Update on The Man with the Golden Voice: Two Years on

I came back across an old post about Ted Williams, the Man with the Golden Voice as I was browsing some older posts. After watching the YouTube video which launched his story, I wondered what happened to him. I remembered that as time passed, more information about Ted came out. It was a sad story with so many sides. A real life story. Not the ones you see on news shows that try to sugar-coat or simplify a person's life. Problems with his estranged children. His distance with his mother, whom he later reunited with. 

Well here is the update. The best part of this story is that it is not a fairy tale. It's still real life fraught with real challenges. 

Triangle Fire: or is it mis-fire?

I found it odd watching this documentary on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and then seeing the start of the Occupy Wall Street movement. These two events, although seamlessly unrelated, are actually much closer than we think. The common thing about them is the story of the struggle of the common people against those who put pursue wealth above everything else.
The documentary is not so much about the fire and the aftermath. It is rather about the movement and strikes for better conditions and unionization that came before it. The documentary talks about the social conditions of the workers. It describes their lives in early 20th Century New York. The documentary also goes into the aspirations of the workers and why they migrated to America. This sets us up for us to better understand the motivations of the workers. It also is partly to juxtapose it against the tragedy itself.
That is where the documentary falls apart. It does not say that the tragedy could have been avoided had the efforts of the strikes succeeded but it does go a long way to suggest that demands for better conditions were not all achieved and that had something to do with the tragedy. In fact, even if all of the workers' demands were met, that wouldn't have prevented the fire. Success of the strike wouldn't have changed the conditions that led to the tragedy. What would have changed the conditions? Either an enlightened factory owner, aware of the humanity of their workers or specific laws defining the rights of workers for a safe workplace. Guess which one is more likely?
The documentary goes into this narrative mode, where we are presented with the musings of the workers. It gives an insight into their thinking. It makes us understand what the workers were going through. However, I have my doubts that the narrative is factual. Some could have been culled from other workers in other factories. That is ok when talking about the general condition of society and describing the New York of the era. But then the narrative continues into the event itself and some of the narrative were just impossible to have been written because they describe the writer's ultimate demise.
That takes the documentary into a grey area. It is a legitimate documentary at times because of the experts who were providing insight and information. It presents little known facts about the strike efforts. It even discusses the relationship between the women's suffrage movement and the strikers. But when it ventures into the often dramatic narrative, it begins bordering on non-fiction. It this a non-fiction documentary? It has too much drama that threaten the documentary's legitimacy.

The Shock Doctrine jolted me awake

Category: Documentary

In a strange city and jet lagged, you tend to watch whatever is on in the early hours of the day with the hope that it is boring enough to drive you to well-deserved sleep. This was my hope not fulfilled.
The Shock Doctrine is a documentary that claims that the economic and social disasters in the last few decades were caused by policies put in place after some disaster or catastrophe. The documentary is based on the book of the same name. The shock facing the general population, with it's attention diverted, provided an opportunity to introduce extreme measures that would not normally be accepted, sometime under the disguise of helping to improve the situation. This was done on purpose or in latter years, planned as part of the whole scheme. The ultimate goal of the Shock Doctrine was at first, to try out Milton Friedman's free-market economic theory in real life. This led to some successes and some failures. But the value of the doctrine lies in it's ability to introduce or make people accept what they normally would not. In the end, the doctrine is used to ultimately put wealth in the hands of the few.
What is shocking to me was the nature of the doctrine itself. This was not thought up by some politician with some shady deal in mind. This was thought up and identified by people in academia, in universities who were driven by some high-minded academic goal. This doctrine was thought up as a means to an end, a tool to be used. I have never fully understood why people of my parent's generation viewed academics with suspicion. I understood why universities were forcing science undergraduates to take more arts-related courses and vice versa, to create a more rounded person. But putting the historical events in the documentary in context (plus the minor event called the creation of the atomic bomb), the drive to make academic more humans seems logical now.
The documentary is depressing to no end. It just piles on woe upon woe of the helplessness of the general public to their manipulation to agree to something that will ultimately bring them great harm. It sheds a new light on politics and war and the tools and goals of them both. Personally, it finally made me understand what the fuss was about Pinochet in the UK and why Margret Thatcher came back to public life to support him. The documentary pulled me in and although I thought I saw some leaps of faith, generally it was easy to follow and lays out the reasoning logically.