In the final scene of a film I started watching on Norway TV (I blame the the jet-lag), which features suicide bombers, suitcase nukes, an attack on NYC, a fitness-obsessed prez, an all-powerful 'world television network', and arab oil - all in 1982. The film is pure schlock, but dead-on and prescient in its analysis of the media as accelerant of war and terror. It is worth watching right to the end, when the US uses a terrorist attack on the homeland as an excuse to invade an oil-producing country, and Sean Connery, as the media super-hack, prepares to parachute in with the military (premature embeddedness), he gives the memorable line of 'if it doesn't happen on TV it doesn't happen' (or something like that), simultaneously tearing off his very bad rug. The other reason to watch the credits is for the amazing cast of great B-grade comedic actors (Leslie Nelson, Dean Stockwell, and ...Rosalind Cash, go figure) and the novel credit, 'The Better Angels', by Charles Mcgarthy, who was ex-CIA and wrote some of the best post-watergate, paranoid spy thrillers - and who was, I believe, the first novelist to feature the suicide bomber. Let's see if we can netflix or get this up on mycourse, for some more serious exegesis.

VTY
JDD