Audio: Frank Miller, not a moonbat; Update: Neither is novelist Andrew Klavan

posted at 8:55 am on January 26, 2007 by Ian
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Little Green Footballs has audio of Frank Miller, who is argubly one of the best comic writers of our time, voicing what he thinks is the state of the home front. Miller is dead on with his opinion of the terrorist culture and, yes, the faults of President Bush. Listen to it all.

Rob Port has more thoughts on Frank Miller.

Update (AP): Your must-read op-ed of the day.

[A]t the movies, all we’re getting is home-front angst and the occasional “Syriana,” in which “moderate” Islam is thwarted by evil American interests. But the notion that this war is about our moral failings is comfort fantasy, pure and simple. It soothes us with the false idea that, if we but mend ourselves, the scary people will leave us alone…

In all fairness, moviemakers have a legitimately baffling problem with the nature of the war itself. In order to honestly dramatize the simple truth about this existential struggle, you have to depict right-minded Americans — some of whom may be white and male and Christian — hunting down and killing dark-skinned villains of a false and wicked creed. That’s what’s happening, on a good day anyway, so that’s what you’d have to show.

Moviemakers are reluctant to do that because, even though it’s the truth, on screen it might appear bigoted and jingoistic…

We cherish the religious tolerance of our society, after all. Plus, we’re less than a lifetime away from Jim Crow and, decent people that we are, we’re rightly humbled by the moral failures of our past. We’ve become uncomfortable to the point of paralysis when reality draws the limits of tolerance and survival demands pride in our traditions and ferocity in their defense. We can show homegrown terrorists in, say, “Déjà Vu” or real-life ones, as in “United 93,” but we can’t bring ourselves to fictionalize the larger idea: Islamo-fascism is an evil and American liberty a good.

Which is a shame. It’s a shame for so powerful an art form to become irrelevant because we can’t find a way to dramatize the central event of our time. It’s a shame that we live under the tireless protection of lawmen and warriors and don’t pay tribute to them. And purely in artistic terms, it’s a shame that so many great stories are just waiting to be told and we’re not telling them.

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