Due to too little time, I didn't write about the wonderful news that Inconvenient Al Gore's documentary won 2 Oscars. This is so satisfying. Congratulations, Al! I will always love you. But the media fell silent when this happened including much of the big 'liberal' blogs.
The Environmental News Wire carried this important story:
(ENS) - Former Vice President Al Gore won the Oscar for Best Documentary for his climate change warning film "An Inconvenient Truth," last night at the 79th Annual Academy Awards, highlighting a night devoted to environmental awareness.In fact, the award went to director Davis Guggenheim and producers Lawrence Bender, Laurie David and Scott Burns, but it was really Gore who was being recognized for focusing international attention on the issue of global warming and he joined the winners on stage for the acceptance.
"I made this movie for my children," Guggenheim said in his acceptance speech. "We all did. And we did so because we were moved to act by this man... all of us were inspired by his fight for 30 years to tell his truth to all of us."
Al Gore's daughter makes cartoons that are the funniest things on earth. Go, Bender!
Environmental news services online celebrated this news. So did a communist-based news service in China. But when I googled for this story, there were virtually NO media I could link to because this incredible victory and honor for Al Gore was 'disappeared'. I went to the biggest of the big American newspapers, the New York Times which claims to print the news that fits and they saw fit to mention this news in the fifth paragraph of a very thin article that simply listed the Oscar victories. One sentence.
The odious Rich who was a movie critic before being elevated to 'pundit' status said nothing. He has a lot of Al Gore's blood on his dirty hands. Because he criticizes Bush, a lot of people link to him or talk excitedly about him but the Daily Howler keeps close tabs on the endless stream of abuse and lies the mainstream media floods into our political and cultural landscape.
Just for example, here is a Nov. 25, 2002 article by the incomparable Daily Howler:
THAT’S RICH: Normal people have a word for it: Lying. We refer to Frank Rich’s inexcusable column in Saturday’s New York Times. Rich—the self-admiring incompetent who, along with Maureen Dowd, ginned up that fateful Love Story nonsense—doesn’t believe you should vote for Al Gore. But instead of trying to argue his case, he quickly started spinning you blue:RICH: The [Gores’] books celebrate The Family, the one cause every Democrat feels compelled to embrace after Monicagate. The reviews for the author are thumbs up… Rich—who, incredibly, can’t stop talking about Monica Lewinsky!—implies that Gore is “embracing” the family due to Lewinsky concerns. But of course, the Gores have staged a Nashville “Family Reunion”—a forum on issues facing the family—every year since the early 90s (see below). Like all pundits, Rich knows this fact; he simply doesn’t want you to know it. So he dumps the fact from his piece. Prepare yourself for a dark, mordant chuckle: In this baldly dissembling way, Rich warns you about Al Gore’s character!
I expected the left blogsphere to celebrate wildly when the Academy Awards honored Al Gore. I remember when Farenheit 9/11 was given an award: the TV station run by total right wingers, ABC, had its crew boo very loudly into microphones! None of the mainstream press pointed this out, of course. Instead, they deep-sixed this embarrassment and ditto, the filmmaker himself. Michael Moore is seldom in the news these days. Like Al Gore.
I'm not really blaming the left side of the sphere for dropping the ball, they are trapped in the same matrix they complain about so bitterly. But instead of merely reacting to whatever the right spews forth, we have an obligation to talk about the good news that concerns us and indeed, I, myself, am just as trapped as everyone else in this stupid molasses news cycle.
The main tool I use to avoid this is to read mostly foreign news. It is also an eye-opener because it holds up a dim mirror to ourselves. But the main thing is, the rotting corpse of a demented, corrupt, pill-popping gold digger has been top news for weeks with everyone running every possible fragment of a storyline to milk this rancid cow of a story and at the same time, a man who should have been President of the USA because he won the popular vote, is ignored when, for the very first time, someone of his political stature has won an Oscar!
Well, after throwing every possible bric-brack at Jimmy Carter for telling the harsh truth about Israel is doesn't surprise me to see Al Gore being ignored because he is warning us about our own actions destroying our own planet. What next? Warnings about World War III?
Back to the bad news, everyone!
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"Due to too little time, I didn't write about the wonderful news that Inconvenient Al Gore's documentary won 2 Oscars."
Did he win for Best Song-and-Dance by a Former VP?
Posted by: JSmith | February 27, 2007 at 09:36 AM
Just over twenty years ago, I worked for one of the top ten Japanese trading companies, fixing and adjusting the then very new satellite TV receivers that they shipped here. Many of the Japanese thought they were different than us, better than us, in fact. So there was this odd tension. These Japanese had never worked for a USan company, so they had no way of knowing that they were pretty much the same.
Now, my immediate supervisor was a very interesting man from Kobe, Japan (a port city of about 1.5 million, which had a bad earthquake in 1995, but is now repaired). He was a nice fellow with a great sense of humor, and very humble. He once told me he was shocked at how hard the Americans worked (this was not known to the Japanese). I was very involved with taoism, so I probably picked up a few things the other Americans overlooked. (Technically, my boss did not work for the giant top-ten company (which very few Americans have ever even heard of!), but for a much smaller company that manufactured the actual products.)
The BIG BOSS of the facility where I worked was Japanese man from the giant trading company ('Mother Ship'), and he was to be treated like G-D. But I knew, for all his majesty, he was not a heavy hitter, in fact a rather light hitter, in fact incompetent. I got out of that job somehow or other, and when you leave a job at a giant Japanese trading company, you are expect to just die promptly. Like the Mafia, or IBM.
Years later I meet up with the only American who had held a somewhat high position there in a drug store in another town. Apparently things were not going at all well with the giant company's satellite receiver business. Seems that Mr G-D had decided to screw the little manufacturer (who my engineer-former-boss really worked for) by selling receivers from a competing manufacturer. But they had to retain my former boss in his engineering position. Now these satellite receivers had to work in conjunction with 'downconverter' modules. So when the humongous barge-load of these units comes in, what happens? For very complicated electronic reasons, the receivers and the downconverters cannot function together at all! It's all useless! (Apparently, Mr G-D had forgotten that my former boss was really still working for the original manufacturer...)
So, I don't like working with people who don't know what they are doing. You need heavy hitters running things, and if you don't have them, you are screwed. Some people have an instinct for failure, and they tend to become bosses! This can happen to political blogs. Most of them are run by somewhat competent people, but most do not have real heavy hitters. They constantly kick me around. And they are constantly having to back up and do things the way I got kicked around for showing them. I kept telling the ENTERTAIN THE TROOPS!!! They finally understood this. In the '60s and early '70s, the actual Beach Boys would throw concerts in the middle of demonstrations, and this was considered a significant enhancement. But the 'Big Blogs' (supposedly) still have this inability to respond well to obvious victories. Sometimes going to the 'Big Blogs' (supposedly) is like going out for fast food. You can only get so far if you lack heavy hitters. I would trade 1000 Markoses for one Alex Jones.
Posted by: blues | February 27, 2007 at 12:13 PM
Five paragraphs of snivel? Why, man? Why?
"They constantly kick me around."
Poor Bluesie. There, there.
Posted by: JSmith | February 27, 2007 at 12:47 PM
I double-dog dare you to go there and offer up your sweet pearls of wisdom, JSmith!
Posted by: blues | February 27, 2007 at 03:22 PM
I love Bender and Al Gore.
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | February 27, 2007 at 09:12 PM
"I double-dog dare you to go there and offer up your sweet pearls of wisdom, JSmith!
There? Where, there?
Posted by: JSmith | February 28, 2007 at 11:56 AM
I would give you a clue, but they would only torture you. They are not the master strategists they would like to be, but they are often kind of rough and mean. It would not be very pleasant.
Posted by: blues | February 28, 2007 at 05:48 PM
And I thought you'd dominated the entire internet with your superior wit & wisdom.
That's OK, though - if you're talking about political blogs, those people don't interest me much. They're too single- (and simple-) minded.
Posted by: JSmith | March 01, 2007 at 02:56 PM