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Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Thought of the day
All of Tom's movie talk lately has reminded me of one of my favorite films, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. I recommend the snazzy three-disc Criterion Collection version of this film.
I was thinking of how the film portrays an Orwellian government. As a departure from other films and novels inspired by 1984, here the government is hopelessly incompetent. There is no privacy for the people in Brazil and hordes of SWAT Team-like agents can storm into a person’s house when his family is about celebrate Christmas. This is the first scene of the film. What makes it compelling though is that the SWAT Team barges in on the wrong guy. A fly got in one of the computers so the agents capture a Buttle and not a Tuttle like they should. In the same scene government hired repairmen try to fix a hole the agents left in the Buttle's ceiling, only to find that their measurements were off because some people went back to the metric system without telling others.
Brazil is a film worth seeing now because it depicts the type of government we in the U.S.A. live under. The Bush administration sees civil liberties as something to work around as they see what you're checking out of the library. That is, if they didn’t already wiretap you're cell phone. The administration have all these underhanded ways of getting information but once they have it they don't seem to do anything useful with it, not even towards successfully fulfilling their own goals.
When confronted with information, received the old-fashioned way, like "Bin Laden determined to strike within the U.S." or the problems with levees protecting against Hurricane Katrina they don't exactly jump into action. The Bush administration is a strange mix of corruption and incompetence when it comes to respecting American citizen's civil liberties and protecting the American people from harm. Perhaps the two most important responsibilities a government can have and they have a "play it by ear" approach.
I wonder if this is worse or better than a focused, sinister government that has full surveillance over its people and can carry out all their plans with precision. Right now I think that the situation we have now is worse because the blunderings of this administration are made that much scarier when you realize how much power they have over you. What's to say they can't capture a suspected terrorist or close down a charity only to find out later they mixed up a "T" with a "B," but by then it's too late?
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