Redstate points to an official Israeli announcement that it pulled all it’s senior diplomats (heads of mission and ambassadors) home for a conference from Dec 27 to Dec 31.

They think it’s a precursor to opening a can of whoopass on someone; I’m less sure.

But it sure means something. A conference call would be far less intrusive; they obviously want something said that won’t possibly be overheard.
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Browsing the LA Weekly, I was scanning for a movie to go to this weekend, and saw this review of ‘The Blind Side’:

Another poor, massive, uneducated African-American teenager lumbers onto screens this month, two weeks after Precious and obviously timed as a pre-Thanksgiving-dinner lesson in the Golden Rule. But unlike the howling rage of Claireece Precious Jones, The Blind Side’s Michael “Big Mike” Oher (Quinton Aaron) is mute, docile, and ever-grateful to the white folks who took him in.

Based on a true story recounted in Michael Lewis’s 2006 book of the same name, Blind Side the movie peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African-Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them. Steel magnolia Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock, frosted and thickly accented) welcomes the homeless Big Mike into her family’s Memphis McMansion, later explaining to him how to play left tackle. In every scene, Oher is instructed, lectured, comforted, or petted like a big puppy; he is merely a cipher (Aaron has, at most, two pages of dialogue), the vehicle through which the kind-hearted but imperfect whites surrounding him are made saintlier. “Am I a good person?” Leigh Anne asks her husband non-rhetorically – as if every second in this film weren’t devoted to canonizing her. – Melissa Anderson

And I was kinda annoyed at this.

Why? Well, for starters because the story is – as the reviewer notes – true. A white family did take in an essentially homeless black child, raise him, and see him succeed.

And so for Ms. Anderson, it’s a story that can’t be told. Or if it is told, it must be told through the lens of oppression and blind rage – or something.

Now, there are so many problem here that I’ll freely admit that we won’t address them all. But I want to focus on one, small issue.

And that is that the concept of ‘truth’ as enjoyed by someone like Ms. Anderson is a kind of cartoon; an Isaiah Berlin hedgehog, Hollywood ‘high concept‘ kind of a thing where the essential truths are few and huge and relatively uncomplex. The story of race in her world in America is the story of oppression by whites of blacks and other people of color; repression that is physical, economic, cultural, and goes to the heart of the character of every non-white American.

The problem is that there are millions – maybe even billions by this time – of true – meaning factually correct – stories that don’t fit that neat ‘high concept’ model of truth. Because reality is a fox’s world, where many messy small stories have to accumulated into a larger vision.

The story of Mike Ober and the Tuohy family is a truth about race in America. As is the larger story about slavery (itself made up of a million lesser stories, some heinous, some humane). As is the Civil War. As is Reconstruction, Jim Crow and Civil Rights – or the cashier who was rude to a customer of a different race at the liquor store where I bought champagne this New Years’ Eve (the cashier was black, the customer Asian).

And so it’s frustrating to me to hear from someone so invested in The Big Story that she can’t embrace or even acknowledge a small truth that contradicts it.

We’re seeing a bit of it that play out in Patterico’s debate with Charles Johnson over a lame Photoshop of Sarah Palin and President Obama.

The small truth – that the picture’s provenance began with a woman who is a registered Democrat – can’t be allowed to stand in the way of a Big Truth – that the picture is a right-wing assault on Obama. I’ve got to compliment Patterico as embracing the ambiguity here while for some reason Charles seems to reject it (…in the last collision with Charles here, I think we may have been trying to make the same point).

The reality there is doubtless as complex as the reality of the story behind Blind Side. And it only fits the Big Story if you chop off it’s legs, or better still ignore it.

I don’t like Big Story thinking. It suggests that people who are uncomfortable with the ambiguity of reality. I like thinking that can take a position and embrace the facts that challenge it.

I wish Melissa Anderson and Charles Johnson showed more of that kind of thinking….in fact, I wish a lot of people on many sides of many arguments could.
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h/t The Jawa report

…not bad for Marines!!
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To everyone!!

Sorry for the hiatus…family matters (i.e. family is more important). But here’s to a closing out 2009 and opening a great 2010 for all of us.

And a special thought for Biggest Guy and his mates…may 2010 be smooth for them as well.
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