War and Peace

The above video is a collaboration between U2 and Green Day. You may wish to watch it before reading further.

I read about what this video was from another blog, and so there were spoilers. In the spoilers, it says that halfway through, it imagines what happens if the US had responded the way it should have during Katrina.

Now, this is a video, so exactly how do you do this?

You take liberties, of course.

So you imagine hundreds of fighter jets flying over New Orleans, even if they're not exactly ideal candidates for rescue. The idea is to juxtapose scenes you'd expect in a miliary strike (a very heavy military strike--basically only stuff you see in Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica) serving as rescue.

But just in case that's not entirely clear, you add a typical news crawl at the bottom indicating that the military has recalled troops from Iraq to deal with the Katrina crisis.

And as silly as that seems, because the logistics feels all wrong, it is reasonably effective at getting its point across. There's this old saying of beating swords into plowshares. This is a modern equivalent, of using US weapons of mass destruction into vehicles of rescue and hope.

So while I might laugh at the idea of this kind of rescue from a pragmatic view, it is a rather clever idea if your point is to say that we should stop the war and use those resources to good, and for that, I have to credit the creative artists who thought of this (I suppose the idea may be obvious to you, but it wasn't so obvious to me).