Former CIA Director James Woolsey on Deflating the Appeal of Terrorism

Admittedly, it’s unconventional, but I think the man is onto something:

After seeing Team America it is virtually impossible, for any of the five of us anyway, to see a picture of Kim Jong Il or even hear his name without the goofy South Park puppet leaping to mind.

Parker’s and Stone’s special gift is to see the pompous, the absurd, and the self-important through the eyes of the young and to caricature these with Chaplinesque comic sensibility. The Middle East — where there is plenty of pomposity, absurdity, and self-importance — is a place where satire and ridicule can be particularly powerful weapons, especially with young people. We should not fight the spirit of rebelliousness of the region’s youth but go with it. It is now the case, and sometimes we even deserve it, that we are that spirit’s target, but we should do our best to help it focus heavily on the real and entrenched enemies of young people’s freedom: the Middle East’s pompous totalitarians.

Interesting. I’ve said that Team America was our generation’s “The Great Dictator.”