Dear Joe:
You already know this, your voice is one of the most clear voices in the US and somehow in order to do that someone has to have titanium not merely in the brain and had to be passed through the grinding mill of the most rotten phase of capitalism in all of its most glorious debauchery inside the US intestines. My point is, how the hell can we do it? -- do it in order to pass it to American people of all flavours, in order to raise the rage, this very painful truth that is only accurately mirrored in the poorest parts of this planet. You are talking plain global truth about our global human condition from inside the beast.
How to use image against image, do we need theatre or the cinema? The edge of poetry edges along the precipice of sentences and all is left at the end of the reading of your papers is a human being stunned by pain and the freedom encountered in plain truth, laughter and tears -- damn it!
Thank you ... anyway
From Australia kindest regards to you,
Cesar Benalcazar
PS: Anyone in the US able to write a movie script based on your work and direct a nice two hours true story about the US inside-out?
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Dear Cesar:
Thank you for you kind words, but really, I am only writing about what tens of millions observe and feel around them.
RE: my having been "passed through the grinding mill of the most rotten phase of capitalism in all of its most glorious debauchery inside the US intestines..." Well, I do have the distinct feeling of having been shit out of something.
I think you are right about cinema. Not that it can save the world, but judging from the success of "Farenheight 911," and despite that movie's sensationalistic and shallow approach, I believe the cinema could have a large effect on people's consciousness in this country. I don't believe it would stop the direction of US capitalism's headlong rush toward the destruction of everything in its path, but it could make sensitive intelligent Americans -- yes, we still have many left -- to openly start taking meaningful positions. Start questioning their meaningless consumption which drives so much of the world's suffering. Of course films are seldom made in this country for the purpose of raising consciousness -- though we must laud Al Gore for "Inconvenient Truth." Trouble is that facts and information mean little in this "information" engorged culture.
I don't know enough about film to know just who might be capable of doing what needs to be done. Dramatize the truth effectively. But I am convinced that it can be written. Convinced that it can be demonstrated through a work based upon real American experience that most Americans could identity with because they have seen it, but just never saw what it meant in global human terms. Never saw it with the faces of their neighbors and selves as participants.
Also, there are millions of Americans waiting for permission to publicly acknowledge what they already see and understand. They need some public medium (spectacle) to demonstrate it in a way that they can openly claim agreement with. They cannot articulate it themselves because they have been conditioned by the state and no longer have the language to do so. Even the proper terms have been turned upside down. Liberal means weak. Welfare means communism. etc. "Other" means danger. But they are still human primates capable of mimicry. They can still look at images of other beings and say, "Yes, I agree with that film." Call it bread and circuses put to positive effect.
Then again, given capitalism's ability to coopt and sell as a commodity virtually anything, even revolution (as when the Sixties Revolution became the "Dodge Revolutiom," etc.) such a film could turn out merely to be more bread and circuses. But at least it would be wholesome bread.
Solidarity,
Joe
