When Ronbo Reagan rose to CEO of the U$, I told a lifelong friend of mine: "What's going to happen, now, is an economic depression that'll turn this into just another Third World Country- and then World War Three." He told me I was full of ****. Now he knows better, but he no longer talks to me. When WWIII (aka, "Operation Desert Storm") started, I was working on a weekly Public Access show (EXPERIMENTAL FILM AND VIDEO). One night, after King George had decreed that his oil fields had been secured, we were doing a show with an exchange student from Russia operating one of the cameras. As was their wont, the producers of the show turned to me the moment I walked in the door and asked me what we would be doing that night. I asked who the new kid was. When I found out, I suggested (and we broadcast it thus, live) an "interview" with a Russian citizen (the exchange student). I was the off-camera "interviewer" and I asked him what he thought of American television. I told him before we began to simply say anything he wanted to in Russian and I would "translate" it for our viewers. He began to speak in Russian. To this day, I have no idea what he said, but my translation went something like this: "Your American TV, it really bad. Me watch mini-series other night, OPERATION DESERT STORM. Very bad. Special effects really cheesy. Even in Russia, we make better war movie than this. George Bush very bad actor." It went on like that for a while (we had an hour to fill, and fill it we did), but you get the gist. We do what we can. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don't. (I just spent the better part of an hour in the freezing cold trying to save a cat that had been run over and left for dead. By the time I got her to her owner, she was able to sit up, though she was very, very badly injured. If she survives, it'll be nothing less than a bona fide miracle. But I didn't just drive by when I saw her lying there bleeding from both ends. I tried.) (By the same token, I once convinced a local pedophile- who was living right next door to me when he got busted the second time- that he might want to live... elsewhere. He moved away for a decade or so, but he's back, now- and living directly across the street from me. But I tried.) Like TORTURING DEMOCRACY, WAR MADE EASY is an important documentary, and one that we all need to see. As WAR MADE EASY so clearly makes clear, the Fourth Estate (so often co-opted by the bald-faced liars that are our political leaders) was fully foreclosed on during the Republican reign of the past 30-plus years. Only an idiot could watch GNN (the Government News Network- "the only news you need to know") and buy the Party Line, lock, stock and barrel. But it happens- every day. People made stupid by television are led like lemmings to the edge of the cliff(s) and told to step off. And do. "Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see," the Greeks once told us. I live by that admonition, and have since I was a kid. Because, despite what our political leaders (who have handed us yet another Great Depression) would have you think, "The object of the Superior Man is Truth." Ask Confucius.
