United Nations Television
Last night we caught some of United Nations Television on C-Span.
It is a good move towards The United Nations Channel. I was glad to see it.
The Episode made me think of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek. I have regretted not going to Harvard for many reasons, but at least being part of student government at MCC did provide some extras. We booked Mr. Roddenberry to speak at the College and had dinner with him prior to his speech to the school.
The United Nations program on C-Span two was about the international plight of women on Women’s Day, which I didn’t know it was Women’s Day until I caught the program.
If you were not a woman Gene Roddenberry didn’t want to know you was my impression, and he had originally cast his wife as Captain Kirk. Interesting how it is now that the show seems much more like his original conception.
His stories were always based on Mythology.
I have not much retention for Mythology myself. The textbook for it was a failure when I think back on it. But I have some ideas about women.
Judith from the Apocrypha is a mythological story for me. "She prayed for the power to deceive." has seemed particularly characteristic of women in that I as a man could not have imagined praying for such power since it would be praying for power to break a commandment.
In the story, the outcome is triumph over the Kings forces and security from attack for as long as Judith lived and for long after that.
The story is this: The King of the area was having a war and demanded soldiers but they were draft dodgers in her and Manassas Town. (Mannassas was dead, and she always wore black in because he was the best and would take no other. Therefore she had position and respect. When the King won without the help of draft dodger towns he returned to kill the disobedient and the town was under siege and starving and about to give up by the council of the men when Judith said, "Hold on, I’ll show you what a woman can do."
She went down to the Kings camp and told the General that her people had been bad and God was angry with them and they were sure to be defeated, and she would tell him when to attack after God told her when the time was right.
This proves once again that one ought to be suspicious of those that tell you God speaks more clearly to them, than to you. But be that as it may, it also says in the story that she was so beautiful that he could not help but believe her.
The other lesson is that we tend to believe what we want to believe. The lies we tell ourselves area more significant than the lies others tell us since we decide what to believe ultimately. The liar, deceiver is really only playing a part that fulfills a script we write. Something that makes us feel good.
To the General it fulfills his image of himself, so strong and right that this beautiful woman would defect to him and bring with her the power of God. She would bring him the work of God about when to act. The word of God, tells us both what to do, and when to do it.
So these are the aspects, motivations and situations of the story. The story is human. There is a life and death struggle going on. Judith and the General flirt and she goes out in the mornings to pray with her handmaiden for a few days until a night, a dinner where the General drinks more wine than he has ever in his life, his officers leave them alone in his tent convinced that Judith is going to bed down with him, have sex with him, and when he passes out she cuts off his head takes it in the morning to her people and they attack the headless army and are victorious.
Her truth then is that she shows to her people, what a woman can do.
United Nations Television has broken through to the essential conflict in the world order which is the conflict over ownership of women. The Civil War of the United States, War Between the States, The War To End Slavery is the model of war.
"Our Past Will Be Your Future." is even the hope that the United States offers to the world just a little bit, in spite of this War that goes on and on a linked evil that outsides me, compels me to create my own country were at least I live according to my own ethics and lights, even enjoying my own zone of vices privately.
It still pisses me off that the cops took my 38 and my pot and gave neither back. In the end I do see the world in terms of the rich and the poor, but also in terms of the right and the wrong.
When I got up this morning Vertical Limit was on so I watched it. It was a very well constructed movie. The parable aspect of brothers and sisters the morning after Women’s Day, set with me well, besides the construction and content I just could not help but admire since there was strength wisdom beauty and humor in the work.
Well, the Soap Opera ingredients are not entirely unrealistic from what I have read of fatal mountain climbing adventures. I keep wondering why when we have the spacesuit technology people freeze to death on such adventures these days, but I am not a clothing retailer to climbers from Nasa.
If I had to go to the top of K2 Everest, whatever sort of point where air is too thin, I’d jump out of a jet on a parasol and take an inflatable glider down before I’d walk up that thing. I hate being cold. I don’t think well when I’m too cold. That’s just that, the facts.
I moved there for love once though, to cold, Rochester New York My God, The First American Border, Boom Town. The first shopping mall. Midtown Plaza still lives, put there downtown in that cold place with all the nearly free energy coming from Niagara. Well the Mall ought to be downtown. The climate made an imperative, and they did it right there.
Cold as it is there is energy for it, some civilization lived anonymously there important and out of the way. There See Genesee!
Scream Erie, Erie Canal. If I could be a Tyrant Gloating with Power, able to speak in Decree, I’d tell my daughter to record the trains in the roundhouse in some night of two foot soft snow. And it would be done.
I certainly am no God Daddy. Maybe something else needs to be done first. I really don’t know.
And then but an army of artists answering to me. It’s an Andy Warhol Factory. -which would make a nice song.
My sort of lyric hook.
Psalm 90. "You sweep us away like a dream: we fade suddenly like the grass."
The grass comes back from the brown of the winter. The dream comes back. We are life. Never really alone in it.
The nitroglycerin aspect of Vertical Limit gives it that artificial Hollywood bullshit touch. Is it a metaphor for the atomic bombs, or biological weapons? I mean really, give me a break!
I’ve been beaten up twice, and been in some other fights I won, and I have a pretty fair idea of how much a body can take from it.
American Beauty is happening where I am. There is some murder in Durham. Over seas spies are getting killed for market share If there was no oil in the world could we stay apart like different planets?
I worked on this cartoon once, The Inspector Gadget Show. Part of Penny the character’s arsenal was a computer book. These things actually ought to be common. I’d use them as an aspect of non lethal weaponry in conflict with ignorance.
The pen is mightier than the sword. In the end as a tool it costs less. I appreciate the New York Times Magazine story about the Satellite Channel to Iranians just crushed by the discompassionate capitalist random overlook. Wonderful that the Magazine lamented the ending of its evolved mission succeeding beyond what Voice of America could imagine through humor and enthusiasm and fatalism.
I recommend that computer books that receive satellite transmissions be dropped on people that are poor. It could be like a free introductory offer. Too much money is spent on bombs. The view of the United Nations must gain respect like the unmarried widowed Judith. It must save us that have better things to do than go to war with each other.
If a brother or a father has a daughter he will not help learn to read, then he is not a worthy brother or father.
There was an industrial video I worked on once that was about what they called an Advanced Learning Appliance. It hooked into mainframes and the student was issued it to the point of never needing a text book as long as they had a phone ine to the mainframes of the school. Such a thing wireless in all of the world educational from the UN, distributed by Transcendia in my ideal world, would be the sort of campaign I’d decree if I could get a consensus.
What is the pilot’s world? I knew George Bush in comparison to the pilots and their passengers I’d meet at the FBO. I was just a servant, one to hold a coat, fill the jet, the Queen Air, the 210 the MU2 Citation Falcon 50, 10 or Twenty with fuel and coffee and little Marriott sandwiches that made me appreciate Ken and Arts and all the catering on movie or commercial sets I worked on.
I ate better when I worked on movies than when I worked in aviation. Seems ironic. I’d like to make a movie of airline pilots having meals in strange cities they flew passengers to for no other reason than that they are pilots.
I think a woman airline pilot who had flown international routes might make a good President for the United States.
As a profile it seems sensible if we want to survive.
I wonder what my cousin Kate thinks since she is such an accomplished sociologist. I’m going to ask her.
Russell