If you go to a movie this fall, in the lead up to the presidential election, you’ll be treated to a two-minute and thirty-five second music video/advertisement for the National Guard. You can view this Kid Rock propaganda here:
After being warmed up by this assault on your senses, you’ll get exposed to how badly divided our country has become and how much Hollywood is catering to that division. Last night, they ran five previews. One of them was about a Catholic priest and nun. The nun sought to prove that the priest had molested a child. Then there were the two left-leaning movies: The Watergate recap Frost/Nixon and Oliver Stone’s W. And two right-leaning movies, filled with car bombs and terror threats: Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Body of Lies and Clive Owen and Naomi Watts’ The International.
Can there be a bigger disconnect than that between Kid Rock’s version of patriotism and that expressed in W and Frost/Nixon? I don’t think so. When I was growing up we had a steady diet of movies where the Soviets were cast as the bad guys and the United States (and the UK) went out and kicked ass. There were the
James Bond movies, the Rambo movies, The Hunt for Red October, and so on. These have now been replaced with movies about how the CIA (and other intelligence agencies) are valiantly fighting against car bombers and kidnappers and terror cells. And Americans are getting subjected to these messages through trailers and Kid Rock’s propaganda piece even when they go to see fun movies like the Coen Brother’s latest mock-up of the intelligence agencies: Burn After Reading. Ironically, there is a scene in Burn After Reading that makes this seamless transition from red-baiting to terror-baiting explicit. A Deputy Chief of the CIA is telling the Director of the CIA that someone has taken a disc containing sensitive information to the Russian Embassy. And the DCI is incredulous. “The Russian Embassy? Why in hell would they bring it to the Russian Embassy.” For most of my life, that is exactly where someone would bring sensitive information if they wanted to get paid for it. But, I guess, in today’s world you would take it the Pakistani Embassy or something. Who knows? Watch the trailers (in the links above) and tell me what you think about the message being sent to the public in the lead-up to this election.
