Arts & Culture

• Do yourself a favor, and don't go see Zero Dark Thirty. Don't encourage film-making that a best offers ambiguity about torture, and at worse endorses it. Spend the two and a half hours on something more valuable and moral.
• Violence baked into popular culture

Dan Froomkin, Huffington Post

This article is made possible with the generous contributions of all reader supported Evergreene Digest readers like you. Thank you!

A chronicle of the decade-long hunt for al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden after the September 2001 attacks, and his death at the hands of the Navy S.E.A.L. Team 6 in May, 2011.

January 9, 2013 | I finally saw Zero Dark Thirty last night, which according to my film critic friends means that only now am I actually allowed to opine on it. (I don't agree, having tweeted up a storm about its evidently pro-torture ethos already.)

Since a lot has been said by now, here are just a few observations.

Torture is much more central to the movie even than I had been led to believe. Not only does the very first scene depict torture, but it does so partly in the name of character development for our gorgeous red-headed hero, showing how tough she is. Literally her first words in the movie are "I'm fine," which "Maya" says after watching a thug agent savagely beat (and ultimately waterboard) an injured, starved and trussed-up detainee. "I'm fine"? Think about that. Furthermore, in the movie, absolutely every bit of evidence that leads Maya to the courier who leads her to bin Laden is elicited through, after, and under threat of more torture. She tells the SEAL team near the end of the movie that she is sure of her information because it comes from "detainee reports." Other agents repeatedly either demand better information from detainees or, later, mope about the loss of what they clearly consider the only effective technique to elicit information. You cannot take this movie at its word and conclude anything other than that torture was an essential step toward tracking bin Laden down. Which it wasn't.

Full story...

Related:

Violence baked into popular culture, David Bauder, Associated Press / Huffington Post

• For whatever concern that politicians and moral leaders show about violent media content, it's those millions of users and viewers who will ultimately decide whether gore stays on the menu, said Marty Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication.
• A Culture That Condones The Killing Of Children And Teaches Children To Kill
• Violence is America's national drug

• America's perversion of priorities
• Narcissism unbound
• Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline ~ Morris Berman
• Special Report | The Dumbing Down of American Politics: Week of August 26

Morris Berman, MorriesBerman.blogspot.com

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Jim Fuller

If you like reading this article, consider contributing a cafe latte to all-reader supported Evergreene Digest--using the donation button in the above right-hand corner—so we can bring you more just like it.

December 16, 2012 | Recently I've been reading The Kimono Mind, a study of Japanese culture written in 1965 by the Austrian-born architect Bernard Rudofsky. It also happens to be, by way of comparison, a study of American culture; and the author is quite clear that he regards Americans as a large collection of morons. 

This alone, of course, makes the book quite enjoyable, since Americans are, in fact, a large collection of morons. 

Full story...

Related:

Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline ~ Morris Berman, Described in  Barnes & Noble

"Morris Berman is one of our most prescient and important social and cultural critics. He marries a laser-like intelligence with a deep moral core. His writing is as lucid and crisp as it is insightful.His newest book, Why America Failed, rips open the dark and dying carcass of empire.His analysis is sobering and often depressing .But the truth at this stage in the game is depressing, very depressing. Those who refuse to face this truth because it is unpleasant, because it does not inspire happy thoughts or offer false hope, are in flight from the real. The collective retreat into self-delusion has transformed huge swaths of the American populace into a peculiar species of adult-children who live in aPeter Pan world of make believe where reality is never permitted to be animpediment to desire. It is too bad Berman, who sees and writes about all this with a stunning clarity, lives in Mexico.It gets lonely up here." —Chris Hedges, author of Death of the Liberal Class and Empire of Illusion

Special Report | The Dumbing Down of American Politics: Week of August 26, David Culver, Ed., Evergreene Digest

• Tea Baggers, Fundamentalists, Bigots, and Other American Dumbasses of the New Millennium
• 7 New Items including:
  • Amerika’s Future is Death
  • Not Senseless, Not Random: The Deadly Mix of Race, Guns, & Madness
  • Extremism normalized
  • How to Think
  • George Lakoff | How Right-Wingers Scam People Into Buying Their Toxic Philosophy
  • The Biggest Problem With Traditional Schooling
  • Dark Ages Redux: American Politics and the End of the Enlightenment
  • George Monbiot | Right's Stupidity Spreads, Enabled by Too-Polite Left