The Perspective Of Reason

I had a great weekend. It was one of those "no obligation" free-for-all. I had several offers to become committed but we turned them all down. It was mostly just quality snuggle time (typically worth its weight in gold). We were both in the baking mood but there was already plenty of pound cake, almond pecan brownies and ice cream; not to mention pop corn....so it would have been a wasted effort. The weather was fantastic and we intended to play croquet; but alas the nothing won out. We did however manage to plant some brilliant beautiful mums and other colorful flowers. We have alot of fun doing things together.

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Saturday morning was great too. There's nothing like a great workout. Hot oxygenated blood coursing through straining veins to demanding muscles and hungry cells has a tendency to purify the mind. It is the best of times and the worse. The garbage of the day gets sorted through and untangled with every strand of sweat leaking its logic to reason. There's something about being surrounded by others doing the same thing. I have always noticed how "we" tend to appreciate fine forms and chiseled features that are recoginzed as marks of dedication and performance.

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I saw a strange movie, actually I saw three strange movies, this weekend. One in particular "Land of the Blind" was very disturbing and equally memorable.

Land of the Blind is a satiric political drama about terrorism, assassination, and the power of memory. The film is set in an unnamed place and time, where an idealistic soldier named Joe (Ralph Fiennes) strikes up an illicit friendship with a political prisoner named Thorne (Donald Sutherland). Through their conversations in the high-security military prison where Thorne is held, Joe slowly begins to question his allegiance to the country's brutal but clownish dictator and his Machiavellian wife. Eventually Thorne succeeds in recruiting Joe to the rebel cause, leading to a bloody coup d'etat with echoes of countless tyrannies, revolutions, and counter-revolutions throughout history. But in the post-revolutionary world, what Thorne asks of Joe leads the two men into bitter conflict, spiraling downward into madness until Joe's co-conspirators conclude that they must erase him from history.

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Isn't it interesting that the person telling the story gets to determine who the terrorists are. I found it interesting that those who (in this particular case and often in history) are bent on liberation and overthrowing governments tend to take over and end up doing pretty much the same if not worse than the oppressors who were there before. "Power corrupts, absolute power absolutely corrupts." Somehow "the cause" becomes just a banner that is lost, flailing in the wind like an abandoned and wounded critter left on side of road to a nirvanah of perfection that no longer matters now that we have power/money once posessesed by the oppressors.

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The greatest monsters in history have not been so horrificly non-human; but merely disillusioned humans. Humans that somebody let down, broke their word to or just got wronged too many times and snapped. So are we all "capable" of being dictators?

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Hmmm....