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THREE

The screening by CNN of our latest wars is carefully directed by those who are producing the wars. What these serial wars are all about is still not clear to us, nor are we ever apt to know what really happened until someone makes a backstage movie like The Bad and the Beautiful or, perhaps, Platoon in the Desert, a bitter, powerful film, quite as unrealistic, in its way, as the CNN-Pentagon releases.

In February 1991 history was being invented before our eyes. From day to day we saw the editing and dubbing process at work. But we were merely viewers, while the actors on-screen were also, in an eerie way, passive: part of a process no one seemed to be in control of. Rumsfeld who now seeks to produce the sequels is, despite his elfin charms, no more than a thousand points of pulsing light in a cathode ray tube.

A few years ago while giving the Massey Lectures at Harvard the mood of prophecy was upon me! “We shall yet be invited,” I said, “by the sponsors of USA, Inc., to bear witness to a presidential election in which one of the heroes of the Gulf will confront the politically ambitious Terminator.” Yes, it will be someone like Rumsfeld versus Schwarzenegger, the ultimate screen version of my own old movie The Best Man, whose title was, of course, ironic.