanding of this phenomenon. This confusion would have been heightened by the fact that both countries I chiefly read about, growing up in the US in the eighties, represented politicized Islam--Saudi Arabia and Iran.
It wasn't until I read the Iranian writer and literary critic, Azar Nafisi's book "Reading Lolita in Tehran" that I gained a sense of how a woman who grew up in a secular culture in an Islamic country (pre-Revolutionary Iran) would approach the same theme. Her take is that Islamic women who cover their hair and wearing loose-fitting long clothing do so as a personal expression of religious piety. When Islamic states require that women adopt this style of clothing and remove the element of personal choice in that decision, she feels they render the gesture meaningless. Well that I could understand better, or at least I could sympathize with choices people might make on an individual level. Admittedly, the sort of paternalistic sensibility conveyed by a phrase like "men have the eyes of wolves" doesn't really strike a chord with me or maybe I wouldn't peg the susceptibility to visual stimulation as a uniquely masculine trait and, at any rate, people will always find something to fixate on. After all, hadn't my English Lit friends and I had a good laugh about who was capable of finding the more "racy" parts of Spenser's Fairie Queene and I remember an older Spanish gentleman commenting on some earlier part of the last century, when women did dress more modestly: "ah, the rapture of an ankle!" The issue only becomes problematic when a gesture originally meant to reflect individual modesty or piety becomes viewed as a politicized statement.
If I were to go to Saudi Arabia, I would consider it normal to comply with their laws as regards women's clothing. If I were Saudi, the fact that Saudi Arabia is not exactly a democratic government is another issue, although some evidence suggests that if it were more democratic, the resulting government might be even more fundamentalist. So I'm not sure that would do anything to free up the dress code. At any rate, it's not my government or my culture, and I would be respectful of their laws if I were there. Correspondingly, the French government ban on religious expression in public schools is not a law that I would necessarily have supported were I French. However, I can understand where this law is coming from and that is something I can respect. Like it or not, public education is not about honoring the individual preferences of every single citizen, but about promoting the ideals of the state that supports it. In France, that is about the strong commitment to secularism in public institutions.
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Michael Moore and Titles
At the end of my previous Reading Michael Moore post, it occured to me that the subject I was interested in pursuing further was not Michael Moore's work itself, which is thought-provoking and conveys messages that I believe are important, but rather peripheral aspects of his style or simple snapshots of what he covered in Bowling for Columbine and Stupid White Men
I find the title Stupid White Men as well as chapter titles like "Kill Whitey" completely gratuitous. As a, let's face it, not-so-stupid white man, Moore probably figures he can get away with it, granted they have a provocative ring. Maybe the titles are not meant to be taken literally, but I still find it pandering for attention at the expense of intellectual honesty. As a pale woman, I'm a member of the wrong color category, but the right sex, according to Moore. If he were going to be scientific about his moralizing, he should do so in a case where every category had the same opportunity to take part in the destructive activities he mentions. Are women morally superior or do most of them simply lack the opportunities or the energy to start wars, oppress people and destroy the environment? I once worked with a man who found Barbara Bush's comment that "one in seven Americans is governed by a Bush" (back when George W. was still governor of Texas) highly disturbing. He found it infuriating that everyone naturally assumed she radiated goodness simply because she was an old woman wearing pearls. Virginia Woolf looked at the issue of gender from the reverse perspective, wondering why it was that women hadn't authored more important works of literature in her essay "A Room of One's Own." She attributes this to the fact that women tend to be the ones principally responsible for raising children (not to mention bearing them), coupled with the fact that women were historically denied education, knowledge of the world and access to publication. She feels that a guaranteed private income and a room of one's own are the necessary first conditions for women to write.
Recently, some have speculated that I may have authored this blog. The idea that I have the time for such activity and that they may, by extension, have been conversing with me through this person is highly entertaining--a testament to the fertility of some imaginations and the degree to which certain people do not really know me. While it is true that the shop around the corner I work for has its preoccupations with taking over the world, there's a distinct possibility that the conventional tactics for pursuing that goal are quite time-consuming enough and there's little left over in a day in the life of yours truly to subvert the "authenticity" of blogsphere.
At fourteen months, the twins are now "fully operational" death stars. Their current interest is stress testing the Playstation and GameCube. The GameCube proved a better time investment. Pirate was crouched over the cube swatting at every possible inch of the surface until he came upon the eject button by hazard. "Ah so..." At this point Blondie leans over and observes. It's a little unquieting, like watching the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. If coming home from work to the twins was not exhausting enough, there's the four year old and her playdate who have needs as well, specifically sandwiches. Of course, they don't want the same kind and while I'm attuned to (and don't tolerate much in the way of) my daughter's culinary quirks, I come up short when it comes to the playdate. "There is mayonaise on my cheese sandwich! I don't eat mayonaise." I laboriously scrape off the mayonaise, but it's not good enough. "Fix me a new sandwich." The week-day babysitter wryly observes "You should have just told him it was a new sandwich," but it's too late and she's not helping either so I fix a new mayonaise-free sandwich...only to notice fifteen minutes later that it hasn't been touched. When I ask the child about this, he answers "Oh, I don't like that kind of cheese."
I find the title Stupid White Men as well as chapter titles like "Kill Whitey" completely gratuitous. As a, let's face it, not-so-stupid white man, Moore probably figures he can get away with it, granted they have a provocative ring. Maybe the titles are not meant to be taken literally, but I still find it pandering for attention at the expense of intellectual honesty. As a pale woman, I'm a member of the wrong color category, but the right sex, according to Moore. If he were going to be scientific about his moralizing, he should do so in a case where every category had the same opportunity to take part in the destructive activities he mentions. Are women morally superior or do most of them simply lack the opportunities or the energy to start wars, oppress people and destroy the environment? I once worked with a man who found Barbara Bush's comment that "one in seven Americans is governed by a Bush" (back when George W. was still governor of Texas) highly disturbing. He found it infuriating that everyone naturally assumed she radiated goodness simply because she was an old woman wearing pearls. Virginia Woolf looked at the issue of gender from the reverse perspective, wondering why it was that women hadn't authored more important works of literature in her essay "A Room of One's Own." She attributes this to the fact that women tend to be the ones principally responsible for raising children (not to mention bearing them), coupled with the fact that women were historically denied education, knowledge of the world and access to publication. She feels that a guaranteed private income and a room of one's own are the necessary first conditions for women to write.
Recently, some have speculated that I may have authored this blog. The idea that I have the time for such activity and that they may, by extension, have been conversing with me through this person is highly entertaining--a testament to the fertility of some imaginations and the degree to which certain people do not really know me. While it is true that the shop around the corner I work for has its preoccupations with taking over the world, there's a distinct possibility that the conventional tactics for pursuing that goal are quite time-consuming enough and there's little left over in a day in the life of yours truly to subvert the "authenticity" of blogsphere.
At fourteen months, the twins are now "fully operational" death stars. Their current interest is stress testing the Playstation and GameCube. The GameCube proved a better time investment. Pirate was crouched over the cube swatting at every possible inch of the surface until he came upon the eject button by hazard. "Ah so..." At this point Blondie leans over and observes. It's a little unquieting, like watching the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. If coming home from work to the twins was not exhausting enough, there's the four year old and her playdate who have needs as well, specifically sandwiches. Of course, they don't want the same kind and while I'm attuned to (and don't tolerate much in the way of) my daughter's culinary quirks, I come up short when it comes to the playdate. "There is mayonaise on my cheese sandwich! I don't eat mayonaise." I laboriously scrape off the mayonaise, but it's not good enough. "Fix me a new sandwich." The week-day babysitter wryly observes "You should have just told him it was a new sandwich," but it's too late and she's not helping either so I fix a new mayonaise-free sandwich...only to notice fifteen minutes later that it hasn't been touched. When I ask the child about this, he answers "Oh, I don't like that kind of cheese."
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
Reading Michael Moore
Over the Christmas holiday, I read his book Stupid White Men. Wanting to profit from a rare moment of child-free time, I found it lying around my in-laws' house. My first introduction to Michael Moore was his his acceptance speech at the Oscars. This was the first time I'd heard about "Bowling for Columbine" and long before I got around to renting it at Blockbuster. At the time, I was not impressed with Moore's antics. Granted, there's a high probability that documentary film makers get far less opportunity to express their opinions before large audiences, than say Rob Lowe, but I still felt his performance was a little over the top.
Some context here: I was definitely not watching the Oscars in anticipation of the best movie, best actor, best actress nomination. No, I was not in the mood to be distracted by the best documentary speech. I was eagerly awaiting my own little personal orgy of bad taste: the E "Entertainment" Television Oscar sideshow featuring Joan Rivers, well actually Joan Rivers, her gay male sidekick and her daughter, Melissa. For the unitiated, Joan Rivers is a sort of harpy caricature, bringing to mind memories of the meanest girl from your high school, fifty years and many face-lifts later. Kudos to Joan for being on the forefront of political correctness, the gay guy can definitely hold his own. He looks like he could bring a tear to some red carpet habitue's eyes based on some imprudently chosen accessory. After all, why should men be excluded from getting in touch with their inner harridan? The only one who doesn't fit in is Joan's daughter, Melissa. As horrid as Joan is, after years of banishing the rich and famous to fashion hell, she has definitely earned her place. Melissa has not. She evokes a cackling hyena, the sort that subsists on the carrion felled by more worthy predators.
Well, before I could get to the smackdown moment of the Joan Rivers Oscars fashion vetting: Joan vs. Cher--Cher in some outfit that is little more than a calculated visual affront, and wouldn't be a shame if there was nobody to affront, and Joan who'd be out of a job if we all had good taste, so they really form a symbiotic pair and then there's me, who would love to be attending the Oscars amid all the pomp and circumstance and all the beautiful people, but I'm sitting on my ass in Atlanta, and the probability of me ever going to the Oscars is close to nil, so I'm waiting for Joan Rivers...and Michael Moore has to come along with his speech about phony elections, phony presidents and phony wars. Not that I disagreed with him, but he did kill the mood. Hey, could somebody bring my entertainment back, 'cause I'm not in the mood to think depressing thoughts or deep thoughts at all for that matter. And then, just who does Michael Moore think he is anyway?
In a country where there's no love lost when it comes to authenticity, the Oscars represent the triumph of the gaudy and the fake--America's annual coronation ritual for its disposable royalty. "I'd like to thank the Academy" smack, smack, air kiss, air kiss. They get to reign for some time and then, when we and the tabloids are bored with them, off with their heads. The closest we get to political nobility is the Kennedys, with the family fortune rooted in historical crime, the drug-addicted third generation, the murdering cousins, secretaries drowned under suspicious circumstances, teenage babysitter seductions--they've exhibited some staying power. Personally, I think the British royal family could use an infusion of fresh blood, then they wouldn't have to be buggering valets (the real reason Dubya's life could have been in danger--they obviously look for other qualifications when hiring help over there). Prince William seems promising, they could find him some nice red-blooded American girl, somebody like Paris Hilton, for example. She's been table dancing since age twelve, starred in a porn video before she was twenty. For all those who claim that money is all you need to make it in America, I beg to differ. Clearly 28 million dollars is not enough. You haven't made it in this country until you're making the rounds of the Internet in the altogether.
And then there's Michael Moore with his documentary about guns and gun-related deaths in America. He doesn't really answer the question of how if other countries have violent pasts and their kids like the same violent movies, video games and music that ours do, and we're not the only ones with guns (apparently gun ownership is rather high in Canada too), why is it that our country is unequaled in its gun-related deaths? I think his in-your-face style, while successful at getting people's attention in that one documentary and in the one book I read, also undermines his message to some degree. His negativity can be a little overwhelming and when he does propose solutions they are rather facile, so at the end you might say "What the hell, we're fucked, so what's the use anyway?" What is refreshing about Moore is that he is far less partisan than most social critics and he actually has some personal connection to the phenomena he writes about.
To be continued.
Some context here: I was definitely not watching the Oscars in anticipation of the best movie, best actor, best actress nomination. No, I was not in the mood to be distracted by the best documentary speech. I was eagerly awaiting my own little personal orgy of bad taste: the E "Entertainment" Television Oscar sideshow featuring Joan Rivers, well actually Joan Rivers, her gay male sidekick and her daughter, Melissa. For the unitiated, Joan Rivers is a sort of harpy caricature, bringing to mind memories of the meanest girl from your high school, fifty years and many face-lifts later. Kudos to Joan for being on the forefront of political correctness, the gay guy can definitely hold his own. He looks like he could bring a tear to some red carpet habitue's eyes based on some imprudently chosen accessory. After all, why should men be excluded from getting in touch with their inner harridan? The only one who doesn't fit in is Joan's daughter, Melissa. As horrid as Joan is, after years of banishing the rich and famous to fashion hell, she has definitely earned her place. Melissa has not. She evokes a cackling hyena, the sort that subsists on the carrion felled by more worthy predators.
Well, before I could get to the smackdown moment of the Joan Rivers Oscars fashion vetting: Joan vs. Cher--Cher in some outfit that is little more than a calculated visual affront, and wouldn't be a shame if there was nobody to affront, and Joan who'd be out of a job if we all had good taste, so they really form a symbiotic pair and then there's me, who would love to be attending the Oscars amid all the pomp and circumstance and all the beautiful people, but I'm sitting on my ass in Atlanta, and the probability of me ever going to the Oscars is close to nil, so I'm waiting for Joan Rivers...and Michael Moore has to come along with his speech about phony elections, phony presidents and phony wars. Not that I disagreed with him, but he did kill the mood. Hey, could somebody bring my entertainment back, 'cause I'm not in the mood to think depressing thoughts or deep thoughts at all for that matter. And then, just who does Michael Moore think he is anyway?
In a country where there's no love lost when it comes to authenticity, the Oscars represent the triumph of the gaudy and the fake--America's annual coronation ritual for its disposable royalty. "I'd like to thank the Academy" smack, smack, air kiss, air kiss. They get to reign for some time and then, when we and the tabloids are bored with them, off with their heads. The closest we get to political nobility is the Kennedys, with the family fortune rooted in historical crime, the drug-addicted third generation, the murdering cousins, secretaries drowned under suspicious circumstances, teenage babysitter seductions--they've exhibited some staying power. Personally, I think the British royal family could use an infusion of fresh blood, then they wouldn't have to be buggering valets (the real reason Dubya's life could have been in danger--they obviously look for other qualifications when hiring help over there). Prince William seems promising, they could find him some nice red-blooded American girl, somebody like Paris Hilton, for example. She's been table dancing since age twelve, starred in a porn video before she was twenty. For all those who claim that money is all you need to make it in America, I beg to differ. Clearly 28 million dollars is not enough. You haven't made it in this country until you're making the rounds of the Internet in the altogether.
And then there's Michael Moore with his documentary about guns and gun-related deaths in America. He doesn't really answer the question of how if other countries have violent pasts and their kids like the same violent movies, video games and music that ours do, and we're not the only ones with guns (apparently gun ownership is rather high in Canada too), why is it that our country is unequaled in its gun-related deaths? I think his in-your-face style, while successful at getting people's attention in that one documentary and in the one book I read, also undermines his message to some degree. His negativity can be a little overwhelming and when he does propose solutions they are rather facile, so at the end you might say "What the hell, we're fucked, so what's the use anyway?" What is refreshing about Moore is that he is far less partisan than most social critics and he actually has some personal connection to the phenomena he writes about.
To be continued.
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