If this isn’t torture, I don’t know what might be. A Republican (of course) state senator from Florida (also of course) has drafted a bill to make it mandatory for high school students to watch Dinesh D’Souza’s op/ed film “America.” Never mind that the movie did only $2.5M in box office when it was released, it made a great impression on Senator Alan Hays.

The Hollywood Reporter: “The first problem with the film is its overstatement of these anti-American tenets ostensibly running rampant in our society.

[snip]

D’Souza posits a simmering crisis that doesn’t really exist outside a few college campuses.

RogerEbert.com: Most of his theories and suppositions are misleading at best (he makes a point of mentioning that Obama supported the bank bailouts but fails to mention whose presidency they occurred under) and silly at worst (such as his assertion that the real face of income inequality is none other than Matt Damon since he made a lot of money from those Jason Bourne films)

Salon:The lies D’Souza must disabuse us of, in order: First, that the genocide of Native Americans happened in relation to the conquest of their land; second, that African slave labor was exploited to build the American economy; third, that Mexican territories were conquered to form the U.S. Southwest; fourth, that U.S. wars abroad have involved imperial motives; fifth, that capitalism is bad.

The argumentation itself is bad, laughably bad.

• Native Americans were bad treaty-keepers who were already killing each other, the brutes
• As for African slaves, D’Souza is content to point out that some whites were indentured servants and some blacks owned slaves themselves; in the wacky world of Dinesh, racism has no legacy, only a distant past.
• Were Mexican territories conquered? Yeah, D’Souza submits, but then he gets a Mexican-American to say that’s cool with him, and Ted Cruz shambles briefly on to bemoan the status of Texans under Mexican rule, which I guess coalesces into a weird unspoken just war theory.
• As for U.S. wars abroad, D’Souza supposes the torture of a Vietnam POW in the Hanoi Hilton made the whole thing even, and glosses over Iraq and Afghanistan in a couple of slick asides: we gave them democracy!
• His discussion of American capitalism is even stranger and more schizophrenic, dashing between clips of Michael Moore and Occupy and alighting briefly upon a black woman who used to be on welfare but then got off it because her friends told her it was ungodly. She then muses that she didn’t even know there were churches while she was on welfare. Just didn’t even know the Christian religion had institutional meeting places, no idea what all those buildings with crosses on top were, and D’Souza nods gravely along: this is what welfare does, the viewer intimates.

It might not be classifiable as corporal punishment to require this be shown to Florida middle and high-schoolers, but it will almost certainly cause mental anguish.