Terry Gilliam as the Black KnightI'll confess to being just a tad disappointed after
reading this story about one of the creative minds behind
Monty Python's Flying Circus. Gilliam was a terrific director and Brazil was one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. But he's as clueless as Oliver Stone when not behind the camera.
He reassured me that the terrorism we've endured here was no worse than the "IRA blitz" in London and looked disbelieving when I told him I grew up in London and there was no comparison between the two.
Having visited Israel once before, in the mid-1980s, he pronounced that the big difference on our side of the divide today was how much "more bourgeois" we had become, and "how skilled at shopping."
He told me that, given our "military might," we had no justification for our paranoid fear of being pushed into the sea, and that we need not take too seriously "the idiot" Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's pursuit of a nuclear capability and threat to wipe us off the map. Ahmadinejad, he said, unveiling his second Hebrew word of the conversation (the first was "balagan"), was talking up our elimination "davka" - simply because he could, not because he really meant anything by it.
