Sunday, July 17, 2005

Oh, I also watched this week's episode of Into the West, another casualty of Friday's power outage. I'm enjoying the heck out of the series, but I'm sure it's getting some negative reaction somewhere, now that the focus has become clearer and clearer. It isn't a happy tale of the brave pioneers setting out West to expand this great land of ours. It's about the human cost of westward expansion, particularly focusing on how miserably the Native Americans were treated. Every episode is awash in pain and blood and misery, and, quite honestly, I think it's about time someone made a big old fictional movie about the suffering moving into the west caused. The only way to avoid repeating our mistakes is to be reminded of them, and this is a series of cruelties that hasn't been showcased in the same way that, say, the Holocaust has been. So good for Steven Spielberg, for delivering something gripping and thought-provoking, instead of a typical feel-good traditional Western.

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