Another film with Iran in the crosshairs: An effing bad idea.
What the world surely doesn’t need.
Patrice Greanville
The New York Times headline made me wince:
Jon Stewart to Direct Serious Film, Will Take Hiatus From ‘Daily Show’
The news—when read in more detail— was not reassuring. It would seem like one of the most colossal egos in the entertainment world is about to pull an ARGO on us. No I’m not referring to Affleck, whose Oscar for that perniciously-timed film is the official certification for Hollywood’s willing concubinage with imperial America. I’m talking about Jon Stewart, by far one of the most insufferable and self-impressed personalities in the modern pantheon of cheap idolatry for which American culture will surely be remembered—should the world survive its runaway ignorance and misdirected violence.
The reason for my disgust is that Stewart is about to take a 12-week hiatus from his duties at the uber-adulated The Daily Show to direct a movie whose plot—oh my— he penned. The movie —”Rosewater”, is reported to be an adaptation of the 2011 book “Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity and Survival,” by Maziar Bahari and Aimee Molloy. Hmm. Hold that a cotton-pickin’ minute. Captivity? A guy named Bahari? Knowing as I guess you do, that the US and its usual accomplices are desperately looking for a way to provoke a fight with Iran, what country do you think will be cast as the humorless heavy in this picture? Yes, that country. The same country already exploited by liberaloid Affleck to excellent “artistic” returns.
“One of the reasons we are in this business is to challenge ourselves,” Mr. Stewart said [fatuously], “and I really connected to Maziar’s story. It’s a personal story but one with universal appeal about what it means to be free.” Mr. Bahari’s ordeal is familiar to “The Daily Show” fans — in fact, the comedy program played a role in it. (1)
The blooming of this execrable notion took place in a rather serendipitous manner. According to the Times,
A Canadian-Iranian journalist and documentarian, Mr. Bahari was jailed in Tehran in 2009 for four months, accused of plotting a revolution against the government. Shortly before his arrest, Mr. Bahari had participated in a “Daily Show” sketch, conducted by one of the show’s correspondents, Jason Jones, who was pretending to be a spy. Mr. Bahari’s captors used the footage against him. “You can imagine how upset we were,” Mr. Stewart said, “and I struck up a friendship with him afterward.”
Since ARGO was premised on something like a ruse to fool the Iranians, Stewart’s premise, also packing identity errors, sounds to me derivative, at best. Not so bloody funny. Let alone that original. How many times are we gonna take credit for rooking the Iranians?
One more requiem for liberalism
With this recklessly ill-timed film, Jon Stewart is now clearly joining not only the lot of imperial apologists (which as Abby Martin suggests—see below—was well prefigured by his fawning over Obama and other Democratic politicos), but also proving for the umpteenth time that liberals are either egotistical assholes with the political acumen of a hedgehog or… thinly-veiled groupies for the imperial status quo. So first Affleck, now Stewart, where will it end, this noxious parade of (shall we say charitably) unwittingly self-indulgent “cinematic art”?
Since Stewart is a comedian, very much the frat-sort, smart-ass, middlebrow American comedian, the kind that the politically illiterate and almost permanently infantilized Generation X finds so damn amusing, albeit one now afflicted with acute auteur pretensions, we can’t tell at this point where this expensive bauble will end, hopefully in the trash, but we can bet that the Iranians will be once again characterized as fanatical ciphers or dunces—not exactly the image needed at this point to inject some warmth and respect in the American mind toward that tortured nation.
Well. What else could we expect? This is the rotten Zeitgeist we inhabit, friends. For ill or for ill.
In the final analysis, however, as even a bright 6-year old could tell, war is too dreadful a matter to be left to mere politicians…or megalomanic buffoons. Man, where is George Carlin when we need him!
Patrice Greanville is the editor in chief of The Greanville Post.
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ADDENDUM
Abby Martin of RT calls out court jester Stewart and his accommodation of Obama. Hard questions are never asked on Stewart’s Daily Show, particularly when Democrat politicians need votes. I’ve said previously how Stewart parades a constant stream of establishment war criminals and monsters on his program so they can peddle their books.
SOURCE:
Jon Stewart to Direct Serious Film, Will Take Hiatus From ‘Daily Show’
(1) http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/jon-stewart-to-direct-serious-film-will-take-hiatus-from-daily-show/
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not be celebrated. And that someone would see the obvious and call Stewart on it, that to pick—of all possible subjects, many much more urgent—this particular plot to sink a pile of greenbacks in it, is simply obscene. Well, about that I suppose I was being way too optimistic.
—PG