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I saw Riding Giants the other day, and I’d recommend it to just about anyone. For those who aren’t familiar with the film, it’s a documentary about surfers throughout history, and their attempts to ride bigger and bigger waves. (Currently, they’re up to about 75 feet). Anyway, the interviews with famous big-wave surfers from the 1950s through the present are fantastic, because you can watch how a small, unique sub-culture (literally like a few dozen guys, at the outset) gets swallowed up by the press and is eventually transformed into something you can buy (into) at the mall! One of my favorite interview subjects was Greg Noll, a foul-mouthed icon from the early days of the sport. Everything he says is “Fuck this” and “What bullshit!” and it must have been awesome to hear this guy talk in the fifties when you could probably really offend people with that kind of talk. =) So anyway, he’s talking about the movie Gidget, that came out in 1959 launching 1000+ surfboards towards SoCal, Hawaii and elsewhere, changing the face of the sport, as well as America’s impression of it forever. In Gidget, as well as literally dozens of other copycat movies that followed, Noll is shocked by the total lack of effort that goes into making the surfing scenes look “real.” He says something like, “There’s three guys, sitting out there on perfectly calm water, having a conversation about girls or whatever and then the next thing you know they cut to these same guys dropping into a 20-foot wave! I mean, who fucking believes this shit?!” I was reminded of this quote when I read a recap of Laura Bush’s speech, last night at the RNC, where she claimed:

Back in the really bad days of the Cold War, we had to practice sheltering under our school desks in case of a Soviet missile attack. Because of strong American leadership in the past, we don’t hide under school desks any more.

I’m literally beyond words here. There are a million jokes I could make at her expense, but I just can’t decide where to start! And the awful thing is, there are millions upon millions of people out there who “fucking believe this shit!” I mean, I’m trying… I’m really, really trying not to come off all elitist and hysterical here, but if you cannot see that “hiding under your desk” and “buying duct tape” are the exact same thing, then I just don’t know what to tell you. Fear eats the soul, and the Bush administration has made fear the central plank of their platform since 9/11 (and before, if truth be told. Because what does it mean to be socially conservative, if not to be afraid of change, whether that change exists as the political and social movements of the 1960s, the acceptance of different sexualities, or any other change that can be perceived as a “threat” to the “American way of life”). So yeah, I guess I’m pretty pissed about the state of things, but really I just feel bad for everyone living in fear, even if it’s their own willful self-deception that keeps them there. In closing, I’ll relate another great story from Riding Giants. This one comes from a big-wave surfer who is also a practising MD. He’s talking about (as many of the interviewees are) how “nothing else matters” when he’s dropping into a wave, and how being dashed against the rocks and caught beneath the surface on many occasions has forced him to confront his mortality and get past his fears to focus on what’s important in his life. He goes on to say that his work with the terminally ill puts him into contact with people who are facing similar fears and that while his job is often depressing, he can take comfort in watching “the bullshit fall away as these people really start to live, often for the first time.” So anyway, I hope America doesn’t have to die for things to get better, but maybe something of that scale is what’s necessary to realize the untapped potential of our nation’s future. See you at the beach! =)