PrintNovember 20, 2010
Crimes against Truth
I'd like to put certain people in the Hollywood community on trial for crimes against truth. I don't mean try them, convict them, and sentence them to prison. I mean try them, convict them, and sentence them to walk around in shame, with the knowledge that the rest of the world knows how dismally they have failed to care about truth on this planet. That is the punishment they deserve for their despicable refusal to face up to the facts that refute their left-wing theories of how life really works.
I am not much of a television watcher these days, nor do I rush off to the movie house to see new releases from Hollywood. But I do get Netflix, and I occasionally stumble onto a movie that gets past my preliminary vetting process. This past Veteran's Day was just such an occasion.
Due to an interesting but misleading jacket-cover description, I watched a movie entitled In the Valley of Elah. It starred Tommy Lee Jones, whose movie presence I find interesting, and Susan Sarandon, whose left-wing politics I find contemptible. According to the jacket cover, the movie is about the disappearance of an "exemplary soldier ... after returning from Iraq" and the determination of his concerned father, a retired Army sergeant, to investigate the disappearance. Nominally, that is what the movie is about, but that is not why the movie was made.
Supposedly based "on events reported ... in a Playboy magazine article" (whatever that means), the movie insinuates that American soldiers are racist troglodytes, drug addicts, and whoremongers, conscienceless assassins of little children, cowards and liars, and murderous drunks who fall out with one another for no reason at all. If ever someone wanted to portray a motley collection of tortured souls heading to Hell, the soldiers in this movie would be their template. But there is a problem with the movie. The problem is that it just isn't true. In fact, it is as untrue as untrue can be.
Because my wife works as a counselor for military families, I have some insight into what kind of men and women are in America's armed forces. As a rule, they are kind, courteous, community-oriented, loyal, brave, compassionate, and generous-hearted. They routinely look for ways to be helpful to other people. They are humble in their outlook and expectations. And most of them believe in God and in the importance of personal goodness. In other words, they are almost exactly the opposite of the psychologically perverted and fundamentally soulless fiends depicted in the movie.
So what is going on here? Why do major parts of Hollywood and the television industry insist on vilifying America's armed forces? Why, for example, was Jane Fonda so loud in her protest against "America's war on the poor, defenseless" Vietnamese and so utterly silent about the Communist murder of millions of Cambodians after the United States pulled out of Southeast Asia? Why is Susan Sarandon so passionate about protecting the Taliban theocracy and Saddam Hussein's thugocracy and so completely indifferent to America's democracy? Do the rights of the Taliban religious police and Saddam Hussein's torturers matter more than the rights of the innocent civilians who were murdered by the thousands on September 11, 2001? Does American blood mean less to the Hollywood left than other people's blood? Or is it that the American left, with its cultural Marxist mindset, neither knows nor cares about the truth?
Long ago, some wise person first observed that the best way to fight fire is with fire, so if someone wants to expose the Hollywood left, there is no better way to do it than to make a movie about them or put them into a television mini-series. Therefore, I propose that some creative soul produce a mock trial, and that it be televised like the O.J. Simpson case. Actors can be hired to play the defendants, who for reasons of modesty probably wouldn't want to play themselves. The script might be written by someone like David Mamet, a recovering liberal. Perhaps a patriot like Gary Sinise might be persuaded to play the prosecutor. Susan Sarandon might even agree to play the defense attorney -- at union scale, of course.
And although I am a lawyer, I would like to play the judge absolutely without charge. The reason I would do such an un-lawyerly thing is that the defendants' crimes against truth are a threat to this nation, and every red-blooded American patriot should be proud to stand up and fight for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. The men and women in our armed forces do it every day, all around the world. Here in the States, the least we can do to honor what they do is to make a movie that honors the truth.
