SUPER TERRORISTS! Pollywood Studios' Latest Production

By Cheryl Seal


JORDAN HOTEL BOMBING PROOF AL QAEDA TERRORIST JIHAD IS WIDENING!!

It was the headline that at last pushed Bush's plummeting ratings off page one for a day or two. And, maybe this story would have actually "stuck" if whoever is in charge of the "bombing publicity" hadn't decided to parade an alleged "woman suicide bomber" before the camera and have her model a "dud" suicide bomb duct-taped around her waist. She turned around for the cameras, showed different views, opening and closing her jacket as if displaying this fall's fashions. Jordanians, at first enraged by the spectacle, are now expressing doubt: The woman's affect (as the shrinks put it) is all wrong. There's no defiance, anger, fear or anything halfway appropriate about her manner. Instead, she acts like a third-string bit actress trudging her way through take number 50 of a low-budget commercial. What gives? Is it yet another "Pollywood" (as in "Pentagon's Hollywood") production?

The signs are all there. The bombing comes just when Bush needed to offer the US "proof" that the war in Iraq is justified and that our enemies really are monsters who know no limits. The week the bombing occurred, US polls showed support for the war at an all time low. It is hard to imagine the "idea guys" at Pollywood passing this opportunity up.

The style, timing, and hype of the bombing publicity has Pollywood written all over it. It is a sleazy Grade D studio touch that has been leaving its oily prints all over the media since 2001. Pollywood's favorite theme, after "THE NATION AT WAR" is "TERRORIST MASTERMINDS." The favorite script always features a single guy - a "terrorism anti-hero"- who, with the aid of the Pollywood PR department (i.e., the mainstream media) is turned into a bogey man of superhuman proportions.

The first terrorist mastermind star featured by Pollywood was Bin Laden. For a while, Bin Laden was depicted as being behind every bad thing that happened in the world short of proveable acts of God! Then suddenly, Bin Laden's "contract" must have run out and not been renewed because he dropped from sight. He was replaced by Saddam Hussein - the veteran star of the 1990 Pollywood production "DESERT STORM". Saddam's return was a classic Pollywood comeback! We progressed from Saddam ordering babies thrown out of incubators (one of his big scenes in DESERT STORM) to a new, even more evil Saddam who feeds dissenters into paper shredders and THREATENS THE ENTIRE WORLD WITH WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION! Hannibal Lechter move over!

Like all comebacks, this one faded as soon as the first "film" (OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM, costarring Jessica Lynch) was released. It was tough to keep it going when even Pollywood's best special effects guys couldn't come up with convincing WMDs. So a new face was sought by the Pollywood talent scouts, who soon discovered a guy named Al Sadr. As the "Pollywood teasers" on the nightly news showed it, Al Sadr was fighting the US troops in Iraq single-handedly, like a twisted version of Douglas Fairbanks in a silent movie. But alas, despite his beady, shifty black eyes and fiery performances, Al Sadr had a fatal failing: he just couldn't get the weight off. Let's face it, a chubby, round-faced terrorist just doesn't quite have the right cower power.  http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/photos/alsadr_moqtada_cp_5155465.jpg

So once again, Pollywood sought sought a new super-villain.

Their new talent search netted Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - a guy they apparently hoped would play as a super-bad Stanley Kowalski (as in Marlon Brando in Streetcar Named Desire), complete with grubby ripped T-shirt. However, the image of Mohammed brought more laughs from US audiences than gasps of fear. Even hailing him as THE evil mastermind of 9/11 didn't help his image.  http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/crime/terrorists/mohammed-shaikh-khalid/khalid-jeremy.jpg


So the next evil super-anti-hero promoted by Pollywood is Al Zarqawi. His debut on the Pollywood screen was made about the time that the US contractors were horrifically killed in Ramadi. An especially heinous guy was clearly needed to account for this monstrous turn of events. Enter Al Zarqawi. Talk about a Darth Vader of a villain! Zarqawi makes Bin Laden look like a lightweight! He's been accused of being behind every bombing - hell, behind every bush! - in Iraq and anywhere else an Al Qaeda terrorist appears to be striking, from Spain to Jordan!. I wonder when finds the time to sleep, let alone dictate all those threatening press releases! And, learning their lessons from the Al Sadr and Mohammed flops, Pollywood has been careful to only release one promo photo in which Zarqawi looks truly sinister - it appears to have been shot in film noir.

 http://images.washtimes.com/photos/full/20040630-100512-3438.jpg

And, to add a gritty vintage Western touch to the current production, Bruce "Diehard" Willis did a promotional stunt in which he offered a "bounty" of $1 million for either Zarqawi or Bin Laden. (Rumor has it they had originally hoped to recruit Clint Eastwood as the bounty supplier, and to time the stunt for maximum effect with the premiere of "Million Dollar Baby.")

Zarqawi has lately been paying the price for overexposure - always a liabilty in a career like his and the poor agenting of his Pollywood reps. So now the studio is going for a new approach: "Let's add a woman! Look at what Cat Woman did for the Batman series!" Unfortunately for Pollywood, Saijida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi is no Michelle Pfieffer. Her lackluster performance left the public wondering not only if she was indeed a bomber, but if she was a real woman, shifting the focus from duct-tape and wire around the waist to hair on the upper lip.

Although the efforts of the Bush warmongers does indeed lend itself to dark comedy, the reality below the fakery is far from humorous.

The reality is that there is no single evil guy or even single organization of evil guys behind most of the chaos in Iraq or terrorist activities occurring at various places around the world. There are angry, disempowered people scattered all over the planet who have the potential to perpetrate acts of terrorism, either as part of a group or acting alone. The only way to address this problem is to address theor sources of rage. As we have seen in France, while a few violent people have driven the excesses that occurred during the riots, it was a failed social system, not these people who fomented the unrest. In Iraq, the ongoing violence is being fomented by the fact that Iraq is an occupied country whose infrastructure was trashed and never really rebuilt during the 2003 war. We saw what a trashed infrastructure does to people as we watched events unfold in New Orleans after Katrina. Picture Katrina's aftermath stretching out for two years and you will get a rough idea of what the tensions in parts of Iraq are like today. It doesn't take a single bad guy to cause eruptions of rage in the form of bombings. Three angry Iraqis acting on their own are just as capable of bombing a hotel and slaughtering innocent people as a network of super-bad-guys.

But, instead of addressing the root cause of increasing terrorism, the Bush administration and its personal studios at Pollywood only wish to justify their failure to address it. So in the wake of the Jordan bombing, we have Tim Russert leading the media charge (always a suspicious sign!) to hype the latest Pollywood production entitled "Jihadist War Widening: Bush to Save the World!"

It remains to be seen how many suckers will line up to buy tickets.