25 February 2008

A Country For Old Men

Last night in Tinseltown they handed out the Oscars.

This morning, I find out that the big winner was “No Country For Old Men”. I just had to shake my head and laugh. It made me think of Cuba. And the newly selected powers that be. The newly selected geriatric change agents.

This morning in the Herald, they describe “No Country For Old Men” as “the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel that uses a botched drug deal as a metaphor for the fateful consequences to a society that forgets the value of a human life”.

Irony, for me, is only eclipsed by sarcasm.

Extremely ironic, I was thinking, that in a night where a film titled “No Country For Old Men” about the “fateful consequences to a society that forgets the value of a human life”, a bunch Old Men, some of them in the military uniforms of their glory days, who look like they are on their way to VFW parade, get selected to usher in a new era to a society which has forgotten the value of human life because of the selfish and violent actions of their youth:


ALEJANDRO ERNESTO / EFE


Then, this old guy in a baseball cap and driving the mandatory Buick Century, going 30 in a 45, decides to stop traffic so he can do who knows what. I finally get by him and look into his car, ready to tell him what he’s going to die from and where he’s going to go afterward, and I see this bewildered elderly gentleman, around 80, who’s obviously totally and cluelessly lost-just like Cuba.

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