No, this isn’t a new running series. Which would be really weird. I just had a MySpacer ask me about the film and it started me thinking… While you can’t get any bigger than global warming, I think the significance of the film for our culture actually extends beyond it. The important word in the title is Truth.
Over the past few years, reasonable, intelligent citizens have watched in horror as public discourse on issues in our country has turned into a circus. Actually, more like a cockfight, where the frenzied violence, the stench of sweat and spittle, and the boisterous shouts of onlookers with money clenched in their fists matter more than which rooster wins. All that matters is the smear of blood and feathers.
As the dizzying 24-hour news trough has slurped up our political system, intelligent liberals have watched their views vanish completely, while intelligent conservatives have gritted their teeth as their cause was placed in the mouths of Ann Coulters. And mainstream media shrank into the pathetic he-said-she-said journalism we have today. “Many people have suggested the sky is blue, however critics charge that blah blah blah...” For a powerful faction with a dogmatic agenda, it’s an airtight scheme: if you can call any dissenting opinion “politics,” and the veracity of a statement matters more than its substance, then we’ve moved beyond Truth. There have been attempts to manipulate politics in a different direction, such as Fahrenheit 9/11, but this is still manipulation, and audiences are dulled to it.
Into this arena steps a man in a suit with a bunch of slides. Mr. Gore is determined to let the facts speak for themselves. What’s amazing is that it’s working – $15 million gross as of a week ago. The rapidly diminishing group of dissenters, such as John Stossel in his embarrassing stint on Scarborough Country, sound for once like what they actually are – uninformed fanatics.
After years of being emasculated, insulted, prodded, wrung out, drugged with roofies, left in the motel bathroom for dead, incarcerated on petty charges, whisked off to a CIA “black site” in an unnamed corner of the planet, left on the side of the road in a country known for its distaste of foreigners, recruited briefly into an international opium ring, lost in a maze of bureaucratic red tape and bumped from talk shows when it tried to tell its story, Truth is finally fighting back.