PUBLIC NUISANCES: Natural Born Killers/Ugly Jaws
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
PUBLIC NUISANCES R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. Natural Born Killers WASHINGTON WE ARE SAYING is give peace a chance"—have the charmed crowds that turned out to hear Senator...
...To all of this children laugh and their eyes widen...
...But, truth be known, Zarqawi is a high school dropout from a squalid Jordanian town where from an early age he was a public nuisance...
...Actually, compared to Zarqawi the corpulent Emir is a more sympathetic fellow...
...He is also remembered for his secret police, his brutality even towards his own citizenry, and certain light-hearted moments...
...Like most of the other terrorists in the Middle East Zarqawi is simply an evil man...
...Moreover, Shark Tale is addressed to a children's audience and so it not only crosses the line with its stereotyping but it contains violence and brutal language that only a Hollywood aesthete would find acceptable...
...My guess is he still has a yen for the hooch...
...He does what he's supposed to do...
...After all, he was the Emir...
...Kids often see what looks like violence as funny, at least in cartoons...
...PUBLIC NUISANCES Actually there is no negotiating with such killers no matter what high office they might attain...
...The Emir of Bokhara might actually have served as a role model for the brute killers now at large in Iraq, for instance, Abu Musab Zarqawi...
...I wonder when Spielberg is going to reply...
...From the Emir of Bokhara to Abu Musab Zarqawi, this Afghan official understands the war we are in...
...In a March 9, 2004 New York Times article, Spielberg wrote, "We are in a race against time for the conscious mind of the young...
...In Shark Tale he has one shark, Lino, praising violence when Lino says of a son, "Your brother Frankie, now he's a killer...
...He gained international renown by maintaining his "Bug Pit," a verminous subterranean 62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2004 cell into which he would thrust foreign visitors, allowing the pit's assorted vermin and reptiles to gnaw on them before their public beheading...
...But Spielberg's Shark Tale is fixated on the Mafia as an Italian enterprise, with no mention of the occasional German, Jew, or Irishman who made their contributions to organized crime in America...
...There is another difference...
...When he finishes apologizing to the shark lovers at PETA, I suggest he give the Columbus Citizens Foundation a call...
...He is the bespectacled Islamofascist who personally beheaded Nicholas Berg in May and more recently Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley, all three being non-combatants merely going about the business of rebuilding Iraq...
...Zarqawi may appear in photographs as a bright young graduate student, one of those thirtysomething Arab graduate students who so often turn up at an American cow college and become such pests at sorority houses...
...The peace movement today can hardly claim that Washington's adversaries are on the right side of history, unless history is headed in reverse...
...The president of the Columbus Citizens Foundation has good reason to be sore...
...People like Ghaffar even on being released from prison return to violence and terror," commented the Afghan official, Rozi Khan...
...The Cold War's peace movement could claim the Soviet Union was "on the right side of history...
...He's beautiful...
...He returned to the Taliban and died in a battle with Afghan security forces...
...1,4 NOVEMBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63...
...As Italian-Americans are usually Catholics they get hit twice...
...That today in America a peace movement is growing and contemplating some sort of peaceful give-and-take with the likes of Zarqawi is astounding, though there were millions who in the 1930s believed they could deal politically with Hitler...
...Yet that is where things stand, my fellow Yanks...
...The Emir apparently found the consumption of pork very funny, and I have to admit I agree with him when it comes to an old German recipe that I once read for pig's feet...
...And a sense of the colossal brutality of the film is conveyed in a hammerhead shark, Giuseppe the Hammerhead, uttering: "May whoever did this die a thousand deaths...
...Natural Born Killers WASHINGTON LL WE ARE SAAAAYING is give peace a chance"—have the charmed crowds that turned out to hear Senator Jean-Francois Kerry, the peace candidate, begun singing this old ditty from peace movements of yore...
...Aside from the fact that it is unlikely that a "maggot-covered corpse" is going to appear under an ocean, this language is a bit too vivid for young people, no...
...The terrorist, one Abdul Ghaffar, had been released months, perhaps years, ago from our Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo to begin his life anew...
...Unreason and murder are in their DNA...
...When Spielberg makes all the bloody sharks in Shark Tale gangsters with Italian-American names and slang, one has to wonder what he is up to...
...But let them consider this: Transforming sharks into Italian-American Mafiosi is not amusing, even to the young...
...Frankly, I think we have gone a bit overboard...
...I grew up in the ethnic bouillabaisse of Chicago, and I recall many ethnics as well as blacks and whites jokingly addressing each other in terms we now consider deeply offensive...
...Yet kids do not think very much about gangsters or the possible ethnicity of gangsters...
...The Middle-Eastern thugs who slaughter their countrymen, kidnap and behead foreigners, and display their victims in cages have more in common with the Emir of Bokhara of 250 years ago than with modern Communist despots...
...Today he might portray himself as a pious Muslim, but in his youth he was jailed for sexual assault...
...One recalls with amusement the time in 1845 when in a fit of "uncontrollable laughter" he released the Rev...
...If Spielberg's film emphasized Italians' contributions to Western culture from the Roman Empire on down through the Renaissance, to modern engineering, science, the arts, and let us not forget suchstaples of American cuisine as pizza and pasta, who would object...
...Even the grisly Fidel Castro has never publicly bragged about his torture cells, and he has always had the public relations savvy to keep public executions to a minimum...
...Improbable antics are the stuff of kids' animated films...
...Now kids are, as F. Scott Fitzgerald might say, different from you and me...
...May this stinking, maggot-covered corpse rot in the fiery depths of hell...
...Well, there is something a little flafla about Hollywood, though I hope the Hollywoodians will not consider that stereotyping...
...Fine, so how do we explain the excesses of Shark Tale...
...They commit a lot of excesses that strike me as hypocritical...
...Behind the mud walls of the Khanate of Bokhara in Central Asia, the Emir maintained a strictly Islamic state...
...He was an alcoholic and possibly a drug addict...
...Frankly, I am somewhat surprised to see how rapidly the cranks and nostalgists who initially opposed our military action in Iraq found themselves in the company of a large chunk of the Democratic Party...
...Yet here we go again, and this year the Democrats' peace candidate did not even have the eloquence or the ideological rigor of yesteryear's Gene McCarthy or George McGovern...
...Moreover I suspect that his famous beheadings have less to do with religious inspirations or even with xenophobia than with his simple innate hatreds...
...Commenting on the death of another Middle Eastern terrorist recently, an Afghan security official got to the heart of the matter...
...Some were meant as friendly jokes...
...For one thing he was probably better educated, for another, he had no police record, and at least when he sexually molested people it was legal...
...Auriana's points were well made and compelling...
...It is not entertaining...
...Cars fly off the road, barnyard animals suddenly take wing over a pasture, animals talk and bop each other in the head...
...Still there seem to remain a few groups one can stereotype and slur with impunity, for instance, religious fundamentalists, Roman Catholics, and Italian Americans...
...Surely if People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) complained of Spielberg's treatment of sharks in this movie, he would be a Vesuvius of apologies...
...He went on to inveigh against "the dangers of stereotyping, the dangers of discrimination, the dangers of racial and religious hatred and vengeful rage...
...In the past stereotypes and slurs were not always meant as offenses...
...It is their nature...
...Joseph Wolff, a Church of England clergyman, who appeared in the Emir's court wearing full canonical dress and admitting that, yes, he did indeed like his pork chops...
...Ugly Jaws WASHINGTON THE OTHER DAY LAWRENCE AURIANA, the president of Columbus Citizens Foundation, an ItalianAmerican heritage organization, objected to the invidious stereotyping of Italian Americans in Steven Spielberg's animated film, Shark Tale...
...America, a country where in generations past ethnic stereotypes abounded along with ethnic slurs, has become very touchy about such practices...
...There is no negotiating with him, nor can he be placated in any way...
...Spielberg might have made a lot more money if his sharks were, what might we call it, ethnically neutral...
Vol. 37 • November 2004 • No. 9
