It’s a third-rate documentary, which I went to see at the NYC Ethical Culture Society screening last week. I’ll let blogger Dean Esmay describe it:

Once upon a time, in faraway land called Afghanistan, the pious young prince bin Laden joined with the oily American hegemonic empire to fight Atheist-Red-Devil-Communism. Young prince bin Laden won the battle and saved us from communism! After this victory, he and his band of mujahideen became outlaws, had some bold adventures and battled their new archenemy, evil hegemonic America, now led by dark Lord George Bush. The decadent Americans, drunk on IPOs and rock music, were blind to the inevitable results of their sins. The 9/11 attacks were the wages of those sins. America demanded revenge and now the battle rages on, from the pixie dust Afghani pipeline to the dusty souks of occupied Iraq. This war will never stop until America admits the error of its oily-imperialist-colonialist ways. America must now repent - we must buy the hearts and minds of oppressed Arabs, Muslims and pious non-decadent folk around the world. Only then shall the world know peace.

I have to say: I don’t know how Christopher Hitchens does it. He is a trouper. He showed up (stone cold sober, for those who are interested) to debate Eric Margolis, who was infuriating.

I fled the auditorium during Margolis’s second rant, when he said that the Iraq war was about protecting Israel and about getting Iraq’s oil.

For the New York Times, American Muslim Sheik Hamza Yusuf is someone who is seeking a “modern middle ground” to “reconcile Islam and American culture”:

Mr. Yusuf told the audience in Houston to beware of “fanatics” who pluck Islamic scripture out of context and say, “We’re going to tell you what God says on every single issue.”

“That’s not Islam,” Mr. Yusuf said. “That’s psychopathy.”

So far so good. Then we get to the reasoning:

He asked the audience to pray for the victims of kidnappers in Iraq, saying that kidnapping is just as bad as American bombings in which the military dismisses the civilians killed as “collateral damage.”

“They’re both sinister, as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “One is efficient, the other is pathetic.”

Both are sinister. Check. But I’m not quite sure which is “efficient” and which is “pathetic,” because the Times doesn’t clarify. I guess if I were really well versed in Times-speak and Times-code, I would just know which morally equivalent side of the equation is which.

Why bother, though, because I’m just so damn relieved that Yusuf and his equally moderate pal Shakir

are challenging the influence of Islam’s more reactionary sects, like Wahhabism and Salafism, which has been spread to American mosques and schools by clerics trained in Saudi Arabia.

I am deeply gratified by this, because I have been a huge fan of this dreamboat,

Johnny Depp,

forever:

After decades of being daring and unexpected in daring and unexpected little films, Depp was now staying true to himself in a big summer blockbuster. He didn’t have to be an outsider on the outside. He could be an outsider on the inside. “You feel like you have infiltrated the enemy camp, like you got in there somehow and chiseled your name in the castle wall,” he says. The huge success of the film “made perfect sense to me on the one hand, and at the same time, it made no sense at all, which I kind of enjoyed.” He takes another drag, exhales. “Yeah, it just felt right. Even now, with the dolls and the cereal boxes and snacks and fruit juices, it all just feels fun to me, in a Warholian way. It’s absurd. It doesn’t get more absurd.”

Wretchard, writing over at TigerHawk’s blog, says:

One of these days the MSM is going to discover that neither OIF nor the War on Terror bears any but the most passing resemblance to Vietnam. That occurred on a different continent, against another enemy over another ideology with a different type of warfare and in another century. Once an aging generation stops looking for napalm, punji sticks, carpet bombing, air strikes and helicopters in the headlines they may realize that that this war is being fought with propaganda, networks, educational systems, religion and nerve gas anywhere and everywhere. In word, it is being fought on a basis that the Western mind is not prepared to contemplate.

Jim Lehrer, host of PBS’s NewsHour, actually thinks that people want an avuncular, authoritative figure to tell them what is “news.” He thinks “serious news” is where the action (and growth) is. He thinks that journalists should focus on stories, but…wait for it…he scoffs at news as entertainment. He thinks that CBS’s treatment of Dan Rather (letting Rather go, that is) is outrageous. And he also thinks that Americans—who are too busy to make their own media choices—are crying out for more gatekeepers.

Really. I watched Kurtz’s interview with Lehrer on Reliable Sources. My mouth was agape. You can read the whole confused mess here.

LEHRER: Absolutely, but we do that for them and they want us, they want people they can trust to do that for them. In other words, the old-fashioned role of the gatekeeper is going to return in a major way and it’s already beginning to return as long as we do not get out of the journalism business. In other words, as long as we stay in the reporting business, we will always have a function and we will always be a growth industry, but once we decide oh, my God, we’ve got to start entertaining people or whatever because in the beginning, Ben Bradlee says this in his interview with me. I asked him about, what newspapers should do to get their strength back. He said stories. In the beginning, there’s always a story. Every major news event we’re talking about in the news today, Haditha, because of some “Time” magazine reporting, prisons for the CIA, “Washington Post” reporting.

Talk about confused…

What to make of John Updike, who can’t decide whether he absolutely must appear near the top of the list of the most important authors of the last 25 years or whether awards are, you know, bad. Who can’t decide whether bloggers are nobodies with a desire to express themselves or whether, in this brave new world, he too is a nobody…because nobody cares about books. Who fetishes a color-coordinated physical object as the perfect vehicle for holding his writerly legacy.

Patti Thorn, writing in the Rocky Mountain News, says:

You gotta love a man who has won nearly every prize the literary world has to offer and who can still angst like an insecure debutante.

No you don’t. I see nothing to love, never mind respect, about this:

“You type in your blog, and some other people read it, and so you create a print society apart from real society and you’re getting the gratification of expressing yourself . . . It’s a way to develop a public persona, but it’s very undiscriminating, and very ‘me-minded.’ We’re all me-minded. We all have egos.”

But writers in the past, such as Upton Sinclair, went beyond ego to serve a greater good, he says. “They were trying to improve the world . . . I get a feeling this electronic stuff is all kind of a game, another form of a video game.”

(via blogger extraordinaire Miss Snark, the literary agent)