"Wall-E" is a crunchy con masterpiece
Monday November 24, 2008
Categories: Culture
"Wall-E" is out on DVD now. If you missed it the first time around, here's my blog take on the movie, in which I tease out the crunchy con themes in the film. We're going to rent it for our...
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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This reminds me of an article I read about vertical farming using hydro/aero ponics, giving us the ability to grow our food in major cities. Technology as our friend!
And then I thought about the resistance such projects would recieve from the farm lobbyists. And I was disheartened.
I've visited the Axiom spaceship. It's right here in North Texas, and it is called the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center,in Grapevine.
400,000 square feet of fake, climate controlled "Texas", complete with buffet lines and shopping galore. You simply don't want to know the carbon footprint on that place.
I see this as a cautionary tale about the human tendency to abdicate all responsibility for our actions. We create entities to buffer us from personal responsibility, scapegoats to facilitate our denials, and we find "leaders" to put in charge of maintaining that buffer, to choose the scapegoats of the moment and instruct us on how to treat them.
The critical moment in the film is when the captain realizes that nothing will or can change if he doesn't lead the way towards being responsible again. He is a hero not for his subsequent deeds, but for making that choice when no one else is willing or capable of making it.
One of the major reasons we live much longer than our forebears is technology. This blog is the result of technology. Technology is one thing that is good in itself and we are not going to get rid of it.
Fortunately.
I just read "The Machine Stops", by E.M. Forster, which presages WALL-E by a good 80 years...
Technology is one thing that is good in itself and we are not going to get rid of it.
You mean technology like weaponized anthrax, fusion bombs and cameras on every street corner? To paraphrase Washington "Technology, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearsome master". Unfortunately, in a lot ways technology is our master today, we order our lives around serving machines.
It takes a too dismal view of humanity for my part. I'm a big Pixar fan but this one was a little too disturbing for me.
Wall-E's fat peoploids are dwellers, not surgers. We're surgers now, but if a real depression hits we could become dwellers:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/11/16/depression_2009_what_would_it_look_like/?page=1
beth November 24, 2008 9:41 AM I've visited the Axiom spaceship. It's right here in North Texas, and it is called the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center,in Grapevine. 400,000 square feet of fake, climate controlled "Texas", complete with buffet lines and shopping galore. You simply don't want to know the carbon footprint on that place.
At a coworker's enthusiastic urging, we visited the Gaylord Texan. We're only about 10 miles from Grapevine, so it's something we could do quite often if we wanted to.
No.
Way.
Imagine a combination of Thomas Kinkade and Precious Moments and Jim and Tammy's former Heritage Village - a la Texas.
Okay, maybe I exaggerate.
A little.
Yuck.
Did I mention the overpriced ice sculpture exhibit which I had no interest in paying big buck$$ to see?
Ice. Hard water. Give me a break.
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