Today's winners of the Self-Hating American prize are Brian De Palma and George Clooney. Both of them are in Spain promoting very serious films of trenchant criticism of the hypocrisy of America's oligarchical unsustainable consumer society, or something like that.

Said De Palma in El Pais, "(Bush) goes around killing people with my tax money...The war in Iraq can be stopped if the dead are shown every day. It happened in Vietnam...In the United States violence is only seen in fiction. But on the TV news there are no dead bodies, violence is shown in small doses. They're selling us a war that has nothing to do with reality, and meanwhile people are getting blown up."

Said Clooney in La Vanguardia, "I grew up in a generation suspicious of the government and of big business. We never believed the government. Watergate was the confirmation of what we all suspected. I never believed in the CIA or in corporations. And movies like Chinatown reinforced these feelings. Unfortunately, things have not improved. In the United States, during twenty years, nobody gave a damnm about what the government did. As long as it didn't affect your personal life, you didn't pay attention to anything...I always remember Ned Beatty's words in Network, when he said there was no United States or Soviet Union, the only thing there was were IBM and ATT. In the world we live in everything is controlled by the big corporations, which is not always bad: I have worked for them and I am not sorry. It depends on who makes the decisions."

Note that Clooney thinks that images from fictional movies are logical support for statements about the nature of society and government.