Glob-a-log

(Sleeping with the enemy)

With only five days to go till the American presidential elections, it is understandable that most of the world’s attention is focused on that, near Shakespearean drama – a sheer unending play in which most now see John McCain as a cross between Lear and MacBeth (but with the added poignancy that he never actually wore the crown) and where Obama is being seen by his admirers as an aspiring but undithering prince Hamlet (and being cast by his opponents as a left-leaning Iago.)

There’s this feeling that the world is at some crossroads and, maybe more importantly, people feel at a total loss. The recent past has been anything but glorious, the present doesn’t feel like home and the future holds more nightmare scenarios than visions of better things to come.

No wonder that many people almost long for those sureties of a past age. The wisdom of old Hollywood movies lay in knowing that the public wanted to see the world in black and white: heroes and villains. When you allow for more colours, you also admit that they come in varying, less easily identifiable shades.

These days, we’ve lost the comfort of knowing where we stand. Where are the Hitlers and the Stalins that we need, in order to define our own virtues? For now, we can’t see beyond these ever-changing shades of murky greys. So, its not surprising that some people even long for those frozen, joyless certainties of the Cold War, when things seemed to be so much simpler – more innocent, almost.

Of course, for some those days never ended. Enter the Communist Party of St Petersburg…:

Kurylenko, the Ukrainian actress who plays Bond’s sidekick in Quantum of Solace, has been condemned by the Communist Party of St Petersburg for aiding “the killer of hundreds of Soviet people and their allies”. Apparently oblivious to Bond’s fictional nature, it accused her of assisting “a man who worked for decades under the orders of Thatcher and Reagan to destroy the USSR”.

The Communists are, however, willing to rehabilitate Kurylenko — if she delivers her co-star, Daniel Craig, into the clutches of Russia’s secret services for interrogation. “Let him tell what other plans are being written in the Pentagon and Hollywood to discredit Russia and drive a wedge between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples,” it said.

Sergei Malinkovich, the leader of the city party, told The Times: “Everyone knows that the CIA and MI6 finance James Bond films as a special operation of psychological warfare against us. This Ukrainian girl sleeps with Bond and that means that Ukraine is sleeping with the West.”

Bless.

(Why the Cold War is still hot)

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 09:28 and is filed under Arts & Ents, Columns, Politics, Satire. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.