Mullings A Political Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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The Patriot

Wednesday, July 5, 2000

All right. We completed our "All-Mel-Gibson-All-The-Time" holiday weekend (with a short break in the office on Monday) by going to see "The Patriot."

I liked it, although at 164 minutes, it was too long by 44. And the battle scenes were true to the current Hollywood thinking that if showing half a leg was good in World War II's "Saving Private Ryan" that same half leg will be great in a film which takes place 168 years earlier all of which caused more wincing than absolutely necessary.

(I had a "too much gore" line in there, but this is, after all, our nation's birthday and I'm trying to be on my best behavior.)

The plot is pretty easy: Gibson's character (Benjamin Martin, loosely based on the real-life character Francis Marion - "The Swamp Fox") became a hero in the French and Indian Wars (1755-1760) but he isn't proud of it.

For a look at Marion, Gibson, and a brief thumbnail of Marion's history click here.

A really, really ruthless Englishman does really, really ruthless things so Gibson grabs his old French and Indian Wars gear and sets off to put things right. Which he does. At the risk of spoiling the ending for those who haven't seen the movie: We win.

The Brits are a bit off-put by the notion of our portraying one of their own as a baby-killing, church-burning, wounded-soldier-shooting, cur while portraying Marion - whom THEY consider to be a terrorist of the worst sort - as a hero.

As an example, in a piece in the London "Daily Telegraph" the other day, this:

"We feel sorry for the Americans, of course. We realise that they have fouled up badly since their rather ungrateful decision to turf us out of their lives in 1781.

"If only we had the time and the money, we would gladly turn our backs on the European nitwittery and come back to reclaim the colonies. Then, they could relearn what they have so clearly forgotten: how to cook potatoes, how to play rugby without a motorcycle helmet on, how to spell "defence" and how to turn up at the beginning of the war rather than halfway through it."

It always comes down to that: Americans throw in their faces at every opportunity, our having had to bail Britain out of two wars; For their part, the British ask us to remember that, while they were in those wars from Day One, we had a habit of joining in about Day 700.

There was one glaring anachronism in the film: At the end, as Gibson's character is pretty much single-handedly winning the Battle of Eutaw Springs, General Cornwallis' adjutant suggests a maneuver which might save the day for the British. Cornwallis says to him, "In your dreams, General."

I happen to know for a fact that the phrase, "In your dreams" was developed 179 years later, in 1960 New Hyde Park Memorial Junior-Senior High School as the only acceptable response by freshman girls to my suggestion that we go out on a date.

Enough.

The Mexican election was a surprise in the ease with which Vicente Fox won the Presidency and the power his party had all the way down to the National Assembly. You have to look pretty hard to find any coverage of the fact that Fox's National Action Party - PAN - was the center-right party in the national election.

If the liberal party had won, we would have had seven million words of analysis written as to why the election in Mexico is a prelude to a rising tide of leftist sentiment sweeping the earth.

Say, who IS the center-right candidate in Estados Unidos? Oh, yes. Jorge Bush.

Here's a lead you don't get to read every day: John Pomfret of the Washington Post Service writing in the International Herald Tribune regarding the decidedly un-center-right direction that Mongolia is taking:
"GACHUURI, Mongolia - 'Hello, Good morning.'
"It was already late afternoon Sunday in this tranquil community of herders and country houses along the banks of the blue waters of the Tuul River in the heart of the Mongolian steppe.
"But the Chief of Stamps at the local election booth serving this community of 2,000 appeared to be deep into several cups of fermented mare's milk and had lost track of time."

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Copyright © 2000 Richard A. Galen

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