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Jon Stewart once again put his title as a fake journalist to question this week in his interview with Republican Presidential hopeful John McCain. The good Senator had graced that program several times before, but as of that night he was being groomed as the candidate that would unite conservatives and moderates under one banner for the next election. This gave Stewart and his team of show runners the opportunity to ask the next center of the Republican Party some questions. These were questions they had often seen swept aside at Washington press conferences in their search for a setup for the night’s punch lines. Why is opposition to the war seen as disrespect to the troops? Why is the administration spending so much time trying to downplay an obvious mistake? The style of the interview was particularly harsh. Stewart interrupted McCain as he repeated the platitudes of his superiors. Voices were raised, arms were waved, and a mock kung fu fight almost started.

Impressed was the wrong word for what I felt after that interview. Stewart had suddenly adopted some of the interview techniques of his political adversaries at Fox News, something his associate Stephen Colbert lampoons as “nailing”. The Daily Show had often taken journalists to task for the way they asked unfair questions to get the sound-bite they needed to squeeze out those few extra ratings points. Did they go back on their principles to get the Republican Party “right where they want them”?

Stewart went after McCain like a junk yard dog. It may have made people uncomfortable, but I’m afraid it was necessary. The United States is at the point where it is facing a war without end, and personal freedom is now held up to utmost scrutiny. US citizens can now be imprisoned indefinitely with a Presidential order. Progressive elements in that country are now retracing their steps to find out how affairs of the state got to this point.

Too much attention may have been given to how the use of media needs to be “fair”. The problem with the Fox News Network has not been its ironic use of the term “Fair and Balanced”, but the fact that it works. The people who vote for George W. Bush and who may be voting for John McCain in 2008 are using that rhetoric to call others to action under that viewpoint. Progressives abhor the use of propaganda because of the way the Nazis used it before WWII. Lest we forget that the Allies also used propaganda, employing the greatest entertainers in the free world, like Mel Blanc, Dr. Seuss, Lucille Ball, and Chuck Jones. The world may be changed for the better by debate and fair play, but at some point, 2+2=4, carbon emissions need to go down and not up, there are terrorists in our midst and no amount of foreign wars will diminish their resolve.

I guess you could say I’ve been on the internet a little bit longer than most. Social networking and user-generated content may be the words of the day, but I’ve seen a lot of these sites come and go. There’s collegeclub.com, classmates.com, Hic5, and others. Out of all of them, I can say that facebook has been the most effective. I have been meeting people that I haven’t seen in over 10 years, and I was pretty sure some of those people wouldn’t even touch a computer for this kind of thing. It’s an odd kind of reunion, with all of the snooping and preening of a real reunion without the abject embarrassment of trying to remember a person’s name.

Facebook’s reputation as a colossal waste of time is also well warranted. There is this compulsion to add every person you have ever associated to your friends list so that you can indulge in every little detail they want to share with on the internet. This led to an epiphany. Supermarket tabloids aren’t addictive because we like to see the mighty Hollywood celebrities falter in their moral turpitude. Humans are gregarious creatures, so we crave the company of others. Unlike emotional transaction of gossiping with our real friends, the gossip rags offer us intimate communication for a measly 5 bucks. Facebook offers the same type of communication, only now it involves our own friends, and the communication is (mostly) consensual.

One of the neater features on facebook is that it allows you to control the amount of information that people see when they search for your profile. This is useful when you want to control the flow of information to potential employers and random internet stalkers. So in order to see a profile of some people, you have to add them to your friends list first. This leads me to a bit of a dilemma when I’m seeking out old classmates. You see, I often have trouble gauging other people’s perception of me. I don’t know if people remember me as a complex, athletic, and artistic individual, or just a very large psychotic creep. I was very shy throughout highschool and university, so you could suppose I was afraid to find out what people thought of me. I know now that people found it really annoying when I put my hand up in class every five seconds to give an answer and ask a question. With
some people my only transgression may be that I didn’t know them well enough. Knowing your own perception gets harder when you become an adult, because no one wants to be the bad guy and break it to you that you piss them off. Clicking that “add to friends” button suddenly turns into a definite social risk.

Then again, if I had a machine that could put me in contact with everyone I have ever known, shouldn’t I use it specifically to talk to the people I didn’t get along with? Shouldn’t I take this opportunity to forgive and be forgiven for past mistakes? If someone has a gripe against me, it should be my duty to address those concerns.

So I’m going to take a new policy with facebook: friend everyone. Abbotsford Senior Class of ‘97? Friended. BCIT GIS program ‘07? Friended. I welcome anyone to friend me as well. If you like the blog posts, feel free to friend me. If I haven’t gotten around to friending you, go ahead and friend me. Even if we have no contact other than facebook, friend me. Even if I don’t know you, it’ll be a pleasure to get to know you.

I’m sure that every reader has a book that they hate. It wasn’t that it was just a boring read, or that the plot was too contrived or characters too shallow. It might not be anything qualitative at all. Every book inhabits a moral universe that dictates the events of the story. Sometimes that morality gets under your skin on such a level that it’s almost as if you had made a personal enemy. “Bridge to Terabithia” is one such book for me. Yes, the Newberry award winning, critically acclaimed novel is the antithesis of the novels of beauty and truth that give clarity to life.

I read it for a grade 5 novel study. It’s about a poor Virginia farm-boy named Jess who has this habit of getting his ass kicked on a daily basis at school. He meets Leslie, a girl from an affluent liberal family. They create this imaginary world of Terabithia in a small wood where they can escape the pressures of unpopularity. Their relationship is not without a little tension. Jess’ little sister May belle even mentions that God is going to damn Leslie to hell for believing the bible is fictional. Fortunately for Leslie, she gets to find out about all that when she cracks her head on a rock and drowns in the creek that runs through Terabithia. The book ends with Jess finding “the strength to carry on” as lets his sister into Terabithia and crowns her queen in Leslie’s place.

I asked then, as I do now: What the Hell?

Okay, so not only does our hero not get the girl, she dies by accident and now he has to share his future make-out spot with his little sister. Now, I love my sister, but making her queen of my imaginary kingdom strikes me as a little… creepy.

With the accidental death, there is no moral culpability. I know in 20th century first world countries, kids die pretty creative deaths, if at all. Cancer, bee stings, exploding pajamas, that kind of thing. The tragedy in the book is actually based on a real childhood incident involving the author’s husband. Now, if I’m a 5th grader trying to develop my love for reading, I don’t want to read about how messed up your life is, and if I’m grieving about my best friend’s real death, I’m sure as hell not going to embark on some incestuous mythology to try and deal with it! Does he make more friends after this? No! All he does is retreat into that imaginary world just as insular and introverted as before. This isn’t tragedy, it’s snuff!

It’s not even the death of a main character that bothered me. It appears that in “Bridge to Terabithia”, no one responsible for their actions. From the bullies to the rock in the creek, everything in this book just sort of happens to the characters, with no one taking any action in the real world.

Furthermore, the best books, the best stories are made of people who have to make hard choices. Letting Leslie go wasn’t hard choice. What was he going to do? They cremated her!

What about the Powerful message? That kids have no control over their lives? That as soon as we hit personal tragedy we give up on the honorable struggle of sibling rivalry? Kids need to read books that reveal the possibility of life. If we’re stopped by grim reality we should demonstrate how as beings of free will, we always have the possibility of deciding our fate.

I found myself in Langley on Saturday, and I decided to catch 300 at the local IMAX. I could see at once why it had earned 70 million on the opening weekend. It was the ultimate swan song for cool dudes saying cool stuff, fighting cool battles, and dying in really cool ways. For the background, 300 refers to the 300 soldiers led by the Spartan King Leonidas who defended Greece against the full might of the Persian empire at the Battle of Thermopylae. The film itself lends to my theory (stop me if you know who came up with it first) that successful art is equal parts titillation and equal parts innovation. It’s full of platitudes on heroism, courage and masculinity, but care and attention to detail is evident in every shot in the movie. Most of it was shot on a soundstage in Montreal and special software was used to give many of its scenes an illustrative quality, like the graphic novel it was based on.

I thought the most refreshing aspect of 300 was that given all of the stylization and simulacra used in its production, no one could possibly accuse it of trying to be historically accurate. Alas, according to many reviews, this was not the case. People have accused it for being a polemic for the Iraq war, that King Leonidas was George Bush trying to hold the terrorists in Iraq. Iran has even made a complaint to UNESCO on the basis that the film-makers made Xerxes look like Mr. Clean in drag. This is despite the fact that the Battle of Thermopylae has more in common with the Battle of Britain than Bush’s campaign of vanity, and the Spartans themselves wouldn’t be out of place in a gay pride parade.

It saddens me that in out post-modern society, nothing is taken within its own context anymore. 300 is not about Persian homosexuality, the Iraq war, or any of the pet issues of today. It is about the heroism of the Spartans, written about by Herodotus, which inspired the 1962 movie “300 Spartans”, which inspired Frank Miller to draw the graphic novel “300” that the 2007 movie is based on. The Persians depicted in the film were not even real. They were based on the testimony of the only soldier to return from King Leonidas’ expedition. As Director Zack Snyder described the character as a guy who knows how not to wreck a good story with truth”. It’s a problem I find with many drawn-out historical epics on film. As they refuse to take a side in the debate of history and take on a documentary stance, the elements of the story that inspire human emotion are lost. A complete picture of history is made of many first and second-hand accounts, and if discount one because your country looks bad, you might as well discount them all.