America's image is going down

[Mediocrates]

The most crowded movie I ever saw in Paris was running "Crimson Tide" which over there is titled "USS Alabama".

You warmongers.

[Kev]

And this is my opinion than pretending your are "hated by everyone" is the excuse you need to be a hater yourself.

A: I never said I was a "hater" as you chose to put it.

B: I am British and Canadian

C: I'm not hated...at least as far as I know? LOL

D: I am not Jewish

E: I am not an Israeli

E: The article remains as monotonous as before despite the newfound information that shows I am not American.

[Olivier]

Originally posted by Kev
A: I never said I was a "hater" as you chose to put it.

Ok I was a bit fast on that one, i'm sorry, but my short experience here tells me people start by complaining "they are hated" and turn out to be extremely consistent haters themselves.


As for your being jewish or israeli, I was not infering anything.

[KSO]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3756545.stm
McCartney speaks out against war
Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney has criticised the UK government for being too hasty in going to war in Iraq.
"Maybe our government went in too fast with the Americans," he told the weekly Portuguese magazine Visao on Thursday.

"It would have been better if the UN had been together," the 61-year-old singer continued. "Now it's become very bloody with Iraq, it's very difficult."

The singer, who is currently touring Europe, opens the Rock in Rio music festival in Lisbon on Friday.

Sir Paul said he understood the need to act after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.


To look for Bin Laden seemed reasonable to go against terrorism, but the war has become very difficult
Sir Paul McCartney
"If someone came to my house and blew it up, I wouldn't just want to sit there and say thank you," he said.
"I'd be angry like I think anyone would be, so I could see America and Britain being angry.

"To look for Bin Laden seemed reasonable to go against terrorism, but the war has become very difficult."

Sir Paul, who became a father for the fourth time last October, wrote a song, Freedom, after witnessing the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.

The Rock in Rio festival - modelled on an annual Brazilian festival which has been running since 1985 - is held over the next two weekends.

Britney Spears and Peter Gabriel are among the more than 70 performers taking part in the event, held at Lisbon's Bela Vista Parque.

Sir Paul's performance is part of a European tour which began in the Spanish city of Santander on Tuesday.

Story from BBC NEWS:

[Oh Jerusalem]

Recalling a time when setbacks didn't deter us

May 30, 2004

BY MARK STEYN

Memorial Day in my corner of New Hampshire is always the same. A clutch of veterans from the Second World War to the Gulf march round the common, followed by the town band, and the scouts, and the fifth-graders. The band plays ''Anchors Aweigh," ''My Country, 'Tis of Thee,'' ''God Bless America'' and, in an alarming nod to modernity, Ray Stevens' ''Everything Is Beautiful (In Its Own Way)'' (Billboard No. 1, May 1970). One of the town's selectmen gives a short speech, so do a couple of representatives from state organizations, and then the fifth-graders recite the Gettsyburg Address and the Great War's great poetry. There's a brief prayer and a three-gun salute, exciting the dogs and babies. Wreaths are laid. And then the crowd wends slowly up the hill to the Legion hut for ice cream, and a few veterans wonder, as they always do, if anybody understands what they did, and why they did it.

Before the First World War, it was called Decoration Day -- a day for going to the cemetery and ''strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.'' Some decorated the resting places of fallen family members; others adopted for a day the graves of those who died too young to leave any descendants.

I wish we still did that. Lincoln's ''mystic chords of memory'' are difficult to hear in the din of the modern world, and one of the best ways to do it is to stand before an old headstone, read the name, and wonder at the young life compressed into those brute dates: 1840-1862. 1843-1864.

In my local cemetery, there's a monument over three graves, forebears of my hardworking assistant, though I didn't know that the time I first came across them. Turner Grant, his cousin John Gilbert and his sister's fiance Charles Lovejoy had been friends since boyhood and all three enlisted on the same day. Charles died on March 5, 1863, Turner on March 6, and John on March 11. Nothing splendid or heroic. They were tentmates in Virginia, and there was an outbreak of measles in the camp.

For some reason, there was a bureaucratic mixup and the army neglected to inform the families. Then, on their final journey home, the bodies were taken off the train at the wrong town. It was a Saturday afternoon and the stationmaster didn't want the caskets sitting there all weekend. So a man who knew where the Grants lived offered to take them up to the next town and drop them off on Sunday morning.

When he arrived, the family was at church, so he unloaded the coffins from his buggy and left without a word or a note to anyone. Imagine coming home from Sunday worship and finding three caskets waiting on the porch. Imagine being young Caroline Grant, and those caskets contain the bodies of your brother, your cousin and the man to whom you're betrothed.

That's a hell of a story behind the bald dates on three tombstones. If it happened today, maybe Caroline would be on Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric demanding proper compensation, and the truth about what happened, and why the politicians were covering it up. Maybe she'd form a group of victims' families. Maybe she'd call for a special commission to establish whether the government did everything it could to prevent disease outbreaks at army camps. Maybe, when they got around to forming the commission, she'd be booing and chanting during the officials' testimony, as several of the 9/11 families did during Mayor Rudy Giuliani's testimony.

All wars are messy, and many of them seem small and unworthy even at the moment of triumph. The unkempt lice-infested Saddam Hussein yanked from his spider hole last December is not so very different from the Jefferson Davis captured in May 1865 while skulking away in women's clothing, and thereafter depicted by gleeful Northern cartoonists in hoop skirts, petticoats and crinolines.

Conquered and captured, an enemy shrivels, and you question what he ever had that necessitated such a sacrifice. The piercing clarity of war shades into the murky grays of postwar reconstruction. You think Iraq's a quagmire? Lincoln's ''new birth of freedom'' bogged down into a centurylong quagmire of segregation, denial of civil rights, lynchings. Does that mean the Civil War wasn't worth fighting? That, as Al Gore and other excitable types would say, Abe W. Lincoln lied to us?

Like the French Resistance, tiny in its day but of apparently unlimited manpower since the war ended, for some people it's not obvious which side to be on until the dust's settled. New York, for example, resisted the Civil War my small town's menfolk were so eager to enlist in. The big city was racked by bloody riots against the draft. And you can sort of see the rioters' point. More than 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War -- or about 1.8 percent of the population. Today, if 1.8 percent of the population were killed in war, there would be 5.4 million graves to decorate on Decoration Day.

But that's the difference between then and now: the loss of proportion. They had victims galore back in 1863, but they weren't a victim culture. They had a lot of crummy decisions and bureaucratic screwups worth re-examining, but they weren't a nation that prioritized retroactive pseudo-legalistic self-flagellating vaudeville over all else. They had hellish setbacks but they didn't lose sight of the forest in order to obsess week after week on one tiny twig of one weedy little tree.

There is something not just ridiculous but unbecoming about a hyperpower 300 million strong whose elites -- from the deranged former vice president down -- want the outcome of a war, and the fate of a nation, to hinge on one freaky jailhouse; elites who are willing to pay any price, bear any burden, as long as it's pain-free, squeaky clean and over in a week. The sheer silliness dishonors the memory of all those we're supposed to be remembering this Memorial Day.

Playing by Gore-Kennedy rules, the Union would have lost the Civil War, the rebels the Revolutionary War, and the colonists the French and Indian Wars. There would, in other words, be no America. Even in its grief, my part of New Hampshire understood that 141 years ago. We should, too.

[Mediocrates]

It struck me this memorial day that most of the objections to our going to war have little to do with how we feel about them and what we think they deserve and a great deal with how we feel about our own chances of success. I would seriously debate with someone the proposition that Americans as a whole honestly believe that we can be successful in not only the Middle East but everywhere else in the world we might be called on to effect some sweeping change.

In WW2 [and beyond] we believed we would triumph eventually and that is what gave us our justification that our cause was just. In the last generation though I suspect we as a nation no longer believe this and because of that we doubt our own intentions. It is never enough to be righteous, you have to believe you will be victorious as well. If you take that away then it's just a dirty process to be managed out to some nondescript point in the future where you can simply declare a ceasefire.

[Isiah 2:4]

Originally posted by Olivier
indeed .. and I was saying that my preferred realisator is not french (but Jean Renoir is a genius too - and he had contacts with india and Ray). "Une partie de campagne" is my preferred film by him (but I still have to discover many of his films).

Aha...i forgot i was goin to reply to this thread. I think the best French Writer / Director (realisator) is Matheau Kassovitz (Jewish of course ) Amelie c'est magnifique!! I watched La Haine (Hatred) the other week. Its a great film. The lead characters are from 'la cite' outside Paris. What you Americans will know as 'the projects'. Its about the police, volatile youth etc..but there is a trio of friends made up of a Jew, an Arab and a Black guy. Very amusing and realistic.

If you havent seen Amelie, go buy it from Amazon, it really is a wonderful story.

Daren Aronofsky is also one of my favourite directors. he did 'Requiem for a dream' and 'Pi', two films with very distinct themes, but with a heavy Jewish cultural content. Well, what am i saying?!! 'Pi' is about Maths and the Torah! Can't really get any more Jewish than that.