There are a thousand ways to stay asleep; there is one way to
wake up.
The movie is “Wag the Dog,” a film about a war staged by cynical
political operatives using digital technology to con the public.
The defining metaphor of the film is the clip from the Iraqi War
of a smart bomb knocking at the front door of a building before
blowing everything up. Why, asks the film, was that the only clip
we ever saw, and anyway, how do we know it’s real?
By the end of the movie, we are included in the conspiracy; we
understand how the images in our minds are manipulated or
created.
Even the suggestion that murder is sometimes necessary did not
startle an audience that has heard that Vince Foster did not die
where his body was found, Ron Brown had a hole in his skull that
looked like a bullet wound, and the bullet that killed JFK
travelled more miles than a politician campaigning for
reelection.
We hear things too. A noted pathologist called to the JFK
autopsy, after examining the wounds, told a friend, ” One day the
truth will come out.”
Meanwhile, says Eileen McDargh, a noted business speaker, in the
absence of truth, we make it up.
Dangerous times, indeed, when few people believe any official
statement because even the illusion of integrity is no longer
sought.
“Wag the Dog” is insidious because it isn’t so much a wake-up
call as one more sleeping pill. The film gives us the illusion
that *we* know how it’s done when in fact we’ve been shown
another diverting simulation.
The necessary myths that sustain the body politic are frayed.
Without those myths the center can not hold. Even habitual sleep-
walkers wake up after tumbling down the midnight stairs.
