Date:    Tue, 16 Aug 1994 21:59:39 -0700 (PDT)
From:    Steven Rubio <srubio@garnet.berkeley.edu>
Subject: _TV Nation_ and Bosnia
To:      Bad Subjects Mailing List <badsubjects@uclink.berkeley.edu>
.........................................................................


I'm gonna try again to see if anyone else out there is watching _TV 
Nation_. Tonight's episode had a segment that was simultaneously funny 
and disturbing, which is often true on this show, but when the subject is 
Bosnia, it seems more, well, disturbing.

Michael Moore decides to solve the problems in Bosnia. He rents a Yugo 
(he thinks it will help him get off on a good foot) and visits the 
ambassadors to the United States from, I think, Croatia and Serbia. (One 
thing the segment pushes home is how hard it is for us to follow the 
entire Bosnian story ... I admit I was never quite certain who was who, 
which added to the bizarre nature of it all.) At one point, he sits 
around with a couple of Serb ambassadors with a giant pizza on the table 
in front of them, and asks these guys to show him, on the pizza, exactly 
what is going on in Bosnia. And the guys blithely start hacking away at 
the pizza ... this slice is Serbia, this slice is Croatia ... the cheese 
and the ham and the mushrooms are the various peoples, and they start 
sawing away, with one guy turning down a "slice" of Bosnia because he 
wants to eat a slice from his mother's hometown.

It is very funny ... and not a little sick, to be honest. Moore tries to 
get the Serbian and Bosnian (I think) ambassadors to call each other on 
the phone, but they won't do it ... they "aren't speaking to each 
other." One of the ambassador explains "ethnic cleansing" as "not 
killing, just relocating" (though he admits killing takes place), adding 
that you don't need to kill people, just scare them so much they leave on 
their own.

Finally, Michael Moore tells the Serbs that he believes if everyone would 
just join together and sing this certain song, the world might finally 
discover peace. He plays this song on his boombox ... it's the Barney 
theme song, "I love you, you love me." Moore gets the Serbs to sing 
along ... as they sing, on the screen appears simple statements about how 
many Bosnian people have been slaughtered by Serbs and Croats.

Like I say, it's a very disturbing moment ... like so much of _TV 
Nation_, it's hard to know what to think.


Steven