Chris Orr decries Mickey Kaus’s decrying of The Bourne Ultimatum as “anti-American”. Chris is right to observe that the film’s good guys are also American government officers and that Joan Allen’s character says of water-boarding etc that “This isn’t us” but ultimately (ha!) I can’t quite agree with his conclusion. I thought it a rather searing indictment of the United States, albeit for rather different reasons.
As my friends know I’m generally a pretty pro-America kind of chap. Some of my best friends are American, don’t you know. Even so, there are limits.
What The Bourne Ultimatum did capture was an arrogance that gives the United States a permanent right to do as it pleases anywhere in the world. In this movie this even includes a CIA assassination squad bumping off a British citizen at a mainline London railway station.
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