Andrew Reid: Curb Your Enthusiasm

There was a man in American who believed that God would cure his sick daughter.

Unfortunately, he was so steadfast in this belief that he failed to call the doctor, and she died.

A wake up call swings like a wreaking ball into his belief in the healing power of Our Kind Lord. Or not.

He ended up in court, where the judge sentenced him to 25 years in jail for murder. The man is seen smiling as the verdict is read out, thinking that ‘God is really testing him this year’.

The next day, another man arrived in court accused of downloading 30 songs from the Internet. The music industry lawyers had decided to make an example of him, in the belief that he had committed $14 million worth of damages. The judge ‘took a lenient line’ and decided only to fine the man $700,000. If the verdict stands after his appeal, he will file for bankruptcy. He is accused of downloading songs by the Smashing Pumpkins and Green Day, one of whose albums is called American Idiot.

The guy was listening to the lyrics of American Idiot, while a lawyer filed the case against him on behalf of the multi billion pound music industry he’d so damaged.

Don’t want to be an American idiot.
One nation controlled by the media.
Information age of hysteria.
It’s calling out to idiot America.

And so the previous generation wallows in failure and wilts in the white heat of technology, and the new generation seems pathetically trapped in the wreckage.

False choices abound, from the fleeting moments spent with your girlfriend on holiday watching the blood red sun sink into the cool blue ocean before your morning flight back to nowhereland, and a shadowy existence spent chained to a chair behind a desk, prostituting your brain and your slowly deteriorating fattening body for the financial gain of a few.

False choices, like democratically elected governments who are all the same and who rule between themselves as the decades pass by with not so much a flicker of real change or freedom.

False choices, like the weekends littered with drunks and drinking, pointless shopping unwittingly feeding the machine which traps us here in the first place just for the sake of a moment’s entertainment, for the lack of anything meaningful to do.

False choices, like going to work or staying at home. The false choice of too much Western freedom.

Furrowing my brow I thought… there must be something in each one of us which is waiting to get out and run free, something not exploitable for financial or political gain. Something pure and innocent. Something so incredible that others can only look on and enjoy what we have to offer.

So I watched a film called with Joey about a typical Japanese family, who have two son’s one a young boy aged 11 and an older 18 year old. The father loses his job but doesn’t tell anybody, and pretends to go to work each day. There he meets a friend from school, whom is doing exactly the same. Meanwhile, the young son runs through the compact twisting Tokyo streets and he spots an old keyboard in the junk at the side of the road under a railway bridge. He brings it home and plugs it in but no sound emanates from the speaker-less Roland MIDI synthesiser. Inspired, for reasons he doesn’t fully understand, he goes to take piano lessons whilst his family on one single day collapses around him, for reasons he doesn’t fully understand.

4 months later, and the young son is at a music school and performs a sonata in an exam, watched by his parents. He’s a musical genius and the crowd gathers around as the sonata concludes, there is only silence, wet eyes and open mouths.

The little genius then trots off with his dysfunctional family.

I downloaded this film via Bit Torrent.

Come and find me, you stupid fucking American, British, French, Belgian, Swiss, Chinese, African, Argentine Idiots.

You can hear it in the beat they march to
And you can feel the earth shake when they start to dance
You can tell by the way they move you
It’s not murder, it’s an act of faith, baby.