'Redacted' or not, here comes Brian De Palma!

It is customary on Thanksgiving for Americans to talk about what we are thankful for. We certainly have much to appreciate, but it's doubtful we'd have all we have (or any of it) without people like my friend Danny.

Danny is a Captain in the United States Air Force. He is also engaged to one of my oldest, dearest friends, and has made her a deliriously happy bride-to-be. So for that alone, of course I am thankful.

But Danny comes from a military family; that is, a whole family of brave men and women who live their lives risking everything, every day, for us. Those families are not in short supply in the United States Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and every other branch or division of our Armed Forces. Those families are plenteous, as are the even-more common individuals who risk their lives for us and our allies while their families, if they have families, are many thousands of miles away.

As a journalist, I haven't done much reporting on the war in Iraq. But that which I have written on the war has been part of what many would call the "truth surge" -- an attempt to mirror (without, of course, comparing) -- the remarkably gripping and off-the-mat revitalization of our Armed Forces' rebuilding mission following their successful Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Regardless of the level of daily progress in Iraq, however, the point is that the men and women of our Armed Forces are heroes. For that, I am thankful.

Brian De Palma doesn't agree, however. And whatever the Hollywood director is thankful for today, it isn't the aforementioned sacrifices by our troops.

That's because De Palma doesn't think my friend Danny is a hero. He doesn't think Danny's family are heroes, and he doesn't think much of Danny's fiancee Linda's year spent alternating between clinging to hope that Danny was OK and fighting loneliness.

And that's not because I'm staging or parroting some right-wing interpretation of De Palma's new movie, Redacted, in which De Palma portrays American soldiers as crazed, rabid rapists. It's because De Palma, in a press conference about the movie, in his own words clearly described exactly how he feels about our soldiers.

"The problem is that the language and the way the soldiers are truly reacting are in their blogs and in the videos they make and in the documentaries you see that are made from those videos. When you see these guys on television, they're nothing but giving talking points from whatever they’re supposed to say in order that the one specific image of how the war is going is supposed to be projected. And it's very much understandable."

Take a look at that last line: And it's very much understandable. In other words, we can clearly understand why soldiers wouldn't act like themselves in front of the American public. We might have some respect for these animals as long as we didn't see their true colors, is what De Palma is trying to say.

Look, it isn't a secret that De Palma is just a hack looking to profit off the war. But we can see why he wouldn't act that way at a press conference. We can see why he would just read talking points for the public without saying explicitly that he despises every man and woman in uniform. It's understandable.

You see, what's real is scripted, and what's scripted is real, in De Palma's world.

"We're in a new era of reality television, so if you can believe two people on a beach... are discussing how to scheme against two other people, and they're whispering to each other on 'Survivor', I think you can practically believe anything," De Palma told the press conference attendees.

Reality is unbelievable, so just to be safe, believe Hollywood. You know you can trust them.

And don't worry, though he hates the troops, De Palma hates President George W. Bush more. And his deranged hatred of Bush is the reason he's making this movie.

As he told audience members at the NY Film Festival:

"You know when this administration's over, all the things they did are all going to come out; the books are going to start being written by everybody that was involved in hiding things and manipulating things. And I — we — basically, just want to sort of end this war, you know, and by trying to show what the reality of this war is — stop sugarcoating it."

There you have it. The two reasons, in Brian De Palma's own words, why he and I are thankful for very different things as we celebrate Thanksgiving and head into the Chanukah-Christmas season.

De Palma believes that: (A) It's reasonable to portray our soldiers as subhuman destruction machines if it's for a noble cause, like trying to subvert a twice-elected sitting president's freedom- and democracy-spreading agenda, and (B) He's showing people the "reality" of the situation which, as De Palma told the audience earlier, the mainstream American media just wasn't exposing -- that the soldiers risking their lives in one of the most daring yet noble undertakings in modern history are really just psychopathic thugs.

Today, I'm thankful for what Danny and his fellow soldiers have done for us, and that in March Danny will vow to make my friend Linda eternally happy. Danny and Linda's families are thankful for that, too. My family, and my friends, are thankful for those things as well.

And I think we're all pretty thankful that we're nothing like Brian De Palma.