A Politically incorrect (somewhat incoherent) rant

[goldvermilion87]

So, I am going to be politically incorrect.  Don't like, don't read.  :-)

I strongly object to Disney's Pocahontas as nonsensical historical revisionism.  (It's also boring--and I love Disney in general--but that is a different matter altogether.)  I mean, there is not much to say on that score.  It's just pretty way off historically. 

Now that, you may say, is not a rant.  Just wait!

I was listening to my Disney's greatest hits CD  (You are allowed to like opera and Disney, thank you very much)  and something about "Just around the riverbend" struck me for the first time.  The first line is "What I like most about rivers is you can't step in the same river twice."

POP QUIZ

Question:  Who said "you cannot step into the same river twice"?

Answer:  Heraclitus of Ephesus, 500ish BC

Now, this annoys me very much.  It mildly annoyed me when I first noticed, because the film is anti-Western and all about how the stupid British came in and killed the pristine native American culture with their greedy ways, and the philosophy beginning the song was imported from Western philosophy.  And then I started to think about it more.   

I don't have a problem with criticizing the early settlers.  Not at all.  I do think there were atrocities committed.  Note that they were committed on both sides, and I get mad when I read things justifying King Philip's war, and laying all the blame there on the side of the colonists.  (and I did read that once...can't remember where...but it made us VERY displeased, precious.)  I would also criticize the West because we knew better (and I'm sure that makes me paternalistic, but I'll deal).  But this is the thing: we criticize ourselves NOW because in some ways practice has caught up to the philosophy/religion in the west, and we have decided that we should not have killed people for our lands, and that we should not have enslaved people.  That is, it is Western philosphy that creates the guilt for what we did.  (It's also Western culture that gives us "the noble savage" which is the central trope of Disney's Pocahontas, btw)

So what is this rambling rant against--it's against using our Western heritage to create a ridiculously unhistorical propagandistic children's film that completely pans the west.

And really, why would we do that?  I tend to think that we made mistakes--big mistakes--and now we see them.  But history has happened.  We need to learn from history, not ditch an over-idealized view of our past only to set up an over-idealized view of those we wronged in the past.  That isn't useful at all. 

Anyway, I guess I didn't really go anywhere special.  But I was thinking about it, and figured it could raise interesting discussion.  

Hey, at least I didn't go off on my The Night at the Museum is evil rant.  You should be glad. 

And to end this on a cheerful note, the next song on my Disney CD is "The Circle of Life," which reminds me of THIS:

 

*snrk*

Comments

[labourslamp.livejournal.com]

Three words that will make you feel better, my friend:

Twain

on

Cooper.

(Bonus word: YANA)

[goldvermilion87.livejournal.com]

YES

JUST THINKING ABOUT THOSE THREE WORDS MAKE ME FEEL A LOT BETTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[labourslamp.livejournal.com]

Wow.

Do you need any more exclamation points? I haven't used half my quota for the day. Here you go:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[goldvermilion87.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I can always use more exclamation points, as I do have a tendency to overuse them in times of excitement.

AND WHEN I THINK ABOUT MARK TWAIN DESCRIBING THE INDIANS JUMPING OFF THE TREE AND MISSING THE HOUSE BOAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(I would have you know that I copied and pasted the ones you gave me, because I really am that dorky. :-P )

[capt-facepalm.livejournal.com]

And now we come to the "Burn her! She's a witch!" portion of the discussion, where I throw in my two cents worth:

History is the events of the past as seen, or better yet, interpreted, by subsequent researchers (they call themselves historians). The biggest flaw in the study of history is to cherry pick elements and examine them out of their original context. Horrendous obscenities and atrocities committed in the past may be better understood (not excused) if we had a better comprehension of the contextual reasons why they occured. It does not excuse the crimes of the past, but at least we may gain some idea of why they happened.

And what does this say about current events? All my younger colleagues were highly distressed to hear that some strict Islamist cultures still do not approve of women participating in reading. My classmates were insensed and wanted to support a women's reading group against the wishes of her society. Here is were I get all politically incorrect: I said, in front of the whole class, including the prof who was very much in favour of this initiative, that us supporting the women's reading group was to her society as abhorent as if outsiders supported pedophiles and the inclusion of child pornography in our society. I'd like to hope this argument made some of them stop and think. I'm sure others think I support fundamentalist Islam and kiddie-porn (alas, we aren't all deep thinkers!) This illustrates current events in their cultural settings.

There is a very famous film clip out of early Nazi Germany which depicts book burning. It is somewhere on YouTube. We saw it in class when we were discussing censorship. I could not bear to watch it. Why? My colleagues teased that I was sensitive to the destruction of the written word. (This is only part of it.) What that video meant to me was showing the roots of evil. Remember, this was early in the Nazi regime, before kristallnacht, and before the world knew of the horrors to come. How could those people, cheerfully stoking the fires with the texts from Jewish authors, know that actions like this would eventually escalate and result in the holocaust? If they knew, would they have gone along with it? (I hope not) How will we recognise similar signs in our own times? And if we could recognise them, would we be brave enough to stand up to the forces behind them? Would you? Would I? For me, I don't know if I am that brave, and that is what upset me so.

But let's discuss Disney's version of Pocahontas. Very bad. Very bad, indeed. Worst one I have seen (and I am a fan of animated feature films). A much better "first contact" animated feature was "Road to Eldorado" by Dreamworks. (Music wasn't half bad either; and the rhetoric was very low key.)

You are allowed to like opera and Disney, but there is good Disney and there is bad Disney: good includes Tarzan and Lion King. The list of bad Disney is too long to recount now.

I'll end my incoherant rant here for now. It's late.