Okay, I’m not REALLY caught up. But at least I’m writing up yesterday’s panels now, as opposed to the Showtime panels from Saturday.
First up on Sunday were the very heavy back-to-back CNN panels: “God’s Warriors,” a look at the religious aspect of war, hosted by Christiane Amanpour, and “Planet in Peril,” where Anderson Cooper explores the world and, basically, looks at how it’s all gonna fall apart if we don’t do something about it.
Warning: I’m not kidding, this is pretty heady stuff. Just so there’s no claims of false advertising…
Amanpour doesn’t believe that she makes any definitive conclusions about the three different religions – Islam, Judaism, and Christianity – tackled in “God’s Warriors.”
“To be frank, I don’t think that’s the role of these programs. Really, we set out to explore through individual voices, through, you know, certain groups, certain individual people not just what is, but how do they do it. So you’ll see through the Christian two hours, for instance, they do it through a series of academies, through their law schools, through their big events, for instance, BattleCry in San Francisco. They do it through grassroots politics. When we go to the Jewish segment, for instance, we do — we talk about the settlements, and it’s actually a fascinating, if I say so myself, view of what’s happened since the Six-Day War. We’re now in the 40th year — 40 years since the Six-Day War, and we see unfold this phenomenal story of what happened there. Now, you can make a conclusion afterwards that opportunities were there and chances were missed by everybody so that there still is not peace, you know, in that region right now, but what we’re showing is how they do it and how it happens rather than saying good, bad, right, wrong. We’re not doing that at all. And in the Muslim world, one of the things that I found is that, yes, we know the stereotype. We know the fringe that uses violence to achieve its means, but the fact of the matter is there is a huge Muslim population out there which is being encouraged to be democratic. Iraq has its problems as we know, but let’s say Egypt, for instance. They’ve had elections recently. Jordan we’ll do at the end of this year, two very strong American-Muslim allies, and what we found there, which I think is quite significant, is that, because of their political system up to now, because they’ve lived in authoritarian regimes up until now and they’ve had no real permissible political activity, the mosque and the Muslim brotherhood and those Islamic groups have been their outlet by default for politics. So I think for sure that democracy in the Middle East in some of these countries is going to go through a period of Islamist democracy, which does not mean violent. It just means that it does cause a sort of fear in the rest of the world, but I hope that we explain that actually these are these people and this is their avenue and this is where they’re going.”
Cooper was asked the inevitable question about his special: couldn’t this be perceived as a the-sky-is-falling situation? “Well, I mean, there are plenty other networks they can watch where they won’t get any information at all,” he replied, with a grin. Sobering slightly, he continued, “Look, I think there is hope. There’s no doubt — I think in this series you’re going to meet people who are working very hard on this issue. We spent days at Swiss Camp in the middle of Greenland with some scientists from NASA and the University of Colorado who are working on this issue. And if you ask them, ‘Are you hopeful?,’ as we did, they say yes, there is cause for hope. There is — and they can’t necessarily put a finger on ‘Well, this is reversible or this is not,’ because a lot of things aren’t reversible. Or, ‘In order to get some change, we’re talking about generational change. We’re not talking about change, even in our lifetime, fixing some of these problems.’ But certainly I’ve met a lot of good people along the way in doing this project who are working very hard. And, you know, maybe it’s small victories here or there or it’s the reintroduction of a species in Yellowstone, which seems to be successful. There are farmers and ranchers around there who don’t agree that it’s successful. They don’t like it because some of their livestock have been killed. But you certainly see that there are people working very hard on this issue. So if there’s cause for hope — I’m a big believer in the power of individuals. I think — we continue to cover New Orleans a lot. And to me, the only success that we have seen in New Orleans in the last two years since the storm has been because of individuals making a difference, standing up and helping people. I think that’s what we’re seeing, certainly with some of these people that we met along the way here.”
Some eyebrows were raised when it was announced that Jeff Corwin, of Discovery Channel fame, played a major role in “Planet in Peril,” but Cooper seemed almost surprised that anyone else would be surprised. “Jeff’s a remarkably talented guy. He has a great wealth of knowledge. He’s great to travel with. We just thought it would be — he’s an asset to draw on. It’s also nice because — for instance, in the Amazon we were repeatedly bitten by things, and Jeff could sort of identify them and tell us whether or not it was severe or not. One of our cameraman was actually hospitalized after being bitten by a spider. So those sorts of things — the other one had, actually, a spider lay eggs inside him. So it’s comforting when you have something growing in you, to have someone like Jeff there.” (When asked his first thought when he’s in a situation where one’s cameraman is having spiders laying eggs inside them, Cooper replied, “I think I need to get a new cameraman,” then clarified for the concerned audience members that the cameraman in question is actually on his way to China and loves being on the project.)
