AFTER THE GENOCIDE, LET'S DO DINNER

Many have abused Hollywood for ignoring the movie “Hotel Rwanda” at Oscar time because it actually dealt with something. I disagree, Hollywood ignored it because it directly accuses our lazy white Left (UN, Belgians, French, and American) of looking at the horror on TV, saying things like, “isn’t that awful,” and then going out to dinner. That is our Left—and far far too much of our Right.

I once had a professor who was too gentle a man by half. He had somehow managed to escape Heidelberg University during the Hitler years and then ended up teaching drama in the U.S. This sweet man, even though he was 6'4" and 230 pounds or so, couldn’t kill a fly if he sat on it. He was a good teacher and a brilliant guy who couldn’t possibly earn a living outside of Academia. One day he looked me in the eye during a class and said, “The only purpose of art is to increase our understanding. Everything else is entertainment. But, if the entertainment can’t put you in a frame of mind so that you seek to increase your understanding later, then the entertainment is pornography and you demean yourself by participating in it.”

I was reminded of the words of this gentle man as I watched “Hotel Rwanda,” a movie that will increase your understanding of both yourself and too many others should you choose to rent it. This movie is everything that Michael Moore and the PBS establishment is not. The story is human, very moving, and clearly will increase your understanding should you choose to rent it. A story of the typical guy who goes along to get along so he can have friends later when he might need them, and who keeps loads of “their” cash on hand “just in case.” One day when the modern day SS comes a calling and slaughtering he turns to his “friends” for help and finds that his friends actually think of him as “lower than a nigger; an African,” and nobody will really help. It’s a hell of a movie on a lot of levels; the UN is a joke, the Belgians and the French care nothing about anything other than saving their own skins, and the Americans are invisible.

This is a tale of the Left becoming exposed as useless, fraudulent, and weak; the genocide goes on while they decry it with tears and ads in the New York Times, and then they go on with their dinners. A “Cherry Orchard” of our time. Hope you rent it, you won’t be sorry.