What's going on in Hollywood?

First we had Argo, a movie that clearly dramatizes events, but does so for the benefit of the US and - get this - the CIA!  Like my boys said, that's like a movie that makes the Gestapo look like heroes.   Then we had Unbroken, by Angelina Jolie.  A movie that portrays the US as heroes and the Japanese - get this - as the bad guys.  Almost brutal.  Almost Nazi like in their cruelty.  A portrayal some vaguely admit, but prefer to keep under the bushel in order to emphasize the helpless peace loving spirit of Japan in August 1945.  And now we have The Sniper.  A film by political and economic conservative Clint Eastwood, that looks at the complexities of a US soldier who is a sniper, and actually shows the insurgents as baddies.

What the hell!  We're supposed to be the bad guys.  We nuke babies.  We slaughter darkies.  We own slaves and butcher Indians Native Americans.  We cause wars.  We interfere.  When people are forced to fly jets into our skyscrapers filled with Eichmanns innocent civilians, we're the ones that made them hate us.

What's with this?

My boys and my wife and I watched Argo together last night.  They were stunned.  Not because they thought it was an historical treatise on the events.  But because it dared to make us out to be the good guys.  Yes, it did it's job in showing we weren't always clean and without blame in events.  But we - and the CIA! - were actually the heroes.  Other countries objected, it wasn't multi-cultural enough, how dare an actor who isn't Mexican portray a person, etc., etc.   But my boys were stunned.  They said they're not used to that.  Throughout their life, we're the bad guys.  The US.  Our Founding Racists Fathers.  Our armies.  Our leaders.  Our racist citizens.  That's supposed to be the emphasis.  And that's what my boys have seen in their culture, their media, their schools and textbooks.

Like I told my boys as we watched Argo, and I described the low spirits of the day, there were actually people then who said the best days of the US were behind us.  That was an actual POV.  One of my sons piped up and said that's not what they say today.  Today, the motto is that the US never had any best days, we were always evil, wrong, and bad.  Our only hope is to make amends and repent and put the evils of the past behind us.  And yet these movies suggest otherwise.

To my wife and I, it was a nice refresher.  To my boys, it was a completely different POV.  Like finding out the world may be flat after all.  How interesting.