Hollywood Outscripted
I’m enjoying the unfolding story about the Port Management fubar. This is great entertainment: a behind-closed-door deal made public and met with outrage; a proud, defiant stance by Der Leader; a embarrassed admonition that the president was (gasp) uninformed along side a few weak pointers on how the opposition is blowing this all out of proportion.
Who scripts this stuff?
While I have no doubt the Dubai Ports World runs some of the most efficient systems in the world, I cannot laugh at the underlying hypocrisy in this farce. First, the administration has been blanketing the term “terrorist” over the Middle East to justify an illegal police action for the past four years. As a result, Americans are starting to look askance at their brown neighbors on Main Street., whom they previously ignored. Now, we have the same mentality bouncing back and our (for lack of a better term) leaders are intimating their detractors are racists.
You can’t have it both ways, guys. Either all foreign Muslims are in cahoots with the Christian devil, or they are not. Just because the bush family enjoys a long and fruitful history with Saudi princes, going way back to the Second World War, doesn’t justify this exception to the blanket characterization posited by George’s World, inc.
Now, we have to think (and Americans HATE THAT): Not all Muslims are radical extremist anti-American suicide splatter paint artists – the Saudis are our friends. It’s too much. Do all Saudis wear white like their princes? How can we tell them apart? And – most important – what does this have to do with Kate on “Lost?” Americans have no time for this dubious distinction. We’re too busy shuffling from house to car to work to car to the table to the TV, then to bed. Who cares as long as we have gas for the guzzler, juice for the appliances, and somewhere to stash the kids during the day?
Meanwhile, just outside Joe Sixpack’s reality is a place called Earth where the denizens are busy sniping at one another with words, ideologies and/or bullets – whatever is a hand. While this affords some entertaining moments, the whole place is unstable and could implode momentarily. Who’s to blame for an uncaring public consumed by money worries, for an uncaring government drunk on power, and for a few shrewd foreigners angling to take the behemoth down piecemeal?
Could Hollywood write a better angle than this?