Monday, September 13, 2004
Memo to Spielberg: We're facing a 'War of the Worlds'
We are experiencing a civilization-wide failure, even three years after 9/11, to define the terrorism born of Islam's core medieval precepts: violent jihad and dehumanizing dhimmitude. We see the same kind of terrorism in Russia that we see in Israel, Sudan and Iraq. We've seen it in Spain and we've seen in it Bali, and we've certainly seen it in the United States. We see it, but maybe we don't believe it — a failure that could ultimately be our undoing. Too many of us prefer to overlook the evils of World War IV and watch "Chevalier" Spielberg get a kiss on both cheeks from Jacques Chirac for dramatizing the evils of World War II.
"In this difficult time," Chirac told his new Hollywood knight, "it is essential that cinema" blah, blah "recalls the horror of what is unutterable." Unutterable is right. But no "cinema" — not by Spielberg, not by anyone — is recalling anything, utterable or not, about the colossal struggle of our age. There is no cultural echo chamber in which this conflict finds resonance. Indeed, Spielberg's next picture is a remake of H.G. Wells' 1898 Martian-invasion story "The War of the Worlds." This is a far cry from the scores of movies Hollywood made to depict World War II, including "Mrs. Miniver," "The Mortal Storm," and "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo." These days, Hollywood just hates President Bush and sticks a sock on its lens...
Well, good for Chirac. They've got a big problem in France now, and I suppose this is one way they're trying to do something about it, weak though it may be.
But on another level, there are few better examples of the world's (and particularly Europe's and Hollywood's) ability to wring its hands and cry rivers over dead Jews while condemning and pointing fingers at the live ones. The Holocaust is over. The victims dead and buried or incinerated. It's easy to wring hands over deceased nations we no longer need fear we will be forced to actually do anything to help. Talk is cheap, and this is the ultimate cheap talk. The leaders who sent the boys to die in foreign wars are dead and gone, as are the boys they sent - buried in graves so many decades old the grass over them may as well never have been disturbed for all one can tell now. Is anyone really in there?
There's no argument over what to do now, it's been had. So it's easy to make the movies, furrow our brows and make pronouncements - but what of the living? I speak not just of the Jews and Israel, but of all of us. We're all Jews now. All of us. The people in Darfur for whom the world shrinks from labeling what is happening a "genocide" for fear they may actually have to do something more than wag a finger, as well as those live Jews in Israel today facing a murderous onslaught of hate unseen since the '30's. Recognizing the evil of the Holocaust as it was is all well and good, but what of a recognition of the evil we all face today? Is it more important to climb in the sack with Arafat, Assad and Rafsanjani? Is it perhaps more tempting to take the opportunity to balance the the old European accounts by wagging a finger at the Jews of today and amplifying every perceived wrong so that European guilt over the events of the past may somehow be mollified? Is the Hollywood elite so tentative because they fear if they actually recognize the evil as it is, they may have to face the fact that politicians of the "wrong" political party may actually be right?
I'm tired of self-flagellation over past events, and somnambulant politicians and artists slapping each other on the back and congratulating themselves for every new gyration and twist that helps them avoid facing today's reality. Show me the past lessons learned, and how you're going to apply those lessons to we the living.
That will be worth a medal.
