The simple(ton's) world v. the world we actually live in.

One thing I try to do every day is read the "Letters to the Editor" in the Washington Post. I don't really read the editorials themselves, and as for the columnists, there are only a few I might read: Colbert King, for example. Most of the others are either bland or idiotic. Charles Krauthammer falls into the latter category.

It's unclear exactly when he slipped into dementia, but it's been a while. While I don't read him regularly because I have enough stupidity in my life, every now and then I hear about what he's written or the headline to his column seems particularly hateful. Today in the Post, there were three letters to the editor about Mr. Krauthammer's recent column on Syriana. Well, I'd seen Syriana and thought maybe I should go back and look at the column to see what nutty things Mr. K's unstable mind might conjure up.

Sure enough, right off the bat, he (or his headline handler) is pulling the classic post-9/11 trope: "Oscars for Osama" the column title screams, proving through assertion that if you're critical of US capitalism/imperialism (or in fact if you call US military and political intervention "US imperialism"), then you are of course an Osama devotee. For Mr. Krauthammer, you are either marching in line or you are a bomb-planter.

Mr. Krauthammer seems to skip over the messy fact that everyone in the movie is implicated in one way or another with a failing, even the Arab prince whom Krauthammer likes to see as the center of the movie. Other people I've spoken to consider Clooney to be the center. However, the movie is decentered and destabilized by shifting allegiances and multiple storylines. What Krauthammer, revealing his own inability to read complex situations, describes as follows:

"The true distinction of "Syriana's" script is the near-incomprehensible plot -- a muddled mix of story lines about a corrupt Kazakh oil deal, a succession struggle in an oil-rich Arab kingdom, and a giant Texas oil company that pulls the strings at the CIA and, naturally, everywhere else..."

I suppose Chuck would deny that multi-national energy companies have a great interest in lines of succession in oil-rich countries, or that --Cheney's energy panel aside -- the industry exerts influence on foreign and economic policy, but those of us stuck in the real world know better. I suppose Chuck has never heard of US complicity in Operation Condor, in toppling Chilean President Allende, in the CIA-assisted assassination of Congo's Patrice Lumumba, and even such recent events as the Bush administration's initial support for the attempted coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. There's really a long history of the sort of things happening that Krauthammer scoffs at... Chuck, Chuck, come back to Earth!

Even more amazingly mind-boggling is Krauthammer's utter misreading of the suicide bombing that takes place in the movie (and is similar to the attack on the USS Cole). Krauthammer considers the bomber to be the "moral heart of the film" and describes the action in this way:

"The explosion, which would have the force of a nuclear bomb, constitutes the moral high point of the movie, the moment of climactic cleansing, as the Pure One clad in white merges with the great white mass of the huge terminal wall, at which point the screen goes pure white. And reverently silent."

I know it's tough to explain to Mr. Krauthammer subtle things like symbolism, but the reason the film goes white is that the storyline for the bomber ended there: we weren't seeing the event in the third person, but rather through the bomber's perspective and it's highly doubtful the bomber would survive that crash to see all the pretty explosions that Mr. K is probably used to. The film, however, does not valorize the bomber's perspective as Krauthammer contends.

What Mr. K's reading cannot allow is that the bomber isn't simply an object of pure hate -- he isn't the nasty swarthy villain with a dagger between his teeth that Mr. Krauthammer grew up with: he is a migrant worker who falls prey to a fanatical delusional interpretation of religion; surely Mr. Krauthammer would admit that religious leaders sometimes influence their followers in ways that are not exactly healthy or laudable. Nor can he stomach the idea that many bombers are recruited out of the desperate masses most vulnerable to manipulation: people whose ways of lives are unstable, poverty-stricken, and offer little hope.

So we've got Krauthammer misreading the film's portrayal of the suicide bombing -- it is hardly a heroic act in the film's narrative -- and further we have Krauthammer placing this portrayal at the moral heart of the film. I would submit rather that the moral heart of the film is not located in any particular character, but rather from a narrative viewpoint that understands political, economic, and social events as intertwined and holds in contempt leaders who preach one set of ideals while adhering to quite another.