Demosophia

This Is Your Brain, On Wishes

Sully posts a clueless review of Team America. It's like he saw a different movie than I did:

Sanity against the moronic ra-ra pro-Americanism of many in the Bush camp, who seem blind to any empirical evidence, prudence, or skepticism in their attempt to protect us from Jihadist terror; and sanity against the moronic Sontagian left that fails to see any danger in the first place (except that from president Bush, of course).

Well, the Sontagians all got killed defending the terrorists and the "moronic ra-ra pro-Americans" kicked the hell out of both the terrorists and the Sontagians. Not much nuance there. To me, the point was that the job of taking on totalitarianism just isn't for professional skeptics, and a winning strategy doesn't rest on prudence. The wishful-thinking virus seems to have infected Sullivan awhile back by way of his Achilles heel, and he can't even interpret a satirical comedy correctly any longer. It's sort of sad to see this happen to someone, but there it is.

One of the pitfalls of satire is that, inebbitubrry, lots of people just don't "get it." I think Andrew Sullivan took a wild swing, and missed by a mile. Of course they're also satirizing the US itself, but in a sympathetic way. Most of the heros in their movies and South Park episodes are iconoclasts, so the notion that the US demolishes sacred images is less a criticism than a kind of admiration of our single-mindedness. The idea they're demolishing in the movie is that the Louvre really matters that much in the scheme of things... given that the enemy wants to destroy a great deal more than the Louvre. Obsessing about the details is, at best, an advisory capacity, not a direction-defining function.

Anyway, there are three kinds of people in the world. Double heh.

Update: I just wanted to add, in relation to Roger L. Simon's comment about Roger Ebert's increasingly politicized reviews, that I went to high school with Gene Siskel (Culver Military Academy, class of '63) and I think Gene would have loved this movie. He had a "full bodied" sense of humor. Pity you're not still around, Gene.

Posted by Demosophist at October 18, 2004 01:59 AM | TrackBack