The blogosphere is quite abuzz over a British-made mock documentary that envisions a world in the wake of the assassination of U.S. President George W. Bush, where an Emporer Palpatine-like President Dick Cheney institutes a totalitarian government in the United States that instigates a cascading series of wars against Iran, Syria, Venezuela and Cuba.

While I think that filmmaker Gabriel Range made a film that he hopes is supposed to be taken quite seriously, this dark historical fantasy seems to be more of an exploration of the psychology of the darker, more twisted depths of paranoid agi-prop than an attempt to define a realistic alternative future in the event of an assassination.

Is Range truly convinced that the American people would spasmodically accept the nationality of a presidential assassin as a justifiable pretense for war? Americans have certainly had the opportunity, and yet did not try to invade Italy when Giuseppe Zangara tried to kill FDR, nor did we stage a knee-jerk invasion of Iraq in the wake of the 1993 attempt on President H.W. Bush's life by agents of Saddam Hussein.

No, Range assaults the intelligence and the individuality of all Americans, assuming we would embrace the imposition of his fictional totalitarianism and an ever-escalating series of wars without having any mechanisms, or even an inclination, to stop them from occurring. He lumps liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, into one stereotype of a bloodthirsty kill-anyone-we-can-because-we-can cartoonish monolith that has never existed in this or any other American lifetime.

We are not clones, Mr. Range.

More than any other, this country is naturally inclined to entertain radically different ideas at the same time, making this war-loving future United States of Death laughably sophomoric, and in the end, next to impossible to believe for anyone who knows the American psychology at all.

We'll learned nothing about an alternate American future from what I've read of this film, but I think we have learned quite a bit about what Gabriel Range thinks of Americans.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:39 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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