Conrad Brean is a spin doctor for an American president in the 1997 movie “Wag the Dog.” Brean teams with Hollywood producer Stanley Motss to manufacture a war in Albania to distract voters from a sexual scandal involving the president. The election is in two weeks.
Brean works best under pressure and always speaks in generalities: “Why (war with) Albania? Why not?” Asked about this alleged Albanian crisis, Brean scoffs, “Well, I’m working on that.”
Imagine a government official, a president for example, offering something like, “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall” or that Obamacare’s replacement is in two weeks, and you have a sense of Conrad Brean.
“Wag the Dog” also leans into axioms like “Perception is reality” and “Dog bites man vs. “Man bites dog”. Some insist “Haitian bites dog (or cat).”
I would say that the latter will be parodied to death, but what is parody? Parody to most of us relied on exaggeration of an actual event; on space between what happened, and the parody itself; on life revolving around common “Dog bites man” type episodes.
America has witnessed a capitol breach, a pandemic, and two assassination attempts. Do “Dog bites man” stories still exist? It’s given me paws for thought.
