Chris Dahmen's Blog 11
As film replaces education in the classroom, it is important to keep in mind film ideology must be taken seriously. Guy Debord explains “The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears.’ The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of acceptance.� Cinematic ideology cannot and should not pass for lived or actual history under any circumstances because it is so unequivocally one-sided. A person who watches a film about history and who believes they know exactly how it was is making a terrible mistake. “Talk to Me� actually reminds me of “Birth of a Nation� by D.W. Griffith in the 1910’s. It was labeled an openly racist film by PC multicultural gospel pushers but it tries to pass itself off as historically accurate. All this is fine and good, but without a debate, spectators will be inclined to believe what they see on screen without critical thinking. Even if they know they are watching something fictional, the first thought that enters their mind when thinking about the history will be the image they saw in the movie. The movie undoubtedly glosses over a lot of ideas from a black perspective as well as other races like whites of the time. But again, all films do that. So with “Talk to Me� it should be clear from the film what exactly the ideology is. White people are evil and are responsible for all the evil in the world and blacks are one-hundred percent victims no matter what and have no choice except to bash whites and take what they want. Does that really sound accurate for educational purposes? Does that really sound well rounded or balanced? One sided?
It is worth mentioning that I am a white man and I am not accountable for killing Martin Luther King. I am also not accountable for colonialism. I’m not the one “that pulled the trigger� as Petey Green was so apt to point out. But yet there is still the race difference. I can always be blamed for countless injustices from PC multicultural gospel preachers and militant feminists regardless if I’ve even heard of them right? If that sounds like it is not very well thought out and rather absurd that’s because it is.
Diversity is not as idealistic as most Americans desperately want to believe. Patrick Buchanan in his latest book cites Robert Putnam “one of the world’s most influential political scientists. His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone-from their next-door neighbor to the mayor. ‘In the presence of diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.’ Prof. Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, ‘the most diverse human habitation in human history.’� And we may not survive this century and Europe even more so with our existing and continuing diversity as Seymour Lipset points out “The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension, and tragedy.�
In this new century of ours attempts to shame us for our culture and history and identity by minorities and non-western people must be deftly ignored. If blacks and other minorities are not going to respect our PC multicultural standard why should whites? Why shouldn’t we also have identity politics too and challenge that which is harmful to us? What is letting others walk all over us but a lack of confidence in ourselves? And for what ideology, to build castles in the sky, who said that is necessary? I have the right to make these claims without being labeled a racist or other cat calls as Rosa Luxemburg points out “Freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently� just for the record.