Apr
20
Four years ago, Morgan Spurlock took on the fast food industry with his documentary “Super Size Me.” In the film, he dined at McDonald’s for breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday for a month. His health declined, his weight increased, and he forced the McFranchises across the country to rethink their menus, or at the very least re-brand them.
Spurlock’s new film, “Where in the World is Osama bin Laden,” takes on another franchise, this one being global terrorism. Now he doesn’t become a terrorist for 30 days. Instead, he travels to the Middle East in search of a guy who people in some of the most impoverished shanty towns in the universe won’t turn over for a $25 million bounty. In a bid to make the world safer for his unborn baby, Spurlock’s adventure explores the cultural, political and religious disconnect our foreign policy seems to have in waging our ongoing war on terror and how that creates more and more men like bin Laden. What’s the value of capturing one man when millions more are exactly like him?
Where our media and our elected officials have spent the past 7 years bloviating about the Islamic religion, Spurlock actually lets Muslims speak for themselves. As it turns out, most of the everyday people in these countries are not wearing bomb vests, burning the Stars-and-Stripes and chanting, “Death to America!” They’re as divorced from bin Laden and al-Qaeda as you or I. And they apparently love professional wrestling.
It’s our government, not our people, that Muslims seem to take exception with, and it’s hard not to sympathize. How has our country not been hijacked by radicals of a different stripe, tyrants who hide behind religion and jingoism, parading us through the gates of hell while chanting talking-point propaganda? To deny this is to admit you have a head full of rocks. We’ve played directly into bin Laden’s hands with this ill-advised war on terror. The fact that we haven’t been “hit again” is not a useful yardstick in measuring the success of Bush’s endless and bloody occupation of Iraq. We’re hit everyday so long as a man or woman in uniform is killed, injured or traumatized by the violence in a faraway land that John McCain would like us to carry out for another century.
Ahem. Where was I again? Oh, yes, Morgan Spurlock’s documentary. There’s much of value here that I hope people will discuss, or at the very least, rant about like I just did. That so many people in this country choose to avoid anything and everything political I find unnerving. We have these inalienable rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness that are simply absent in the Middle East, and yet our culture is so overwhelmingly populated by perpetual adolescents — lazy, unmotivated and apathetic.
Though Spurlock learns that capturing or killing the one man whose face is synonymous with terrorism isn’t going to child-proof all the dangers in the world, it becomes clear to him that, well, at least his baby isn’t going to attend a school that borders the Gaza Strip and could be shelled at a moment’s notice. The immense poverty, the non-stop violence, the miles and miles of fences that can be found the Middle East — these are things he can shield his child from here in the U.S., or can he? Where in the world is Osama bin Laden? He’s practically everywhere.
-Brad Lohan
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[…] two weeks ago, I went to see “Where in the World is Osama bin Laden” (read my review). I nearly lucked out and got a private screening, since the only thing people in this country hate […]