"The Big One"

Patrick Bond pbond at wn.apc.org
Mon May 18 01:22:13 PDT 1998


When I was with Doug at an upper west side coffee shop one Saturday morning last October, we ran into Moore. He told me that since TV Nation had lost its US sponsors, he sent out an appeal for others, and came up with Britain's ITV and South Africa's M-NET, so he was grateful that in SA his "Roger and Me" had become such a cult flick that even a really weak commercial network would help him out for the next round of production.

Last month we had a similar fun time watching a really good left journalist -- John Pilger -- skewer some rich white trash in his documentary "Apartheid did not Die." Targets were the country's leading real estate agent -- "Pam, things for whites haven't really changed, have they" "No not at all, let me tell you about the fabulous house that Mark Thatcher just bought from me" -- and the country's "best-dressed woman" (really hilarious) and the white p.r. man for the largest corporation (Anglo American), who sputtered when John probed and probed about why workers with lung diseases were laid off with tiny benefits packages (the p.r. hack didn't want to guess at the payouts, and looked truly beastly). This film got the whole country talking, and predictably some of its biggest critics were the new black elite. One of the best lines was Mandela's when John asked him why SA was selling arms to some of the world's worst human rights offenders: "It would be wrong to interfere in the internal affairs of another country."



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