After an enjoyable walk with Dory, which included a stop at honest ed’s where I purchased 15$ worth of 69 cent cans of organic refriend and turtle beans (!!!), I almost died riding my bike at top speed to the movie theatre where I met Kate, her cousin Max, and his girlfriend and her friend to see “Thank you for Smoking”.
Contrary to some, I seem to truly enjoy films that make heroes of “morally reprehensible” characters. Another example might be “Lord of War”. I suppose I don’t have a high flying idea of what people are morally obliged to be, and while I’ll certainly commend genuinly good work I don’t “hate” those who occupy spaces in our society which we find perticularly distasteful. I don’t think it’s “their fault”, persay, despite the fact that I’m certain people who argue for big tobbaco or sell arms to both sides know full well the material harm and suffering which are caused by their actions. For one, to say they are the cause of the suffering is really to reduce the notion of cause to effective cause, as technological rationality does incessantly, but that’s not what I want to say here. Rather, I see these people (who most certainly include in the larger sense almost everyone I see on the streets of Toronto – wearing a suit or not) as those who have not yet for whatever or other grasped the gravity of the situation at hand. Whether you sell cigaretts or won’t spend the extra 30$ a month on organic, fair trade produce etc…, it’s qualitativly part of the same denial. (And certainly the large proportion of people in this rich city don’t make choices such as that out of neccesity but rather out of convinience and poorly reflected frugality). But this is no reason to de-humanize someone or morally berate them for not, as John Stuart said in his famous crossfire interview, doing their duty to the public discourse.
This is not a dead issue. Who to condemn? Who to choose for your heroes? When to simply suspend, or forget judgement, try to see how the other half lives.
