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As we celebrate the Declaration of Independence, here's a fun exercise in critical thinking and visual interpretation. This photo of Sarah Palin, taken by Brian Adams for a spread in Runner's World magazine, represents a veritable firecracker-explosion of patriotic and political symbolism. (Likewise the use of familiar props in this photo and this one.) Given Palin's views and background, how would you interpret it?

Click on photo to enlarge.

If critics have become irrelevant, it has little to do with how many people say they pay attention to them or how many movies get press screened before they open. No, I submit it's because so many people don't even know what criticism is. They think it means "saying something bad." Listen to the way they reason argue with one another. Watch the talking heads on TV. Listen to the little kids on the playground, or the couple in the bar having a marital spat. News reporting or blog commenting. It's all the same. Critical thinking is not a value prized by our culture.

"I criticize something!"

"I disagree! So, I criticize you back! You are a criticizer!"

Never mind specifics, subtleties, reasons -- they're superfluous. All that matters is point-of-view, pro- something or anti- something else. A "debate" is merely a series of unrelated expressions of agreement or disagreement -- usually expressed as disparaging characterizations of the other person. Republicans say this, Democrats say that, nothing else exists outside of their opinions. In this climate, that quotation from Daniel Dennett in the upper right column is indecipherable. See Monty Python's "Argument Clinic" sketch, where argument is hopelessly confused with abuse and contradiction.

So, say whatever you want about "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" or President Obama or Michael Jackson or Bill Maher (to cite a few recent topics hereabouts). What matters is only whether the remarks are critical (in which case you will be characterized as a naysayer) or approving (in which case you will be characterized as praisegiver). In either case, what you actually said will be considered trivial by many, if it is considered (or noticed) at all.

I saw "The Wiz" (1978) and I saw "Captain EO" (1986) and I never saw Michael Jackson the movie star. For the longest time, it seemed, he was supposed to grow up to become one, but it didn't happen that way. Not long after 1982's Thriller he began transforming into something almost unrecognizable, unphotographable -- something that allegedly had to do with Diana Ross, hyperbaric chambers and, perhaps, the Elephant Man's bones. Whether an illness or a form of self-mutilation, it was a shame. The appealingly handsome young man on the cover of Off the Wall and Thriller morphed (as in the famous "Black or White" video) into a synthetic science-fiction construction that could only have inhabited an artificial universe like those of his two best-known big-screen appearances. He still worked for large crowds on stage, but -- for cosmetic and psychological reasons we may never understand -- close ups came to seem like a very bad idea.

As alien and unreal as he presented himself by the mid-1980s, the one thing that seemed genuine about him was his damage. His music became as polished and mask-like as his visage, and equally devoid of mature emotion. It may have been pop music for theme parks, but it wasn't for adults -- and he didn't seem to want to be thought of as one.

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" (aka "ROTFL" to those who are rolling on the floor laughing about it) reportedly cost somewhere between $200 and $300 million to make, and the only special effects the critics are talking about are the ones of humping dogs. Or maybe they're humping dog-bots.

Anyway, there's nothing like an Uwe Boll movie to bring on the critical invective. Did I say "Uwe Boll"? I mean Michael Bay, of course. How did I get those two confused? What I mean to say is that critics who hate this movie don't just hate this movie, they find it anti-movie.

Why? It's just a summer screen-filler, isn't it? Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com thinks it stinks:

U.S. Senate apologizes for slavery and segregation: http://bit.ly/G46Cu. Bob Byrd breaks down on Senate floor. "Too soon. Too soon."

I think that's a funny joke. Normally, I find set-up/punch-line jokes the lowest form of humor (far below puns and slapstick in their paucity of imagination), and I regard them warily, not unlike the way Thoreau viewed "all enterprises that require new clothes." But I cracked up when I saw this tweet from Robert A. George. To find it funny, I guess you'd have to know that Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) is very, very old, and that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in his youth. But in the ad hominem '00s, many people would first look at the identity of the joke teller before deciding if it was humorous.

Robert A. George, eh? Wait a minute -- he's a conservative and a libertarian! He's black! He's a naturalized American citizen, born in Trinidad (and Tobago)! He's a Catholic! He's a blogger, a Twitterer, a Facebooker, a New York Post columnist, a stand-up comedian, a comic-book geek! Soooooo, of course he's going to make that joke about Bob Byrd, right?!?!

This seven-minute 2008 propaganda film from the Iranian Intelligence Ministry (Ahmadinejad regime), begins with a White House conspiracy involving an animated Senator John McCain (aka Mr. Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb-Bomb Iran) and George Soros. It's kind of hard to tell who is who, but isn't it remarkable to see them cooperating at all? They discuss a plan to "contact authors, intellectuals, and influential people in society who have common interests with us" -- as well as "NGO's that share our goals" -- to expand on the mind-altering efforts used at international scientific conferences and harness the power of satellite TV to bombard the Iranian people with "regime change" propaganda.

The second part is a live-action espionage Afterschool Special about a young man who falls in with a bad crowd who conspire through such subversive technologies as e-mail to "pass on the instructions we get from satellite TV" and please their "friends in America." (The internal use of Twitter and Facebook were apparently not perceived as significant threats to the government at the time.)

The worst thing the U.S. could do right now is to feed Ahmadinejad's disinformation machine by lending credence to the government's claims that the protesters are not citizens with legitimate complaints but American tools with hidden agendas.

(tip: The Plank)

UPDATE below...

If you can't be out in the streets of Iran's cities with the protesters, this would be a good time to (re-)watch "Persepolis," Marjane Satrapi's animated memories of growing up under the Shah and the 1979 Iranian Revolution. (BTW, Satrapi herself has reportedly denounced the recent election results as fraud.)