Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Boycotting the war – how to not talk about it

"I have been going around trying to film for this video blog for five days now and it has been a constant struggle. People do not want to talk..."

justzipit.blogspot.com


This hardly is surprising. Nobody wants to talk about anything unless there is something to be gained from it that does not include immediate death. I counted blogs for about three years and nobody in Iraq really wanted to talk. Well, maybe one or two.

Facts and figures to prove this mute point.

This time last year there were over 60 million blogs in the blogsphere and 151 of them were "Iraq" blogs. One month later there were 70 million blogs in the blogsphere. Virtual-Iraq today has 203 blogs. The rest of the blogsphere grows by at least 10million blogs per month and "Iraq" blogs grow by about 4 per month. Hullo-oh.

Anyway. I suppose you could always do with your filim what everybody else does – just make it up. Doesn’t stop the Whitehouse or the Pentagon and it doesn’t stop a good deal of diarists either. It certainly doesn’t stop John Howard in Australia. This week he is organising a two faced sided debate about nuclear power. First Howard tells us about how green it will be, and then he weighs up the cons and tells us how green it will be again.

Actually if you ask me, people not wanting to talk is a god send. People are notoriously biased and untruthful when given attention (just look at the blogsphere). In fact if I weren’t busy being silent over here, I would be busy being silent with a camera in Iraq. Probably with a noir fly on the wall approach. Half-empty glasses, long shots of unfocussed figures (silhouetted against crumbling dwellings or loitering near gaunt commercial shells) scavenging animals. Smoking ruins (this century's). That sort of thing. An occasional flap of my all concealing garments obscuring the edges, because it’s not always easy operating a camera in a tent. A silent video, set to the music of distant artillery. After all, the world has hurtled back several decades. In some aspects. Thinking Erich Von Stroheim, Cecil B. De Mille, King Vidor, Chaplin and Harold Lloyd. It was a man’s world then and nothing much has changed.

Evidence of human activity, can be so much more informative then interrogation.

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