Dividing: "United 93"

Today's weather in New York was great, and there was some good news coming out of Washington. Still, I've been down most of the day. I hope that I'm wrong, but I fear that the contagion of hate injected into out politcal life by the Lee Atwater/Karl Rove Neo-Republican party has so divided and damaged our country that we will not recover.

My despair today actually began on a good note - I was pleased at the enthusiastic response of liberals, conservatives, and of the families of the dead, to the movie "Flight 93." I started downhill when I realized that only a liberal would make a movie that tried to unite us and that did not politicize what took place on 9/11. Neo-Republicans view every single event through a political power-hungry lens. It's depressing.

We needed the liberal Spielberg, whose "Saving Private Ryan" gave us the most vivid, definitive  portrait of a soldier's bravery during the D-Day invasion in WWII, and it took the liberal Greengrass to give us "Flight 93." London's Times sums Greengrass up as one who "may have gone to Hollywood, but he still wears his politics on his sleeve. A tall, burly and long-haired 48-year-old in John Lennon specs, he's verbose and opinionated. "It's the most calamitous decision of our generation," he says of the Iraq war.'"  His previous work has a decidedly leftist bent. In "The Murder of Stephen Lawrence" he looked at institutional racism in the English Police Department, after the murder of a young black man had been poorly investigated. "Bloody Sunday" is named for, and is based on, the day on which Irish civil rights activists were slaughtered by English soldiers.

"Flight 93" premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, in one of New York's most liberal neighborhoods. It's also a neighborhood quite close to where the World Trade Center once stood, and one that was greatly damaged by 9/11. Sister Toldja led me to the Op-Ed on the Opinion Journal by David Beamer, whose son died on the flight. He wrote of Director Greengrass's going "about the task of telling this story with a genuine intent to get it right... [his] extensive research included all the families who had lost loved ones".. on the flight..."And Paul and his team got it right."

Referring to Greengrass, the far right writer Michael Smerconish wrote of the apparent "universal acceptance of his final product... This is not a movie for only red or blue America,...but for all Americans."

While a liberal will produce something powerfully uplifting and uniting from a terrorist attack, the Republican Mel Gibson takes the life of Christ to give us a divisive, obscene, hate-filled screed on film.

A Republican politician will use 9/11 to insult and divide us. Remember Karl Rove, speaking in New York about a year ago? "Conservatives saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."

I only felt worse as the day progressed and I visited some other right wing sites. The vast majority praised the movie, but there were those who were beginning to get ugly and starting to smear. I never expected a Michelle Malkin to apologize for having used  9/11 to advance her personal and political agenda, while a leftist produced a movie that simply told a truth without spin. But I was unprepared for the innuendo: " Yes, I will go see it. Yes, I support Hollywood finally coming through with a movie that celebrates the heroism of the passengers and crew... But there is a side of [their] marketing "that hasn't been exposed yet or confronted...jihadist rhetoric is being echoed by the official United 93 discussion site run by Universal Studios." She links to the site Libertas who talks of "censorship from liberals because the cultural left wants to de-couple the emotionally shocking events of 9/11 with the ongoing War on Terror...  The thought police have won on this one." (Read some of the comments here if you are missing your daily dose of hate.)

Once again Greengrass does the right thing. He did confess to his crime: "I didn't want ...to divide the audience." A united, United States, is something the Right will not allow.

Comments

[Rick]

So when you say "only a liberal would make a movie that tried to unite us and that did not politicize what took place on 9/11", you are talking about Michael Moore and Farenheit 911? Interesting! I see that. I guess.

[bbbustard]

Rick, as always your logic is impeccable. Because I argue that no right winger would ever make a fair film on this topic, is not the same as saying that all films made by those on the left are fair.
By the way, although I thought some small parts of Farenheit were off, the movie was great - 90% of the movie was emormously accurate and informative. Did you see it?