So Vulture reports that Dinesh D’Souza is making a new movie. I really, really wish he wouldn’t.
His last movie, in case you missed it, was 2016: Obama’s America and it is a perfect example of what happens when the American right decides that Michael Moore is a really awesome guy and theywant to be totally just like him. In fairness, I did not watch the movie. I did, however, have the misfortune of reading the entire book upon which it was largely based: The Roots of Obama’s Rage (also by Dinesh D’Souza). It was an educational experience, but not in the way that D’Souza probably intended. The central premise of the book is that Obama is suffering from an acute case of absent-father syndrome, and therefore he has become the spiritual reincarnation of his father’s exact politics. The problem with that, of course, is that if Obama Senior was totally absent from his son’s life, how did he manage to pick up his politics? It’s not as though his precise brand of anti-colonialism was readily available on bookshelves. The only way Roots of Obama’s Rage makes sense as a narrative is if you believe in literal ghosts (which, if you read the book, might actually be what D’Souza is saying).
The mangled thesis isn’t the worst crime of the book, however. The intentionally belligerent tone is. D’Souze quite deliberately hurls as many racially insensitive terms as he can, including some of his own invention. For example, his term “lactation man” (meaning: “a person who makes things white”) impresively manages to be both sexist and racist at the same time! At least Ann Coulter tries to be funny and clever (guilty admission: sometimes I think she succeeds). D’Souza’s provocative prose is just ugly.
So the near media blackout surrounding the film’s release struck me as a blessing. This is not a right-wing documentary you want to bring home to meet your parents. Depressingly, however, the film did astoundingly well. Only three documentaries have ever pulled in more than the $33,449,086 that D’Souza’s film scored: a Justin Bieber documentary, March of the Penguins, and Farenheit 9/11. At over $100,000,000, Michael Moore’s haul is impressive, but his film opened up in over 800 theaters, and Obama’s America opened up in 1.
The next installment is scheduled for release just before the 2014 midterm elections. I can’t wait.
In another example of conservatives behaving badly, I’m flabbergasted at the way the following Cruz / Feinstein smackdown has been making the rounds among my right-of-center Facebook contacts and in the blogosphere. The video of the exchange between the two senators is here, and the conservative take on it is summarized with images like this one: