BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE —
    — MUST SEE MOVIE
Last Tuesday the Film-club in San Jose had a preview, followed by a panel discussion, of Michael Moore's latest flick; "Bowling for Columbine."
This documentary is not just a brilliant piece of work, but also quite
entertaining (at times hilarious!) — a must-see movie —
also for us "we-already-know-it-all" foreigners.
In an interview with Moore, he said that he started out wanting to
make the typical liberal argument that "if we only had fewer guns, we
would have less violence."  However, while making the movie he
soon found that Canada, a nation with roughly the same number of
firearms, had only 165 gun murders a year, compared with 11,000 in the
Untied States.  He explains the difference by presenting an
America built on fear, fear, and fear — something which is also
consistently feed to the people by the mass media, whether it's killer
bees, mould in the walls, or dark-skinned neighbors; it's all built
on fear. 
The movie also shows how gunmakers have been able to accommodate this fear with the appropriate revolver or semiautomatic — while the Canadians are lax enough to even leave their doors unlocked.
Moore said that the canadians have fewer insecurities because their social system provides a safety net: "They have a lot of guns, drink a lot, and have more social problems in some regard, like higher unemployment", he said, "But there's no state-sponsored violence, no beating up on poor people — America, by contrast, keeps growing more hostile toward its poor."
Of course, now our fear mechanism is no longer focused on earthquakes, the Y2K bug, or Antrax'ed mail, but instead the fear of getting killed by a sniper and by a foreign guy in mustache.  In any case; go see this film — which opens (I think) tomorrow.
Peer Landa
Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics
|