Red State Reviewed
Michael Shea made (and sent to many bloggers) a documentary called Red State, about his journey through America's heartland, the south, even up to Washington DC, to talk with and listen to people with political views different from his own. It was a pretty brave thing to do, as Michael chooses to make the film as much "all about him" (even to the point of showing how he feels he needs to change his appearance, so we get the whole shave-and-a-haircut montage, to even approach the red states) as about the people he meets, and shows himself as a fairly ineloquent interviewer so the conversations he has (both with the red state residents and his in-between musings to his camera operator Steve Canas) are awkward at best.
Robin and I found the pacing of the documentary maddeningly uneven. Canas gets some absolutely beautiful footage in, which really makes you appreciate the scope and depth of this country. If this is one of Shea's goals, mission more than accomplished. Dang, the USA is big and beautiful. But the film intersperses these languid picturesque panoramas with interviews of uneven length, then Shea detours into long and (to my mind) unnecessary coverage of Justice Sunday, which may illustrate a point about the religious leanings of many red staters but in no way constitutes speaking with them directly.
Throughout the film Shea does a good job of confessing his own inadequacy at dealing with the ideas his interview subjects present, his lack of open-mindedness, his inability to stop putting words in their mouths that they never uttered, and his constant bewilderment at the themes parroted over and over from Rovian rhetoric, all the code words about "family values" and "culture of life" that are never really defined or even, in the footage presented, questioned very much. The one time he asks someone to define "family values" he gets no answer at all, just more spin about how, since the '60s and '70s, people have come along to redefine things. One woman goes into a dizzying soliloquy comparing modern politics to the show Leave It to Beaver, the analogy becoming more and more torturous as perhaps somewhere within her she realizes she's making things up as she goes along and, indeed, is using as her basis of comparison a TV show that most Americans ought to acknowledge as fictional. The entire idea of family values is based on something that not only isn't traditional but never really existed except in fiction.
None of the people Shea interviews are stupid, but most have chosen beliefs which keep them blissfully ignorant. Not only do these beliefs help them dismiss historical and current reality (the CWA rep - to whom he lied when he told her their interview was over but they kept talking and being recorded which wasn't cool at all - insisting repeatedly that what she doesn't believe in, such as gay marriage or the well-documented horrors of pre-Rov v. Wade back-alley abortions, simply "doesn't exist") but the portions of the Bible that they and their pastors cherry-pick and harp upon constantly allow them to ignore any further learning that contradicts or challenges this doctrine, which more often than not isn't actual Christian belief (love thy neighbor, minister to the poor) but a perversion thereof (God says war is okay, God hates gay marriage).
And it all stems from fear, the Old Testament God (as opposed to love being the New Testament God - the God they supposedly favor over the OT one!). Their leaders have indoctrinated them into believing that their rights are being systematically taken from them, and pervert and cherry-pick examples of this as easily as they do Biblical passages. The rights they cite as being lost come down to "the right to have our religion dominate public life" and "the right to discriminate against whomever we want and be free from them discriminating against us." In other words, the right to be dominant over other human beings, also made in God's image. And this fear has ruled them for at least a generation before Rove even picked up on and magnified it. When someone's afraid, the fight-or-flight scenario comes into place, and many of these folks are too tired or too busy just surviving to have the energy to fight things they've been taught to believe since childhood, so they take flight even more deeply into a faith-based system which tells them it's okay to switch off their thinking caps, that everything they need to know about life can be found in the Bible, that God will provide. And actual politics, as Shea never quite seems to realize, is not front and center in their lives.
Even Shea admits it would be comforting to be so sure of your own belief system that you need never question it, just accept what your government and manipulative faith-perverting preachers tell you even if it defies logic, because it's easier. But this system, the result of their carefully-cultivated fear, scares him in return. Now he knows how they feel! And his reaction is to say "they need to be stopped" (what a surprise, the same reaction they have to their preacher- and government-induced fear!), but at the same time he knows he's met some very kind and loving individuals who would never actually personally harm him, so he has no idea where to go from here. Pretty much like the Democrats.
I don't know the solution either, but I know it needs to start with education, with repeating the message (as often as conservative preachers do against the Democrats) how the current crop of Republicans in power stand for perversion and corruption of lives, for killing and torture, how the founding fathers explicitly stated the US was not founded as a Christian nation and their reasons for this pluralism being grounded in the fear of one religion dominating others which caused the first settlers to flee Europe in the first place... anything that appeals to people's common sense and can take the place of the false gods presented by the Rovians.
And despite Shea's reluctance, we can't stop talking to them, and giving them examples of how we care about them and how the people they keep voting for do not. Which will take people far more possessed of a quick and easy tongue than Shea.
Michael Shea made (and sent to many bloggers) a documentary called Red State, about his journey through America's heartland, the south, even up to Washington DC, to talk with and listen to people with political views different from his own. It was a pretty brave thing to do, as Michael chooses to make the film as much "all about him" (even to the point of showing how he feels he needs to change his appearance, so we get the whole shave-and-a-haircut montage, to even approach the red states) as about the people he meets, and shows himself as a fairly ineloquent interviewer so the conversations he has (both with the red state residents and his in-between musings to his camera operator Steve Canas) are awkward at best.
Robin and I found the pacing of the documentary maddeningly uneven. Canas gets some absolutely beautiful footage in, which really makes you appreciate the scope and depth of this country. If this is one of Shea's goals, mission more than accomplished. Dang, the USA is big and beautiful. But the film intersperses these languid picturesque panoramas with interviews of uneven length, then Shea detours into long and (to my mind) unnecessary coverage of Justice Sunday, which may illustrate a point about the religious leanings of many red staters but in no way constitutes speaking with them directly.
Throughout the film Shea does a good job of confessing his own inadequacy at dealing with the ideas his interview subjects present, his lack of open-mindedness, his inability to stop putting words in their mouths that they never uttered, and his constant bewilderment at the themes parroted over and over from Rovian rhetoric, all the code words about "family values" and "culture of life" that are never really defined or even, in the footage presented, questioned very much. The one time he asks someone to define "family values" he gets no answer at all, just more spin about how, since the '60s and '70s, people have come along to redefine things. One woman goes into a dizzying soliloquy comparing modern politics to the show Leave It to Beaver, the analogy becoming more and more torturous as perhaps somewhere within her she realizes she's making things up as she goes along and, indeed, is using as her basis of comparison a TV show that most Americans ought to acknowledge as fictional. The entire idea of family values is based on something that not only isn't traditional but never really existed except in fiction.
None of the people Shea interviews are stupid, but most have chosen beliefs which keep them blissfully ignorant. Not only do these beliefs help them dismiss historical and current reality (the CWA rep - to whom he lied when he told her their interview was over but they kept talking and being recorded which wasn't cool at all - insisting repeatedly that what she doesn't believe in, such as gay marriage or the well-documented horrors of pre-Rov v. Wade back-alley abortions, simply "doesn't exist") but the portions of the Bible that they and their pastors cherry-pick and harp upon constantly allow them to ignore any further learning that contradicts or challenges this doctrine, which more often than not isn't actual Christian belief (love thy neighbor, minister to the poor) but a perversion thereof (God says war is okay, God hates gay marriage).
And it all stems from fear, the Old Testament God (as opposed to love being the New Testament God - the God they supposedly favor over the OT one!). Their leaders have indoctrinated them into believing that their rights are being systematically taken from them, and pervert and cherry-pick examples of this as easily as they do Biblical passages. The rights they cite as being lost come down to "the right to have our religion dominate public life" and "the right to discriminate against whomever we want and be free from them discriminating against us." In other words, the right to be dominant over other human beings, also made in God's image. And this fear has ruled them for at least a generation before Rove even picked up on and magnified it. When someone's afraid, the fight-or-flight scenario comes into place, and many of these folks are too tired or too busy just surviving to have the energy to fight things they've been taught to believe since childhood, so they take flight even more deeply into a faith-based system which tells them it's okay to switch off their thinking caps, that everything they need to know about life can be found in the Bible, that God will provide. And actual politics, as Shea never quite seems to realize, is not front and center in their lives.
Even Shea admits it would be comforting to be so sure of your own belief system that you need never question it, just accept what your government and manipulative faith-perverting preachers tell you even if it defies logic, because it's easier. But this system, the result of their carefully-cultivated fear, scares him in return. Now he knows how they feel! And his reaction is to say "they need to be stopped" (what a surprise, the same reaction they have to their preacher- and government-induced fear!), but at the same time he knows he's met some very kind and loving individuals who would never actually personally harm him, so he has no idea where to go from here. Pretty much like the Democrats.
I don't know the solution either, but I know it needs to start with education, with repeating the message (as often as conservative preachers do against the Democrats) how the current crop of Republicans in power stand for perversion and corruption of lives, for killing and torture, how the founding fathers explicitly stated the US was not founded as a Christian nation and their reasons for this pluralism being grounded in the fear of one religion dominating others which caused the first settlers to flee Europe in the first place... anything that appeals to people's common sense and can take the place of the false gods presented by the Rovians.
And despite Shea's reluctance, we can't stop talking to them, and giving them examples of how we care about them and how the people they keep voting for do not. Which will take people far more possessed of a quick and easy tongue than Shea.
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