Overseas Roundup

Happy Friday everyone!!

Let's take a look overseas and see what the rest of the world is seeing for news these days...

We'll start in Hong Kong...neighbor to the world's most populous Muslim country. (Indonesia). They're none to happy about the latest bit of Hollywood claptrap....and so the propaganda continues. How is this really any different than what Leni Riefenstahl used to do?

For all its liberal persuasions, the Hollywood film model is firmly rooted in the "if you are not with us, you are against us"

line of neo-conservative thinking.

Cinema is a two-dimensional art form, lending itself more to simplistic caricatures than either literature or its poor cousin theater ever could. While initial audiences were impressed with screen size and vistas of unvisited destinations, the advent of television upped the stakes. Needing to provide a compelling excuse for people to be weaned away from the idiot box, films simply became more grandiose and, in so doing, changed the economics of the business forever.

While productions of yore revolved around the big studios, the need for grandiosity ushered in the age of the film star. Thus movies became about the actor, rather than "merely" a compelling view of an oft-told story. This marked cinema's departure from its parents, namely literature and theater.

This departure is too often glossed over by the news media when reviewing cinema as an art form. In particular, the advent of close-ups in film accentuated facial features, exaggerating the impact on the audience. That change had the less-than-subtle impact of forcing the audience to identify with or against the screen personalities.

In other words, whether you like the face on the screen becomes the dominant consideration. The option of having an equivocal opinion on characters bathed in shades of gray that is afforded in both literature and to a lesser extent theater is mostly unavailable in cinema unless the filmmaker chooses not to engage a mainstream audience.

Forcing art to conform to the audience's empathy produces horrible results all too often, a recent example of which would be Hollywood's homicide of Homer's Iliadin the film Troy, which not only sees the Trojans as the heroic figures but also portrays the Greeks as marauding hooligans. The mistake would be to evaluate the film as a rendition of the Iliad, rather than as a political commentary on the current US government, an intentional rebuke of America's war on Iraq.

Turning to the Middle East, it appears that George Bush's most reliable ally in the region is starting to turn. This article comes from Saudi Arabia, and it's stunning in its frankness.

RIYADH, 29 March 2007 — Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah yesterday lambasted the “illegitimate foreign occupation” of Iraq by US-led forces and urged Arab leaders attending a historic summit in the Saudi capital not to allow foreign powers to determine the future course of the region.

In his keynote address opening the two-day summit, King Abdullah called upon Arab leaders to usher in a new era in Arab joint work while holding them accountable for disunity in the Arab world over the past decades.

“In Iraq, blood flows between brothers in the shadow of an illegitimate foreign occupation and hateful sectarianism, threatening a civil war,” King Abdullah said after taking over the presidency of the 23-member Arab League from Sudan’s President Omar Bashir.

Washington, however, justified its occupation of Iraq. “The US is in Iraq at the request of the Iraqis and under a UN mandate. Any suggestion to the contrary is wrong,” said National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

The Saudi leader also called for an end to the international blockade on the Palestinians. “It has become necessary to end the unjust blockade imposed on the Palestinian people as soon as possible so that the peace process can move in an atmosphere far from oppression and force,” the king said.

Saudi Arabia last month brokered a unity government between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction and Hamas, hoping it would help end a crippling Western blockade imposed after the Islamist group took office over a year ago. The summit drew a number of world and Muslim leaders, including Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

We'll end up in Mexico...where they can say what we've know all along. We don't have a president, we have a caricature.

George W. Bush's citizen approval ratings are in free-fall … 28 percent! As Hugo Chávez said recently, he has become a political corpse. The cartoon by Mike Luckovich in last Sunday's New York Times is illustrative: Karl Rove, the sinister adviser to the President, walks into the Oval Office to deliver the "good news:"

"Thank God for the scandal over Federal Prosecutors, because it's eclipsing the Scooter Libby fiasco, which has obscured revelations over the deplorable state of Walter Reed Medical Center" … One after another.

As its mandate concludes, problems, violations and abuses of power cascade from an administration characterized by its scorn for the law - to all laws, national and international. The list is endless: the invasion of Iraq, in flagrant violation of international law and resolutions of the United Nations Security Council; the hoax over weapons of mass destruction cooked up with the help of Tony Blair (another political corpse); the violations of the Geneva Conventions at the abominable Abu Ghraib prison; and the illegal kidnapping of suspects, who were subsequently transported in CIA aircraft to be tortured in the secret prisons of "friendly" nations.

And what can one say about the so-called "Patriot Act," which allows the government to eavesdrop on the telephone conversations, electronic communications and bank transactions of its own citizens to look for "terrorists?" There is also the case of Guantánamo Bay, where hundreds of prisoners classified with the elusive title of "enemy combatants" are rotting, detained without legal representation and without any hope of clarifying their situation.

The most recent scandal - in a government that has gone from bad to worse - involves the Attorney General, a lackey that has legally covered up or "dressed up" Bush's illegal conduct. In the most recent episode, Alberto Gonzales fired 93 federal prosecutors, all appointed with Senate approval to serve in the country's Federal courts, in order to replace them with unquestioning Republicans - who would cover their backs and continue prosecuting, beyond Bush's mandate, alleged violations of law that are probably unconstitutional.

So, it's the end of another week. Let's be careful out there.