The Business Army - one

This is a rather shaky Google upload of the video I made around one of my screenplay-novels; I just uploaded it to YouTube as well and think the quality there is better; I'll try again when the connection between this site and that has its chance to ferment, or whatever it is computers do between just-fresh uploading and accessibility.

I'm posting it now because of the attention Dinesh D'Sousa's crockumentary 2016 Obama's America is receiving. By coincidence, I noticed D'Sousa's book yesterday while with my wife in the Kyobo bookstore in Kyoungbukkong. (This was a day before a wire story about the book caused a stir -- in other words, I knew nothing about the title.)

One thing that is striking about how the discourse is being framed is the degree to which this documentary is being compared to other American political documentaries that allegedly exist in opposition to what D'Sousa is doing (those other docs being leftist, this one being rightist). The discourse can be then seen as one of ideological conflict -- which, of course, exists. But it seems to me there is another way to see what D'Sousa's film serves as a symbol of, and that is as part of a historical tradition that I don't think Farhenheit 911 and An Inconvenient Truth partake of.

In a sense, any progressive president (and arguably Obama barely ranks on that metric) is a "problem" not because of what he does but what he (or she) might do: The challenge becomes one of pre-emptive containment, not criticism of de facto policy.

There is a parallel here -- and, in my opinion, a strong one -- between this kind of speculative/oppositional discourse and the kind of rhetoric Franklin Roosevelt was confronted with when he was elected. He was "an enemy to his class", someone who did not "run true to form", someone too "ill" to be president ... more to the point, he was a Red, and his policies (viewed at the time by Stalin as a clever means of maintaining a capitalist system the Soviets themselves thought was ripe for collapse) were depicted as crypto-radical. Roosevelt's radicalism primarily lay in the future....