Sorry, Rick...still no go.
I have Windows Media Player but even that wouldn't download.
Movie looks like a great one.
ALSO: check this out re John le Carre new book:
The spy who is back out in the cold
January 5, 2004
John le Carre could say what he liked about the Russians, but not so about the Americans, writes Anne Summers.
Hell hath no fury like a conservative
scorned. Or so it would seem from the
savagery with which the neo-con and
right-wing cabals have turned on John le
Carre and his latest book, Absolute
Friends.
Why are they bothering? It's a novel, after
all. Can you imagine the left caring
enough about Tom Clancy's latest to go
to the barricades?
Le Carre, of course, is different. His
Cold War books had the authority and
verisimilitude of having been written by a
former spy. Despite his protestations
that he is not a spy turned writer ("I was
nothing of the kind. I am a writer who,
when I was very young, spent a few
ineffectual but extremely formative years
in British Intelligence," he told his
publisher's sales force in 1996), the right
could have justifiably presumed le Carre
was onside, or at least a fellow traveller,
because George Smiley and his cohorts
were working against the Russians.
They, and thus he, must have been
anti-communist and, ergo, pro-the West
and pro-American.
But the world has changed since that
uneasy balance provided by the
posturings of the two super powers. And
so, apparently, has le Carre. Last
January he published in The Times in
London a no-holds-barred opinion piece
entitled "The United States of America
has gone mad".
"The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything
Osama bin Laden could have hoped for
in his nastiest dreams," he wrote . "As in
McCarthy times, the freedoms that have
made America the envy of the world are
being systematically eroded. The
combination of compliant US media and
vested corporate interests is once more
ensuring that a debate that should be
ringing out in every town square is
confined to the loftier columns of the
East Coast press.
"How Bush and his junta succeeded in
deflecting America's anger from bin
Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the
great public relations conjuring tricks of
history," he went on. "But they swung it. A
recent poll tells us that one in two
Americans now believe Saddam was
responsible for the attack on the World
Trade Centre. But the American public is
not merely being misled. It is being
browbeaten and kept in a state of
ignorance and fear."
These words fell like kerosene onto the
already inflamed worldwide debate
about the morality of a pre-emptive strike
against Iraq by the United States.
And the flak Le Carre copped then is
being repeated now because his latest
book, published in early December,
takes up these themes with even greater
gusto.
"There's a new Grand Design about in
case you haven't noticed," he has one of
his characters say. "It's called
pre-emptive naivety, and it rests on the
assumption that everyone in the world
would like to live in Dayton, Ohio, under
one god, no prizes for guessing whose
god that is."
Full article @
smh.com.au |
