Word: distractability
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...away from the present and the mindless celebrity worship and inane pop culture that dominates it. Colleges should create an environment and shape a curriculum that maximizes exposure to the great works and the great thinkers of the Western tradition. Colleges fail in this purpose when they distract their students with courses focused on trivial subjects that have nothing to do with important works of the past. This is not to say that there’s no merit in studying current cultural practices or phenomena; but time in college is limited. It should be spent reading Tolstoy and Kant...
Ironically, however, it is the comic media outlets that educate, rather than distract, the public. Shows like The Daily Show, and not Crossfire, offer the most insight into what is actually happening in our world. Perhaps this is because writers for The Daily Show do not get their material fed to them by communications directors or “rapid response teams” from the party headquarters. Rather, they use “the absurdity of the system,” as Stewart calls it, to produce their own content...
...director Christian Johnston chose to fictionalize his exposé. The tapes chronicle the efforts of filmmaker Don Larson (George Calil) and his translator, Wali Zarif (Wali Razaqui) to record and possibly join the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The foibles in the fiction prompt a host of questions that distract from the substantive reflection that the film would otherwise promote. Johnston aims to debunk the myths of the Afghani situation, but should have realized that original footage of a war zone’s unseen chaos speaks for itself...
Most distressingly, the foibles in the fiction of September Tapes prompt a host of all too easily answered questions that distract from the substantive reflection that the film would otherwise promote. The viewer asks himself: Why does Lars have a trace of a British accent? Because Calil is English. Why do Lars and Wali, formally introduced at the start of the film, immediately act as if they have known each other for some time? Because Calil and Razaqi have. Would Lars be better off without his iPod during machine gun skirmishes with the Taliban? Yes, despite the iPod?...
...know, I've been in worse situations in my life. The attacks don't attack me as much as they attack Americans and America. They're trying to distract people from the real issues that matter...