Against my better judgment, I’m going to offer my two cents on the pressing question of whether the Bourne Ultimatum is anti-American, and only because in the pre-Labor Day doldrums, the dust up between Mickey Kaus and Christopher Orr spurred me to take an afternoon off yesterday and go see the flick. I find myself compelled to take Orr’s side, and this despite the fact that Kaus so elegantly zinged TNR with a throw away line about Scott Beauchamp. First off, Kaus says that Greenglass’s United 93 was an indictment of the Bush administration’s failure to act effectively on 9/11. That’s not how I saw it. It seemed to me an indictment of the pre-9/11 mindset that afflicted the entire country from the president on down. And I certainly didn’t see it as anti-American. Bourne, of course, was not exactly an ode to the American security apparatus. The CIA is portrayed as hopelessly corrupt–there is only one other decent agent, with the exception of Bourne, and all the others seem incapable of making their own judgment as to the morality of killing journalists, fellow agents, civilians, etc. Still, this CIA as it is portrayed is pure (right-wing) fantasy–it’s competent. That competence is channeled for evil purposes, but it is impressive nonetheless. Sort of akin to Jonathan Last’s case
