By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Bruce Robinson: We are required to listen to the wrong voices
in the upcoming UK-themed edition of Chicago-based slick StopSmiling, majordomo JC Gabel takes a flight to Blighty to the rural farm of undersung screenwriter, novelist and ranteur Bruce Robinson. The 12-page takeout includes pics of Robinson’s workspaces, and lots of the same sort of blunt flights of fancy and disfavor as in his scripts for Withnail & I and an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson‘s “Rum Diaries” he’s slated to direct (for the first time since 1992’s producer-mangled Jennifer 8) with Johnny Depp. The piece is not online, but concludes with greater than a solid page, in 10-point type, of the 59-year-old writer on the world today, of which this is only a modest swatch of articulation: “This war on terror is preposterous and will create ten terrorists for every one it kills. It’s Orwellian in scope, Truly Orwellian, and the preserve of maniacs… Criticize Bush, Rumsfeld, et al, ‘Oh you’re anti-American, are you?’ No, Mr. Bush, I am not anti-American, I am anti-you. It’s an obscene con, a trick, manipulated to try and put dissent on the side of the ‘terrorists.’ Obscene. I’m not on the side of bin fucking Laden, or any other of these peculiar murderers. And I am not anti-American. I adore America… [But not] the American of snatch-squads and secret prison camps. It is the America of the Constitution of the United States. I think the Constitution of the United States ranks among the greatest documents ever written, it stands next to the Magna Cara, which I also have a profound fondness for. What I’m anti is these men, who by their deceit would seem to deny the content of these documents, constituting the best form of government human beings have ever invented—democracy. I am not on the side of the terrorists… Nobody tells us about the tragedy of Iraq. We’re blinded in a blizzard of lies. The truth is too shameful to tell. When our greatest living writer, Harold Pinter, won the greatest literary prize on Earth, the Nobel Prize, it didn’t even make BBC TV news. Any British slut who’d come third in the Eurovision song contest would have been all over the news. But not Pinter. Why? Because Pinter tells the truth and they’re terrified of hearing it. From the moment we open our eyes in the morning to closing them at night, we are bludgeoned with propaganda. I beg your pardon, spin. We are required to listen to the wrong voices. To get at their oil, we dehumanize people who invented writing 6,000 years before Shakespeare. Iraq invented language, algebra, astronomy and our propaganda converts them into screeching ragheads in their own streets… I much admire Bob Geldof et al for the effort—Band Aid, Live Aid, whatever—but they’re piss in the ocean, cynically used as photo-ops for the politicians. Rock stars can’t change Africa. Exxon, Halliburton, BP and Shell can. Cut to the guy in the new car ad, with the blonde in a miniskirt next to him on an empty road—driving into the eternal good life. But beyond the horizon are those starving kids with flies around their eyes.” [More on Mr. B. from his publisher, Bloomsbury.]