To enjoy the movie you have to pretend. Americans, by the time they're adults, have spent more time pretending something is real - the pictures and sound presented by the television - than they have doing almost anything else except breathe.
It takes a lot of pretending to believe what we're being told now, but Americans are doing it, they're pretending as hard as they can.
When the news gets out that the suicide bombers are women, we're told they're mostly rich kids, privileged, as though there's some special tweak only rich kids have, to want to blow themselves to pieces and take a bunch of civilians with them.
The alternative view, that these are people who are so desperate and so angry that they're willing to die, isn't presented. But it's the only emotionally logical explanation, which even a minimal soul-search would reveal to be so; I mean after all, what would it take to get you to do that? To go into it knowing you were about to die?
Would you ever do that? Never? Or only as a last resort? Because it is pretty much the last resort isn't it?
Do your feelings about Iraqis change when you understand that half the population there is now under 18 years old?
When you understand that America is burning 380 million gallons of gasoline every day?
Think of how disgusting it would be to discover that the men who engineered the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 were hiding behind some innocent people, confident that for them to be found out, to be apprehended, you'd have to stop pretending. Knowing you can't. Or won't.
That's what's up. That's what's going on. And the men who did it are hiding behind you, so that you feel attacked when they are; the fantasy, the story, the movie is that innocent people are being attacked by the evil terrorists.
But the people doing the attacking don't care that much about you either way - they hate the men who hide behind you.
It takes a lot of pretending to believe what we're being told now, but Americans are doing it, they're pretending as hard as they can.
When the news gets out that the suicide bombers are women, we're told they're mostly rich kids, privileged, as though there's some special tweak only rich kids have, to want to blow themselves to pieces and take a bunch of civilians with them.
The alternative view, that these are people who are so desperate and so angry that they're willing to die, isn't presented. But it's the only emotionally logical explanation, which even a minimal soul-search would reveal to be so; I mean after all, what would it take to get you to do that? To go into it knowing you were about to die?
Would you ever do that? Never? Or only as a last resort? Because it is pretty much the last resort isn't it?
Do your feelings about Iraqis change when you understand that half the population there is now under 18 years old?
When you understand that America is burning 380 million gallons of gasoline every day?
Think of how disgusting it would be to discover that the men who engineered the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 were hiding behind some innocent people, confident that for them to be found out, to be apprehended, you'd have to stop pretending. Knowing you can't. Or won't.
That's what's up. That's what's going on. And the men who did it are hiding behind you, so that you feel attacked when they are; the fantasy, the story, the movie is that innocent people are being attacked by the evil terrorists.
But the people doing the attacking don't care that much about you either way - they hate the men who hide behind you.
