My older readers may remember special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen's work in the 50's-early 60's. How thrilled we unjaded children were as we munched on our still-affordable popcorn and candy at the sight of Harryhausen's heroes doing battle with stop-motioned action figures and ordinary garden lizards festooned with plastic fins, which made for serviceable dinosaurs.
It was Harryhausen's misfortune to come into his own during that awful, awkward interregnum in special FX technology that fell between the still-novel stop-motion photography of Meriam C. Cooper's original
King Kong and today's cgi that gave us Peter Jackson's
King Kong. One of the cheap tricks used by the otherwise talented and resourceful Harryhausen was sticking the lizard in the foreground while the "smaller" actors, standing in front of a projection screen, pretended to rattle their sabers and spears against a garden variety reptile more outrageously bloated in size than a Halliburton or Exxon executive. This is, we all know, what filmmakers call "forced perspective."
The intellectual Zelda Rubensteins of the Bush administration are doing this in two ways with both the war in Iraq and the GWOT. When they rake over the coals an infuriatingly compliant media for "insisting" on reporting the uglier (read: inconvenient) side of the war in Iraq, they're trying to force our perspective by superimposing into the foreground stories and pictures of soldiers and Marines fixing bikes for Iraqi children and handing out candy. They want you to focus, instead, on the little rebuilding work that's actually being done. Since when are 130 unstarted and unfinished hospitals and clinics newsworthy, even when they've already been paid for?
Bush and his rodeo clowns want you to think that this isn't a war with actual fatal consequences but a slap-happy peace-keeping, humanitarian effort and three and a half year-long photo op. But what's lost on the administration is that what they're allowing to be shown to us is completely inconsistent with the big, hole-y bag of lies that got us into this quagmire and equally inconsistent with the imperfectly-hidden facts of this war, which are corruption, cruelty, incompetence and death.
And Bush uses a forced perspective by making us think the terrorists are closer than they actually are and that St. George is the only thing standing between us and the lizard with the plastic fins posing as a dragon.
Warning: Terrorists, ersatz dinosaurs and other objects in mirror are actually further away than they appear.
Once again, this posture is inconsistent with the facts. It's notable that with the last three tapes released by Osama bin Laden and the last by al Zawahiri, the Bush administration's response was basically a big ole Ho Hum. Terror threat level? Nah, jes' keep it where it is, whatever color it is. Yellow, orange? Whatever.
And let's talk about port, reservoir, and nuclear plant security, securing the northern border, the big cold place where the non-Mexican terrorists occasionally come over from Canada. Ho hum, ho hum and again they say ho hum.
Yet, they keep trying to force our perspective in a losing attempt at fooling us into thinking that the USA PATRIOT Act, the NSA wiretaps, the financial data mining, the REAL ID Act and a whole host of other acts of legislative sodomy are necessary to defending us against terrorists that are so close that they're right under our 300,000,000 bloody noses.
And this is the guy who'd accused Kerry during the '04 debates of "sending out mixed messages"?
Here's an unambiguous message that's going out straight to George Dubya from Pottersville:
It is stupid, reckless and, frankly, despicable to send kids into battle without adequate armor, training or a strategy for victory and withdrawal simply to keep us dependent on Middle East oil. It is equally stupid, reckless and, frankly, despicable to keep trying to sell such a lemon of a war to a nation without being willing to show us the consequences and fallout of that war.
Yet the administration keeps waving away criticisms of the war and how it's being handled like a beer and egg fart in an elevator because we have bigger issues than our kids, Moms and Dads, sisters and brothers, girlfriends and boyfriends, nieces and nephews and best friends getting slaughtered and decapitated.
It's making English the official language (behind closed doors).
It's repealing the estate tax.
It's stopping flag-burning.
It's Social Security reform.
It's keeping gay men from putting rings on eachother's fingers in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
It's Mexicans illegal immigrants.
It's telling women what they can or can't do with their uteri.
And it's staying in power. At all costs.
And when you look at these faux dinosaurs being thrown at us, more and more Dave Chappelle's abrupt trip to Africa doesn't seem like such a bad idea, after all.
JP
http://welcome-to-pottersville.blogspot.com