By “that ending” do you mean what was whispered into the respective ears? That’s what I mean by “ending”, and that is why this is no Disney/Hollywood movie. Chilling. But believable. All too believable.
You know, I hate to think I would ever agree with Ann Coulter about anything, but I read a quote from her saying something like “they hate us? Fine. We hate them. They want to kill us? Well, we want to kill them too. Let’s kill them before they kill us.” My usual take on things like this is, like a good liberal that I am, I ask “what did we do to make them hate us so?”. The presumption being that it is always our fault for starting things. That’s probably true most of the time. But this Islamic/Western thing may be deeper than we know. Something nobody can reason with. Which is why it makes me think of Sam’s book again. The sheer irrationality of “faith” needs to be confronted, whether christian or muslim or whatever
Do you know of the progressive radio talk show host Ed Schultz? He took part in a forum with several other Air America hosts here in Seattle in July. Ed is as anti-Bush/let’s get out of Iraq as anybody, but he also said that there is a very real element of people over there hating us and wanting to cause us harm no matter who is president, no matter we’re in Iraq, or what. Saudi Arabia is a terrifying place to me. And our country, and the global economy, is dependent on them totally.
Did you know that Jimmy Carter, in 1979, set out a plan, a vision to make the US free of middle eastern oil by the year 2000? He saw what was coming alright. But then Reagan laughed him out of the White House, and it was back to oil-as-usual politics.
So the movie was very real. I was really impressed with that timeline opening of the movie.
So I am blown away by that movie, and yet even this morning I played my bit-part in it by pulling into the local Shell station and pumping ten gallons of that magic juice into my tank. I need those ten gallons to keep my family fed this week. And so does everybody else. And we’re buying it from people whose religious identity is based on hating us.
Man, we’ve got to find other ways to make cars go. But then, if we were to tell the Saudis “thanks, but no thanks” for their only product, wouldn’t they really hate us even more? And then what would they do?
Nasty business, eh?
