Oliver Stone will break your bones…George Bush
Today I had the odd priviledge of being in the same room as Oliver Stone. He is promoting his documentary “South of the Border” in which he interviews Hugo Chavez and many other prominent leaders of the Bolivarian movement around the continent. I can’t say I know anything about South American politics, so I was primarily planning on asking him about how nakedly biased the film is, how much he fauns over these guys and takes care to show each of them playing soccer, shaking hands with the little people, asking them the kind of softball questions that Sarah Palin gets when being interviewed on Fox News. Anyone in the middle is going to see him as too starstruck to be anything more than a hardcore lefty. But he seemed to own it, the fact that he’s almost as bad as Michael Moore but without all the kitch vintage footage.
But here’s the thing. I was in a roundtable, but not one of the panels with the usual suspects I’m almost always sharing the table with - one notorious bloviator who always likes the sound of his own voice more than the answer he’s asking for, the lady with the rhinstone covered baseball cap and a lady with a cane who shoots dirty looks at anyone who coughs or shuffles a paper. This time, I was in the room with several Hispanic journalists. And as soon as Stone sat down at the table, he pointed to each person and tried to name the country they came from: “Ecuador, Salvador, Mexican” and then he got to me “What are you?” “Rhode Island” I said. “But doesn’t she look Ecuadorian?” he asked the others. I’m pale as a ghost, so I guess that was a joke? Everyone else seemed to appreciate that he could tell what country they were from by their facial features. Is there really pride in that? Or am i just too uptight PC that it offended my sense of how others thing people should behave, i don’t know.
They asked him a lot of very specific questions about the politics that I can’t use the answers for, but by the end, he spewed out of few classics that will definitely make it in. Like, “George Bush prostituted this country at the same time that he was a pimp to other nations” “He totally fucked this country.”
