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April 8, 2007
The Shepherd We Shall Not Want
Last night the wife and I watched "The Good Shepherd". A review will be coming shortly, but for now I wanted to mention one particularly memorable line from "The Good Shepherd", a film which dwells extensively on the WASPy and elitist culture of the CIA in its early decades. Matt Damon portrays the central character, CIA operator Edward Bell Wilson, a careful, taciturn, stoic (in the way that only certain privileged types can be) Yale Skull and Bonesman and product of a "respectable" family in a sense that now seems so terribly anachronistic (in Caesar's time he surely would have been counted among the optimates). At one point in his long and sordid career in defense of Brooks Brothers and all it stands for he is trying to enlist the help of a Mafia boss (Joe Pesce). The boss remarks "The Irish have their homeland. Us Italians have our families and our church; the Jews their traditions- hell even the niggers have their music; so what do you people [ie WASPs] have?”
Wilson’s unflinching answer: “We have the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.”
Posted by dag at April 8, 2007 8:08 PM