Divided States of America

When i heard that the opening for the Laibach concert will be their new movie called “Divided States of America”, directed by Sasho Podgorsek, the only thing comingto my mind was “Not another, not THEM jumping the wagon with this anti-american shit”.

Don't get me wrong, America is bad, beyond comprehension, but this all seems like a tidal wave without sense and purpose, and a nice self-promotion for the person/artist/band who gives his opinion, because all of a sudden he becomes an actual saint who fights the injustice, poverty, war and all those bad things plaguing the world today, feeding the audience to the “Miss of the Universe” cliché quotes. So, general feeling was that Laibach became another Green Day surrogate, blended, chewn and preprocessed for mass consumption.

But, as always, i was wrong. Although movie is against current American government, it gently avoids being drawn into self-righteous preaching. This ain't another Michael Moore flick, where a millionaire sells you stories about oppressed people of America working for a dime, while their government spends tax money on bombs, guns and “bad bad things”.

I would really like to find a transcription of the opening speech given by Petar Mlakar of NSK's Institute for pure and applied philosophy. In the absence of this, all i can say is that it takes balls to say things he said in front of a lot of Americans. It wasn't anti-Bush, but anti-American values speech, dissecting them to tiny pieces of nationalistic prejudices about own glory and other's unimportance. Whole tone of the movie was in sync with the Laibach's song “B-machine”, and that is that if all this continues to happen, we're all gone and then it doesn't matter if you have a Lexus or if you live in a trailer.

Reaction from the audience was more than positive, and from what seemed like a cross-section of that “other” America, their opinion was generally united one, that what is happening today is no good. There were people from gay-scientists(?) to regular white collar media workers agreeing that what is going on is bad.

I don't know, maybe i liked it because i can relate to it, it's filmed from the “barbarian” angle of view, from the eyeglasses of people who Americans knew only as James Bond's antagonists, those who buy A-bombs on the black markets, just so they could destroy Americans, because they hate freedom and Americans have freedom.....and Patriot Act.