nobody puts baby in a corner

A German network aired Wag the Dog the other day and I think that the film has enjoyed a better reception here than it did in the States because there was a greater separation to digest life imitating art than there was for domestic audiences.
The satire about spin and fake news premiered a month before the Clinton-Lewinski scandal and the subsequent conflict in Kosovo was too close for comfort and suffered for its vision and honest assessment of what propaganda that the media might be capable of. Of course the elect of Hollywood could not be persuaded to be the mouth-pieces for this regime who is instead heir to poorly produced adaptations of Ayn Rand novels—subversively the book that Johnny Castle tells Frances Houseman to stop reading in Dirty Dancing was The Fountainhead—or the weird series of documentaries from the Chief of Public Enlightenment, whose latest work Torchbearer is an odd romping march of clashes of cultures through the millennia that squarely assigns all misfortune and the collapse of civilizations on societies growing wayward from the norm.