Author: MacPhoenix

For some reason, this evening I was drawn to the memory of Tiananmen Square back in 1989, and the dull thud of our inaction towards China. Sometimes, I’m afraid to admit, I just don’t understand the big wheels that turn in the American approach to foreign affairs. Ever since Nixon, we’ve been trying to court the biggest abuser of human rights, because it is also the biggest nation of consumers. Now we’re using China as a wedge to get into the hearts and minds of the North Koreans, but China and North Korea are at the lowest point in their own relations with each other since before the 1950s. China is just once again using America as a way to show that they’re a world-team player. And America is still content to see China as a nation of 1.25 billion wearers of Nike sneakers and purchasers of McDonald Happy Meals.

My country paints odd strokes of huge monochromatic color over everything. Don’t these ravenous American (multi-national really) companies realize that China is the largest producer of pirated material? It’s a devil’s bargain.

We become so obsessed with seeing regions or countries or leaders in one way. It’s childlike in its breathtaking naiveté. Current thought would make one believe that there were Iraqis hijackers on the airplanes of 9/11, but there were not. No Afghanis either. A bunch of Saudis though. And Saudi Arabia is the country that exported the Wahabi form of Islamic thought to Pakistan. The Pakistani secret service trained Wahabi clerics and sent them into Afghanistan to successfully take over the country as the Taliban. The Taliban sheltered the al Qaeda and the exiled Saudi, Osama bin Laden. But oil-rich Saudi Arabia is an ally to the United States, according to our doctrine of being blind to real danger.

There is no real relevance to this post to anything current. Except maybe there is. Bush Sr. did nothing in the wake of Tiananmen, and later invaded Iraq to help our friends, the house of Saud, protect their tyrannical hold over their country. Maybe there is.

Heh.

The SUV is taking a lot of negative press these days, thanks to a new book out called High and Mighty: SUVs — The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way. The New Repubic’s January 20th issue has a great critique/companion article on the book, and I just finished reading a humorous online article from SFGate.com. I can only hope this is the peak of the SUV craze, and it is all downhill for them from here on in.

Just as a matter of making things clear, as High and Mighty points out, SUV are more dangerous for their owners than all other cars except sub-compacts and pickups. Traffic death rates were falling until they flatlined due to the popularity of SUVs, despite the fact that safety features were added to all vehicles in that time. The cargo and passenger room in SUVs tends to be smaller than regular automobiles. And car manufactures spend little on designing improved versions of SUVs (except Ford after going through the nightmare of product recalls for poorly designed Explorers), making SUVs one of the cheapest vehicles to manufacture, but then they are sold for a premium and reap huge profits for auto makers. Guess that’s why they don’t bother to improve anything about them.

I just saw Signs on DVD. Part of the reason I didn’t like it, admittedly, was that I had larger expectations for it. Not too large, mind you, just larger than the movie turned out to have. I expected a twist at the end. There was no twist, just the playing out of what the movie called coincidence, but in reality was a set up by M. Night Shyamalan. But the problem with the set up was that there was no reason to care. The causes and events that play a vitally important role in the climax of the film were picked because they played a vitally important role in the climax of the film. The audience is just strung along.

This was only part of the problem, though. What really bothered me about the movie was the total break down of believability. The film held my interest long enough to make me question whether or not the aliens had a terrestrial explanation. We were supposed to feel ambiguity, because fantastic events kept intruding on the main characters’ normal world. But as the film progressed, we were asked to accept that these events were unfolding because of an alien invasion. So the crop circles were a method of navigation used by an interstellar attack fleet? Sure, they can find our needle in a haystack of a planet, no problem, but they can’t coordinate landing over major cities without giving us weeks of advanced warning, and luckily every city is within miles of the cornfields that they used to plot their courses. And is there no better planet to harvest for food? For a hydrophobic creature, they sure picked the wrong big, blue ball of water to land on. And were they not aware of mighty axes that we Earthlings wield? Because that probably would have helped them get through the doors that they were so confounded by.

But there is an explanation for the stupidity of the alien race that crossed thousands of light years just to be beaten back by baseball bats and glasses of water. See, M. Night Shyamalan is a great director (not writer, just director), and like all great directors, he loves movies. So this movie is just a collage of movies that he always wanted to make. So we have the paranoia of War of the Worlds, the creatures from The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the weakness of the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz. What we don’t have with Signs is a good movie.

*cough, cough* Excuse me. Just clearing a small amount of doubt from my throat.