I Like the White World by Mark Butterworth

Author:Mark Butterworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2013-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

Documentaries look easy to make. You position a person in front of a camera, ask him questions, or go out with a cameraman to some place, take pictures, and ask people on the street some questions. Piece of cake. But if documentaries aren’t created for purely propaganda purposes, they need balance, so if I know you favor Marxism, for example, why would I, an avid anti-communist take the time to appear in your film where you interview me for three hours, and then cut what I say down to a two minute snippet which may or may not be the crux of my thinking? And the conclusion of the film is against me.

Why would I do that? Vanity, in many cases. People like appearing to be authorities; they want to be on TV or in a film for the minor publicity it gets, and can use it for self-promotion—Peter Ware, nuclear engineer, appeared as an expert in the documentary film, I Have Nukes For You.

If they’ve written a book (and usually have), it’s free advertising. If they support a charity or foundation, again, free solicitation, which may turn into donations.

But I have a subject where there are plenty of experts, but I can’t use them, or else I bore everyone to tears. The only people who give a damn about truth are theologians and philosophers. People might listen for a minute or two to someone explaining Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, but no one will listen for ten seconds to anything about Kant, Hegel, or Wittgenstein.

So I have to try and vet a talking head to find one who’s articulate, sensible, interesting, a pleasure to be with for a little while, and who lives locally.

Thank God for Amazon.com. I can go to the online bookstore, find all the contemporary books on philosophy, check out the authors—where they work or teach—and contact the ones who seem the most interesting and useful to our purposes.

Once I’d done that, I realized I could do the same for judges, lawyers, politicians, mayors, or elected officials, superintendents of schools, college presidents, business school administrators, religious ministers and theologians, scientists and engineers.

I wanted to get a California Supreme Court Justice, but the court is in San Francisco, so I had to settle for the appellate division (courts of appeal) of which there were a number of them in SoCal.

I don’t want to go into all the details, but I had to make about fifty phone calls to find two judges interested in discussing the matter which gave me the chance to interview them for a few minutes in their office to see what kind of an interviewee they would make; and if they thought participation might be worthwhile for them.

Neither was a good candidate. Both seemed confused by the subject of the film, neither was articulate or interesting. I thanked them for their time.

That taught me why you see the same “experts” on TV all the time. They’re people who know how to convey their thoughts intelligently and succinctly.

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