America (2014)

Director: Dinesh D’Souza                              Writers: Dinesh D’Souza & John Sullivan
Music: Bryan E. Miller                                  Cinematography: Andrew P.C. Smith
Starring: Dinesh D’Souza, Ted Cruz, Jagdish Bhagwati and Stanley Kurtz

Well, I really fell face-first into this one, but it serves me right. I don’t like to know a lot about films before I see them. To get the full impact, the less I know the better. The very misleading tag lines I read for this were something about what the world would be like if America didn’t exist. Sound’s cool, right? An alternative history story that imagines British control of North America. Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong. America is a jingoistic, right-wing propaganda piece full of lies and misdirection, something that feels more like a Fox News special report than a feature film. It’s nothing that sane people need to concern themselves with and is better off ignored. I had a weird feeling right from the start--after, of course, I realized I was watching a documentary--when the host, director and writer Dinesh D’Souza, called his previous film a runaway hit. Really? I’d never heard of it. But that’s only because I don’t watch films that lie to my face.

D’Souza, like all good right-wing radicals in this country, has only one purpose: to gain control of the government so that it can continue exploiting and robbing the poor and lining the pockets of the wealthy and taking a scorched-earth policy in doing so. He begins his screed by attempting to discredit historian Howard Zinn, saying that the author is only trying to make us ashamed for being Americans. In the first place, that’s not what Zinn ever tried to do. In the second place, D’Souza’s ultra simplistic summarizing of Zinn’s most famous work, A People’s History of the United States, is in itself a pack of lies. But be that as it may, he then goes on to say that Euro-Americans were not responsible for the genocide of the native populations of North America, it was just the diseases that wiped them out. He says that it was totally okay for the United States to appropriate half of Mexico, because Mexicans like it here. Worst of all, he makes the completely unethical argument that slavery was okay because everyone was doing it, even blacks. He uses isolated instances of individuals to make his specious arguments and then spins them to make it appear that it applies in all cases, completely ignoring the mountains of facts that show his arguments to be bald-face lies.

Once he’s finished fabricating history, he takes us up to the present and begins the right-wing radical approach to any argument: making stuff up. He goes on to bash the president’s push to get Americans health care coverage with more lies. He makes up all kinds of lies about how great capitalism is by telling us that we don’t have to buy that I-Phone or see that movie if we don’t want to, completely ignoring the fact that we do have to buy energy for homes and transportation, as well as insurance and health care, and that corporations are raping the land and polluting our natural resources and gouging us in every conceivable just to turn a buck. It’s the same garbage we’ve all heard before and it isn’t any more convincing now. Lies never are. Finally he comes to his real point, a preemptive smear campaign against Hillary Clinton before the run up to her presidency. It’s pathetic. It’s incredibly disingenuous. It’s downright evil. Do yourself a favor and don’t be sucked into the misleading advertising surrounding this sham of a film. Watch Howard Zinn's film instead and stay away from Dinesh D’Souza’s America. It’s not anyplace I want to live.