Killing them softly

I saw this film last night. It was brutal, a choreographed montage of everything that lies beneath the self-deceiving hyperbole of American politics. Set against the electoral rhetoric of Obama, Bush and McCain the script is taut, gutter-dirty and with a self-contained obscene morality that is so authentic it makes you reel. Life is brief for all of us and most of us realise it far too late to do much about it. In this film it can be so brief that the characters have barely time to lift a head in wonder as the bullets arrive. To die incidentally, as minor protagonists in an unknown plot, is the worst of all deaths whether as ordinary folk in state terrorism, as a result of famine in an ignored catastrophe or as  pacific followers of the wrong religion in a certain place at a certain time. We would like to think of our deaths being somehow the noble ends of lives well lived, even when our final months are distressingly ignoble.

I wrote a tweet in homage to Omar Khayyam recently:

Our lives are kisses on the surface of the river
Tiny whorls that catch the light and then disappear

Gentle and poetic I hope. The perfect antithesis of Killing them Softly