Goddamn HBO conked out right in the middle of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Why hast thou forsaken me, Oh Lord?

I saw "The Last Samurai" this weekend and while not sucky and mildly entertaining, the idea behind the movie is little screwy. No, not the fact that Tom Cruise somehow winds up being the only survivor of the climatic battle scene, but the politics of it. Not to get too polemicy here, but the basic theme of the movie can be summed up thusly: industrial, modern, money-grubbing, badly bearded America bad, agrarian co-operative living, honor-bound, traditional, poetry spewing Japanese peasants good. It's saying that Japan would have been much better if we wouldn't have gotten our grubby little hands on them and polluted them with our money guns, and lawyers.

This is, of course, the American white, liberal guilt view of the world- that the world would be perfectly peaceful and shiny happy if it weren't for us (well, and the rest of the West too) going around and corrupting these beautiful, lovely, peaceful societies with our evil ways. That the rest of the world would be much better off if we had instituted some sort of Prime Directive and just observed other civilizations and not gotten involved in them. No pollution, no wars, no poverty, no AIDS, no McDonalds. It's this theme that makes the movie pretty liberal. If you look at it from the Japanese standpoint, however, the view is actually almost conservative to the point of reactionary. In fact, those who espouse those views in Japan are considered the whacko-fringe. After all, what's more reactionary than saying change is bad, no matter how good those changes might be, and that they should stay the same no matter how good some of those changes would be?

I don't think the people who made the movie actually knew anything about Japanese history. Not that I'm an expert in it, but I do know that after first opening up to the West somewhere in the 17th Century, one of the Emperor's saw us a bunch of missionary loving greedheads and basically kicked out all the Westerners. He then banned any sort of contact with the West until the 19th century when they finally got hip as it were. As a result, you got one back-ward ass, isolated, totally out of it culture. It wasn't until the Emperor finally opened the country up to the West that the Japanese were able to modernize. And yeah, they did kind of turn into a nasty, power-hungry empire, but oops. The idea that somehow the Japanese were better off before the West came in (symbolized by the movie's supposed big climax when the Japanese Emperor says "thanks, but no thanks" to the American Ambassador offering a treaty) is as absurd as the idea of Samurai running around in armor and swords in a world full of cannons and howitzers. The Samurai were running against the tides of history.

But let's look at the politics again. The movie is liberal in that it espouses the belief that the West does nothing but corrupt the rest of the world and robbed those countries of their traditional values. In America, however, people who call for the return of traditional values are people like Pat Robertson, Patrick Buchanon, and John Ashcroft. In other words, it's conservative to believe in traditional values in America, but liberal if you believe in the traditional values of other countries.

Or, you could look at it this way, from the standpoint of that time. Back in 19th century Japan, the liberal viewpoint would be for modernization and industrialization. That's what liberalism is, or should be about- the constant moving forward to improve society. After all, feudal Japanese society is pretty backward ass. Among other things, it's not to big on Women's rights. So, what would actually be the liberal viewpoint 150 years ago is now wrong and the reactionary viewpoint is right.

Here's another way to look at it. Say the Samurai actually win and beat back the whimpy Emperor. The Emperor closes the door to modernity, kicks out all the foreigners, and the Samurai ride again. What would that mean to history? And I don't mean the historical question of how it would have affected WWII and all that fun stuff (would we have entered without Pearl Harbor? Would the atomic bomb have been dropped and thus ushering in the Cold War?). No, I mean if Japanese would have gone full-Samurai, would we have the walkman, Toyota, Godzilla, and Hello Kitty?

Nope. And what a sad world we'd be living in without Hello Kitty.