You have to admit, the title is original. So, what prompted this sudden outburst? Well, my cable has been turned off since the middle of January, which means I've been watching precious little real tv.

So, yesterday, at work, I happened to be in the lunch room alone, and was drawn to C-SPAn, which was showing an interview Ann Coulter did with somebody from the Claire Booth Luce institute (no idea who CBL is or was). Anyway, Miss Coulter was promoting her new book "Guilty." I've read parts of it, in an odd moment in the bookstore, and it's not bad. Anyway, I've always thought that Ann Coulter was a bit of a shrew, with a bit too much invective for my taste (Although, I agree with much of what she says, as my mother used to tell me, "It's not what you say. It's how you say it."). Still, I always watch when she is on tv, if I can.

So, anyway, there she is, on C-SPAN, without all her bristles up, and seemingly at ease, although she did still flash her rapier wit. So, I caught myself thinking, "You know, she's actually a rational, intelligent, engaging woman. And she's kind of cute!" I know that last part was just the man in me coming out, but seriously, I've always thought Ann Coulter looked dried up or anorexic in her book jacket photos, and on tv, not to mention being kind of angular for a woman. In this case, however, she just looked and sounded like what Trisha Yearwood once called "A Real Live Woman." I mean, I'm not in love with her or anything, but she's not the Wicked Witch of the North or anything either. Angelina Jolie, on the other hand...

Which brings me to Wallace. It's a "docu-drama" about George C.Wallace, who never seems to get talked about in the history books. It originally aired on TNT. I had it on tape, but had never watched it. So... For those of you who don't know, GCW was a segregationist governor of Alabama in the 1960's, who is famous for calling for "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever." He also ran for president several times, most notably in 1968, that eventful year in American history when Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both assasinated, Lyndon Johnson was hounded out of office, and violent riots were planned and executed at the Democratic Convention in Chicago by what someone has called "long haired, dope smoking, maggot infested hippie types" who were great lovers of peace. Yes, you read that right. Many of the rioters later went into politics.

Anyway, Wallace was shot at a campaign rally during his run for the Democratic nomination for president. Angelina Jolie plays his second wife, who was at the rally when he is shot. She does a good job making you forget that it's Angelina J, which for me is a good thing. I haven't had much use for her at least since she broke up Jennifer Anniston's marriage with her adulterous affair with Ms. Anniston's hubby. And she's not even cute. But I digress.

My point in mentioning the movie is that it is called a "docu-drama." That is, it pretends it's a portrayal of what actually happened, but actually, as the disclaimer at the beginning says, "some persons or events were created or altered for dramatic purposes." Which is to say, we're going to lie about, change or invent things without telling you what's fact and what's fiction, just so we can tell a better story. To show you how this works, one of the main characters in the story, a black man named Archie is completely made up. Didn't exist. And I'm fairly certain that the last scene in the movie, where Wallace visits Martin Luther King's church, and emotionally talks about how wrong he was, and apologizes to black people everywhere, didn't happen quite that way, if at all. Oh, and Archie was there with him.

My point isn't to defend George Wallace or not. My point is, if you don't know anything about Wallace, and you watch this movie, you might actually take it as fact, which it's not. For one thing, there is clearly an attempt to whitewash Martin Luther King, and the Kennedys, which is almost de riguer now days, and to tie Wallace, and the segregationist South, to conservatism, on the Vietnam war, on 'Law and order" (not the tv show, the campaign slogan), etc. (As Ann Coulter explained once, when Republicans seek votes in the South, this is a rascist ploy called "the Southern strategy." No word on what it's called when Democrats seek votes in the South.) And if you don't know any better, the movie makers won't tell you how they've slanted the facts. How we see the past affects how we act, and vote, in the present.

If you're saying, "But maybe it was accurate in the larger sense." Let me ask you, what if I made a movie about John Kennedy, and I painted him as a very ill man, who pretended to be exceptionally healthy, whose bootlegger, pro -Nazi father bought him into office, possibly with the connivance of his buddys in the mob? What if I then showed Kennedy as an inveterate womanizer, and an incompetent boob who couldn't get his agenda through Congress, and stumbled from one foreign policy blunder to another, from nearly bringing the world into World War III, to getting us bogged down in Vietnam? Oh, wait. That would actually be history.

Okay, so what if I closed the film by showing that he was shot by a communist who had already defected to the Soviet Union once, and was trying to leave the country to join his comrades again? Oh wait. That would be history too.

So, what if I then INVENTED a Russian communist character, let's call him Boris, who knew Kennedy, and was close to him all through his rise to power, and remained a family friend after the assasination? And I ended my movie with Boris taking Jackie Kennedy to Moscow, where she wept at Lenin's tomb, and apologized to the people of the world for all the evil her husband did, and all he helped perpetuate by his vicious crusade against the peace loving communists? Then I presented this as an essentially accurate depiction of JFK and what he meant to the country?

Can you tell me someone wouldn't scream bloody murder?

Again, I'm not defending Wallace, or his policies. I'm not attacking JFK either. I didn't know the men, and wasn't even born when they ran. It's also not my intention to refight the 1960's. I'm just saying, facts matter. Honesty matters. Associations matter. Truth matters. And you're not allowed to change the facts just because they don't fit your idea of the truth, or of what the truth OUGHT to be. Yet that is what "docu-dramas" do all the time. So, know what really happened before you start deciding that this person is good, and that person is bad because of how they are portrayed on tv or in movies. If I only knew Jesus from the movies made about him, I'd want to puke.

By the way, Ann Coulter sure is cute.