Bet your house on it that if this movie's title contained "Iranian", "Boko Haram", "North Korean" or, Allah and God forbid, "Arab", then the movie would never have been released. Hollywood would have swamped its producers in lawsuits, sicked the FBI on to them and beseeched the US President. Fox News would have railed about this "immoral, anti-American, anti-democracy, anti-everything-we-believe-in" movie.
But somehow the word "American" makes it not only acceptable but epic, admirable, even glorious and certainly ordained by a Christian God, especially given that Clint Eastwood directed.
The media is full of stuff about the guy who plays the lead. Bor-ing. You're only acting, mate. You do get to go home and make-believe in your marble-clad bathroom.
The United States, for all its contribution to societies at large in wartime, in business, and most everything else has yet lots of blind spots.
I'm not anti-American, nor a writer whose literary heroes are virtually all American. I'm a fanatic on black American music, and my boxing heroes are just about all Americans. I kind of love what Apple has done for the lives of near everyone on the planet (and kind of hate their ruthless business model). Microsoft the same.
But I loathe the vast majority of their movie output. And I can't stand the Oscar-award hysteria that Hollywood and a collusive media shove down our throats every year, ad nauseam.
Actors interviewed on television and their every detailed recall of some incident while filming and "almost got killed, should have used a stuntman". This of an entire movie that's a stunt or a joke.
The actress breathlessly expounding on how many takes a certain scene took to shoot "that absolutely drained me, even though the director was an absolute genius. Oh, and as for my co-star he is such an incredible, unbelievable genius talent I get the shivers talking about him. Why, I ..."
Come here, remote control. Or, better still, call in a sniper and shoot out the studio lights and sound system. Gushers all of them.
American businesses are the best marketers in world trade history. Doff our hats. They're brilliant, relentless, and even their ruthlessness can be overlooked so well do they push their products and services. Even if some are health threats such as any soft drink, burger, cigarettes and - too many to name, afraid of being sued. Just saying that their business drive, if not necessarily ethics, is to be admired.
Clever, cunning, manipulative Hollywood has inflicted on the entire modern world the importance of Oscar award outcomes. Every media outlet talks this ceremony up till even thinking people such as those published in the New York Times are pulled into its orbit. Give the Hollywood publicists and marketers their dues.
When George Clooney got married it was media saturation coverage. But this is world news didn't you know? George Clooney got married.
Another thing about that amazing but flawed democracy: If Lance Armstrong was black he'd now be serving 10-15 years in a penitentiary. A man who not only shamed his sport, he shamed America, effectively stole tens of millions and his latest caper had his wife take the blame claiming she, not he, was driving a vehicle that had an accident as he'd been drinking.
They threw the black NFL superstar Michael Vick in jail for three years for having fighting dogs. That's it. He wasn't a drug cheat, didn't steal from the public.
Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential Republican candidate who shoots moose and most any other animal says water-boarding is "America's way of baptising terrorists". This person could have been her nation's second-in-command.
If they only made a movie showing cowardly Islamic State murderers being snipered, we'd all go to see it.
