Religions > Atheism > 'Invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity'
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Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"George Washington Hayduke" |
| Date: |
25 Sep 2004 09:37:13 PM |
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'Invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity' |
'Invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to
Christianity'
James Meek attends the world's first right-wing film festival
Friday September 24, 2004
The Guardian
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1311287,00.html
If you are travelling to an event that bills itself as the world's first
conservative film festival, it is prudent to do a little research in
advance. The premise of the American Film Renaissance, held in Dallas
recently, was that Hollywood is in the grip of a clique of anti-religious,
gay-loving, gun-hating, foreigner-appeasing, left-wing degenerates who
wilfully and foolishly fail to represent mainstream American opinion.
Cruising over the Atlantic on an American Airlines Boeing 777, en route to
Dallas, seemed a good opportunity to test the theory, particularly since I
had been seated squarely over the right wing of the aircraft. Films don't
come any more Hollywood mainstream than the ones they put 20 inches in
front
of your face on big US airlines.
Fourth on American's inflight bill was Saltwater, a four-year-old foreign
film, and hence immediately suspect, but not actually Hollywood's fault
(it's Irish). Third on the menu was Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius, about an
amateur golfer who achieved a clean sweep of the big world golfing trophies
in 1930 and went on to found the Augusta National Golf Club. I searched for
a Marxist parable on the hallowed greens. I did not find one.
I sought, too, for the dark satanic subtext of Harry Potter and the
Prisoner
of Azkaban, for the hidden message of evil that would draw American
youngsters into a life of godlessness and vegetarianism. I sought in vain.
Top of the bill was a movie called New York Minute, starring the Olsen
sisters, Ashley and Mary-Kate, as pretty blonde teenagers being pursued
through Manhattan by a truancy officer, a criminal bungler of less than
pantomime menace and a pair of lovable mussy-haired boys. Where was the
sex?
Where was the violence? Where were the drugs? Where, in this Desperately
Seeking Susan de nos jours, was the subversion to inflame conservative
America?
Our film festival is not really to chastise liberals, it's to chastise
conservatives," said Jim Hubbard in the lobby of the Intercontinental
Hotel,
Dallas, next day. Hubbard set up American Renaissance with his wife Ellen.
"Quit whining about Hollywood, quit threatening these meaningless boycotts,
get into the market of ideas and fight for what you believe. There was just
such a shortage of films and documentaries that represented a conservative
world view. For some reason, conservatives don't go into film. They don't
tend to be artists. I don't know why. That's just a tendency."
Hubbard has been described by the media as a wealthy Dallas attorney,
although he isn't. He's from Arkansas, not long out of law school, and has
done various jobs, including restaurateur and schoolteacher. He told me he
and his wife slept on a $200 futon from Wal-Mart. Ellen Hubbard did not
seem
happy he told me this.
The Hubbards set up the festival - mainly, they say, with money from family
and friends - after going to an arthouse cinema one night and being faced
with a choice between Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine and Frieda, a
film about Frieda Kahlo - "a film about a communist artist," as Hubbard put
it. "Neither of those films reflected our world view."
What upsets Hubbard and festival-goers is as much what Hollywood puts into
its films as what they leave out. Why, Hubbard asks, did they change Muslim
terrorists to right-wing terrorists from Europe when they filmed Tom
Clancy's The Sum of All Fears? And could I name any films in which the Viet
Cong were portrayed as villains? Well, there was The Deer Hunter, which won
the Best Picture Oscar in 1978; in it, sweating, screaming, vicious North
Vietnamese soldiers are shown dragging their US prisoners from rat-infested
cages and forcing them to play Russian roulette. Hubbard hadn't seen it.
The festival launch was in a small function room in the hotel that evening.
It wasn't Cannes. Not that it wanted to be. There were lots of black and
orange balloons, a buffet and a free bar, and about 80 film-makers,
journalists, producers and hard to label individuals drawn to the scent of
conservative gatherings like deer to a salt-lick, such as a well turned-out
Englishman, Jonathan Boyd Hunt - there to promote his research proving "the
very real threat that the BBC-Guardian axis poses to the interests of the
United States".
Among the crowd I got talking to was a marketing executive, Matt Tibbitts,
who was hoping to get his movie Echoes of Innocence accepted for Sundance.
It's about a girl whose childhood sweetheart vanishes but who holds true to
her promise to marry him. Tibbitts wouldn't tell me how long she waits, but
I had the impression it is a very long time. "She promised a guy in seventh
grade that he would be the one she married so, obviously, she's still a
virgin," said Tibbitts. "We want people of all faiths, of all backgrounds
to
come and view it, to start the dialogue, because virginity isn't just a
Christian thing."
To the outsider, it might appear that 2004 was honours even for the
anti-war
left and the pro-war Christian right in film terms in America: the former
had the astonishing commercial success of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11
to
enjoy, the latter the huge phenomenon of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the
Christ. They didn't see it that way at American Film Renaissance. They were
angry about Fahrenheit 9/11, certainly - surprisingly so, given that so few
of them had seen it. But they were still angry that the big studios had
scorned The Passion. Even their triumph at Gibson going off and showing the
big players how a Christian film could make money was tinged with rage.
Michael Medved, the right-wing talk radio host whose speech opened the
festival, is not a Christian, as he took pains to point out; he is Jewish,
which is why, he explained, he couldn't use a microphone. It was the
Sabbath. "The huge success of The Passion of the Christ has changed western
culture permanently and forever," he said. "The opposition to the film is
not because it was anti-Jewish but because it was pro-Christian ... People
who fear all religion are going to react to that movie like Dracula reacts
to the cross."
Medved's festival oration climaxed on the struggle over the legalisation of
gay marriages. "Every single image you see of homosexuality in the media is
positive, saintly," he said. "When was the last time you saw some degraded
[homosexual] character?" He accused the Massachusetts judges who ruled gay
marriage constitutational of jeopardising America's mission in the Middle
East. "We are engaged right now in trying to plant the seeds of democracy
in
Afghanistan and Iraq ... how do we try to teach Iraq about democracy when a
handful of unelected judges dictate to the American people?"
The festival opener was one of only two full-length feature films on show -
DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, a dramatisation of events in the Bush
administration on and after September 11 2001. Timothy Bottoms, best known
for his role in The Last Picture Show, plays George Bush. The movie
premiered on the Showtime TV channel and went swiftly to DVD from there.
Bottoms turned out for the opening, the only remote hint of anything
suggesting the glamour of Cannes, Sundance or Venice. He also had the only
limousine, and offered me a ride to the screening venue, which was a mile
away.
Bottoms distanced himself from the festival's agenda. "I'm not into that
conservative-liberal stuff," he said, pointing out that the last time he
played Bush, it was as a clown for the TV channel Comedy Central, in a
sitcom from the creators of South Park called That's My Bush. That was
before 9/11, however, and Bottoms said he played Bush serious this time so
as to give something back to the survivors of the terrorist attacks on
America.
"For that two-week period, America came together and helped pick George
Bush
up and gave him the spotlight and the stage to make a decision," said
Bottoms, sitting in the dark interior of the limo with a stubby plastic
bottle of water in one hand, as the lights on the vehicle's built-in bar
changed from orange to yellow to green. "The comparison is with Peter Pan.
Tinkerbell, her heart was broken, you think she's going to die, but Peter
Pan tells everyone they can bring her back if they just believe in fairies.
I think America did that to the president of the US, especially when he
went
to Ground Zero."
I vowed not to review the festival films, and I will be as true to that vow
as a good Christian girl guarding her chastity for her missing sweetheart.
Let the record show only that DC 9/11 does show Donald Rumsfeld predicting
the coming attack to his marvelling generals before it happens; that Paul
Wolfowitz, the real version of whom can be seen in Fahrenheit 9/11
chuckling, licking his comb and running it through his hair, is portrayed
in
DC 9/11 as looking like one of Samantha from Sex and the City's more
attractive lovers; that when a senior Democrat was portrayed on the big
screen, pledging loyalty to Bush, a moan of hate rippled through the
audience, like wind in the chimney; and that DC 9/11 includes quite a lot
of
dialogue like this:
George Bush: I have faith.
Laura Bush: We both do.
GB: I love you.
LB: And I love you.
GB: Amen.
Next morning kicked off with The Siege of Western Civilisation, by Herb
Meyer, a one-time minor official in the Reagan administration. "By" in this
context means that Meyer is the whole film: Meyer standing there on the big
screen and talking at you for 42 minutes about why Islam needs to be
dragged
at gunpoint towards modernity, on American terms, and about why it is more
important for American women to have children than to have careers.
Speaking
with the relish many men of his generation would reserve for discussions of
a forthcoming golfing trip, he talks of a coming second American civil war,
and explains how abortion is robbing America's retired people of their
welfare safety net.
"Abortion is a human tragedy but it's also an economic tragedy," he says.
"If these children had been allowed to live, we would not have the problem
we have now. We would have the consumer base, the tax base, and wouldn't be
facing a social security and Medicare crisis. Isn't it amazing? We never
think of it that way."
In true film festival style, Roger Aronoff, the maker of Confronting Iraq,
a
professionally-produced documentary intended to show why the US was right
to
launch its invasion, told the audience that he had only finished the final
edit the night before. He was proud of its watertight accuracy. He
challenged me to find any outright untruths in it, and, sure enough, it did
not contain outright untruths. Among the interviews with Christopher
Hitchens and Bernard Lewis, and the footage of Al Gore intercut with
footage
of the extreme fringe of the US peace movement, there were many outright
truths that it didn't contain either, particularly the outright truth that
no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq.
The documentaries rolled on. Silent Victory was about the valour of a
special forces unit in Vietnam. The unit's veterans spoke candidly and
movingly of the horror of war. Afterwards Don Hall, one of the veterans,
who
co-produced the film with his wife Annette, was asked what he thought of
John Kerry, who also served in Vietnam. Hall said he thought Kerry was a
charlatan and a fake. I asked him later why; he said that Kerry had won
more
medals than he deserved in too short a time.
"I used to be a Democrat," said Mrs Hall. "That was before I knew. Then
came
talk radio and the internet. The blinkers came off."
Next up on the big screen was another Republican woman. There she was,
talking to students at a campus meeting about Iraq. "Suppose, for the sake
of argument, this was a war just for oil," she told them. "We need oil. Why
not go to war for oil?"
This was Ann Coulter, the mind of Rush Limbaugh in the body of Lisa Kudrow,
a witty and blazingly right-wing columnist and chat-show guest who cannot
quite make up her mind whether she is a comedian or a serious political
analyst - a combination that may be easier to get away with over there. As
the star of the documentary Is It True What They Say About Ann? she had
American Renaissance festival-goers rolling over and purring. They already
knew her greatest moments off by heart: the time she called Joe McCarthy a
great American patriot, those liberal media types she bested head to head
on
TV (in these clips, at least), and her most notorious opinion, expressed
shortly after 9/11. She wrote: "It is preposterous to assume every
passenger
is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We know who the homicidal maniacs
are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade
their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
Towards evening, the focus shifted to gun control. I watched Innocents
Betrayed, a collage of archive footage devoted to the proposition that laws
restricting private gun ownership were responsible for the most notorious
genocides and civilian massacres of the 20th century, including Turkey's
massacre of the Armenians, Cambodia, Rwanda and the Nazi slaughter.
Hitler's
gun control laws came in for particular attention. "All over Europe, people
resist the Nazis, except in Germany," the narrator intoned. The message of
the film was so all-encompassing that I was surprised it didn't go for
broke
and argue that if Jesus had only owned a gun, he might still be alive
today.
Earlier, I'd spoken to the film's director, Aaron Zelman, who is also
executive director of an organisation called Jews for the Preservation of
Firearms Ownership. "It's a warning to human beings on how to stay alive,"
he said. "Our film is a warning to people to be on their guard, to be
alert,
to watch out for when governments go bad."
I asked Zelman about something that had been bothering me: that
traditionally film festivals welcomed film-makers who considered that their
films were, in some way or another, artistic, whatever political message
they might have; that, traditionally, polemics of any stripe didn't make
great films. I asked Zelman if he considered himself an artist. I might as
well have asked him if he considered himself a cross-dresser. "This is my
first effort at making a film," he said. "I'm not going to put the whole
artist label on myself, put on a beret, you know. Our documentary is based
on a book called Death By Gun Control. We adapted our book into a film:
that
I would not consider to be artistic."
Surely Hollywood was only interested in making money? Could he give an
example of a left-wing Hollywood movie? He could. "The one Michael Douglas
had; he was the stockbroker. I forget what it was called. That was a
message
showing how evil capitalism is ... Forget about the movies they make, just
their politics, look at who they support. Hollywood is famous for, 'If you
want to make money, everything else is secondary.' But the perception of
the
leftists in Hollywood is based on their political activities." (I checked
later: Oliver Stone's Wall Street was released 17 years ago, and proved
such
a setback to capitalist values that the Republicans stayed in the White
House for five more years.)
It was at around 7pm that I broke. I cannot pinpoint the precise time. It
may have been the moment when, in Larry Elder's anti-gun control
documentary
Michael & Me (made as a response to Bowling For Columbine) he reveals how
safe children really are with guns in the home by pointing out that, in
2001, only 50 kids died in firearms accidents in America. All I know is
that
when I came out and saw a line of Texans queuing up to see a non-festival
film, the unpleasant horror movie Resident Evil, I envied them.
I asked Hubbard why, when the festival was so preoccupied with Michael
Moore, he hadn't been to see either Fahrenheit 9/11 or Bowling For
Columbine. That wasn't fair, said Hubbard; he'd seen bits of Bowling, and
had read Stupid White Men. "I know what he said in public," said Hubbard.
The last film of the night, To End All Wars, the second of the festival's
two features, starred Kiefer Sutherland and Robert Carlyle as Allied
prisoners of the Japanese during the second world war. Neither actor was
present; the picture was, after all, three years old. It shows how
Christian
faith helps the POWs endure their ordeal, which is not without
crucifixions.
The movie never got a full distribution deal. Introducing it, Dave
Ellswick,
a talk radio host from Arkansas, said this was because of its Christian
content, rather than because it wouldn't have sold tickets.
"Conservatives have given up Hollywood and movies to the liberals and the
left," he said. "That's got to stop. We've got to be in the arena of ideas
because our ideas are right, they are the correct ones. They are not
teaching our kids these things; it's not on TV, it's in hardly any of the
books any more. You and I and that big silver screen and talk radio can
really start a renaissance. Enjoy the film!"
+--+
| Hezbollah endorses George W. Bush: http://www.hezbollah.ws/
| "Those who seek to bestow legitimacy must themselves embody it, and
| those who invoke international law must themselves submit to it."
| -- UN Secretary General Kofi Annan talking about Bush's war crimes.
+--+
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| User: "maff" |
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| Title: Re: 'Invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity' |
26 Sep 2004 03:10:14 PM |
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(George Washington Hayduke) wrote in message news:<10lcaun8i3o4e4@corp.supernews.com>...
'Invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to
Christianity'
James Meek attends the world's first right-wing film festival
Friday September 24, 2004
The Guardian
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1311287,00.html
[...]
James Meek
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=18510aff.0407190017.7ba7a15a%40posting.google.com
Christians -- Not All Bad!
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=15152
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