Featuring Keisha Castle-Hughes from the movie “Whale Rider,” the four-minute clip opens in a stylized urban schoolyard, rendered in pen-and-ink and stylized gray watercolors drawn by artist Greg Ruth.
A group of teen girls react with horror to the whining roar of jet engines that fades into the opening notes of the song. When it becomes clear who’s responsible for what we presume is a Sept. 11-style terrorist attack, classmates of Castle-Hughes’ character torment her for her ethnicity, and she flees for home, only to find her parents covering over the Arabic script on the sign outside the family store. Someone has scrawled “terrorist scum” on one of the store’s windows.
“Cinnamon girl mixed heritage/Never knew the meaning of color lines,” Prince sings. “9/11 turned that all around/When she got accused of this crime.”
Intercut with straightforward scenes of the singer and his band playing on a blasted, war-torn landscape, the video shows Castle-Hughes donning traditional dress and head scarf and videotaping what appears to be a statement of martyrdom. In the next scene, she’s back in Western garb and arriving at the airport. Perhaps for emphasis, the camera lingers on the U.S. passport she shows to airport officials.
Then she’s standing in the terminal with a detonator in her hand. She closes her eyes and presses down on the red button with both hands. The perspective shifts outdoors as flames rip through the glass-paneled front wall.
It’s only for a moment, though, and then the scene reverses itself to the moment just before Castle-Hughes hits the button. Is it a fantasy?
Interesting warning. I expect he will soon cut another video called "Vanilla Boy" about a white Republican boy being called an idiot for his beliefs by his school teachers and some "friends," then going home to find a swastika burned into his family's lawn and his dad covering up his Bush / Cheney '04 bumper stickers. Guns and a nightmare school scene follow.
Or maybe a video about the girl's family packing up and moving back to Saudi Arabia, where the girl is forced to quit school and become some man's third wife, has no vote, no freedom of speech, no freedom outside what her husband allows actually, and is constantly bombarded with how evil America is. Her father has no family connections anymore, so he works as a day laborer, and her brother's future looks the same. One day she runs off, joins Hamas, and detonates herself in an Israeli grocery store.
Or maybe we could just make a video about someone practicing personal responsibility, even when severely provoked.
Sorry. Forgot which planet I was on there for a moment.
(Mug tip to Michelle Maulkin.)
1 comment:
Yeah.
As a conservative, white, gun-owner. . . in Oklahoma of all places, I still move my Bush sticker out of the back window when I'm not in the truck. Always afraid that some Michael Moore fan will bust out my windows.
And I haven't strapped on a suicide belt and gone into a coffee house poetry reading. . . . yet ;}
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