The Lives of Others

In the bright afternoon sun Cissie and I sat in the hot tub. Somehow the subject of my Jihad with West River Telephone came up. For anyone who doesn’t know I have been obsessed with fighting these petty crooks ever since I attempted to run in one of WRT’s elections. Cissie said I should forget my fight with them. I explained to my spouse that the thought had gone through my mind to write them an email. The email would ask them to hold fair elections in exchange for holding fair elections I would vow not to run and expose their petty frauds. “Forget about it” Cissie said, “No one cares”. I became a bit indignant and shot off into a diatribe about how Hitler came to power because people were willing to overlook so many little injustices. It struck me as strange that a jewish woman like my wife would not have more passion for fighting small injustices, since she was in a minority that had been victimized for centuries.

Later in the day we settled in Erin’s basement to watch the movie, The Lives of Others. It is the kind of movie Americans cannot watch. There are no car chases, not a single bullet was fired, and there was not a sex scene worthy of the name. The movie reminds me so much of how intellectually bankrupt we are as a country that we cannot enjoy European films that require thought. East Germany was probably the most suppressive and dreary place on earth in our life time. No country on the planet had each person’s life under a microscope like East Germany did. According to the film introduction there were close to 300 thousand people spying on each other. The Lives of Others is a movie you must watch. Read Erin’s review it was excellent. After you see the movie think about how freedom slips away slowly and nobody notices. Little freedoms are given up for the greater good, then one day you wake up and find there is no greater good. The petty little politicians at WRT have the populace convinced that a crooked election now in then is a small price to pay for keeping radicals out of the telephone cooperative. George Bush uses the same thought process to convince the public the CIA should have access to everyone’s phone calls. Where does it all lead. Watch The Lives of Other, and you will see why I am passionate about stomping on the flames of totalitarianism when they are tiny so they don’t ignite the firestorm that killed millions in Europe.