AN UNREASONABLE CHOICE
Sam Smith
CHULEENAN SVETVILAS in Alternet provides an unintended insight into one
of the problems of our age. Svetvilas concludes a review of the new
Ralph Nader documentary with this comment: "An Unreasonable Man presents
many opinions through the 40-some interviews and leaves it to us to
decide whether he was a man of principle or a man who fell behind the
times."
There's your choice, folks. Do you try to be relevant or try to be
right? It is not that the conundrum hasn't appeared before. Consider the
successful German businessman during the rise of Hitler or a member of
the Alabama white elite in, say, 1850.
What is interesting, however, is how frank and blase Sevetvillas is
about the choice, with her implicit assumption that being of the times
means being without principles and that there is at least a reasonable
conflict between the two.
This dichotomy is easily observable to any one who tries to do the right
thing these days. Even trying, unless it be in the name of some distant
and politically safe cause in Africa, is often considered unhip and
irrelevant. Behind the times. The media, in particular, reinforces this
notion, dissing anyone who tries to sneak an actual principle into the
news. We have, it would seem, entered a postmodern paradise where the
pursuit of the moral and the decent is not only unnecessary, it has all
the status of a bad 1970s disco band.
History is not so sure about this because it's seen it all before: with
the Romans, 1920s America, 1930s Germany. A culture that considers
itself too clever to have principles is on the verge of a breakdown. It
is, in the end, an unreasonable choice.
MORE FLOTSAM & JETSAM
http://prorev.com/sam.htm
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Sam Smith
CHULEENAN SVETVILAS in Alternet provides an unintended insight into one
of the problems of our age. Svetvilas concludes a review of the new
Ralph Nader documentary with this comment: "An Unreasonable Man presents
many opinions through the 40-some interviews and leaves it to us to
decide whether he was a man of principle or a man who fell behind the
times."
There's your choice, folks. Do you try to be relevant or try to be
right? It is not that the conundrum hasn't appeared before. Consider the
successful German businessman during the rise of Hitler or a member of
the Alabama white elite in, say, 1850.
What is interesting, however, is how frank and blase Sevetvillas is
about the choice, with her implicit assumption that being of the times
means being without principles and that there is at least a reasonable
conflict between the two.
This dichotomy is easily observable to any one who tries to do the right
thing these days. Even trying, unless it be in the name of some distant
and politically safe cause in Africa, is often considered unhip and
irrelevant. Behind the times. The media, in particular, reinforces this
notion, dissing anyone who tries to sneak an actual principle into the
news. We have, it would seem, entered a postmodern paradise where the
pursuit of the moral and the decent is not only unnecessary, it has all
the status of a bad 1970s disco band.
History is not so sure about this because it's seen it all before: with
the Romans, 1920s America, 1930s Germany. A culture that considers
itself too clever to have principles is on the verge of a breakdown. It
is, in the end, an unreasonable choice.
MORE FLOTSAM & JETSAM
http://prorev.com/sam.htm
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