By Rev. MICHAEL BRESCIANI

Almost everyone in America has been somehow affected by the recent events at the Ft Hood Army Base. The events were seemed particularly intense because only days later Americans honored those who served in Veterans Day observances around the nation.

Just when we thought there couldn’t be another movie about WW II along came Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and the ten part miniseries about the 101^st Airborne’s Easy Company with the epic and stirring film Band of Brothers.

Most Americans are not naïve about the strains of war and they realize that sometimes soldiers will act out their worst under the pressures of warfare. Yet there is an unparalleled history of military dignity, observances of the rules of war and concerted effort to observe the provisions of the Geneva Convention in American fighting men and women. All of this fails sometimes not because they are soldiers or U.S. Soldiers but because they are human.

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By Rev. MICHAEL BRESCIANI

In 1980 Mimosa Films released a film comedy starring a Kalahari bushman named only N!xau, don’t ask for the pronunciation, who not only bears a remarkable physical likeness to Barack Obama but the plot of the award winning film has several similarities to the life of the President. Let’s see.

The star of the film The Gods Must Be Crazy died in 2003 after returning from a brief stint as an actor to his life on the dry plains as a herdsman. He brandished an almost constant but compelling smile that made it seem easier to deal with the fact that practically no one on earth except other Bushmen could understand his Kalahari language which consists of clicks and pops rather than voweletic sounds.

The story begins with the pilot of a small aircraft thoughtlessly throwing a cola bottle out the window of his plane. N!xau  thinks the gods have thrown him a gift from the heavens. He takes the bottle back to his village where the Bushmen delight in finding various uses for it but they soon begin fighting over it. In time N!xau  decides to bring the bottle to ‘the end of the earth’ and throw it over the edge thus returning it to the gods. The entire film is based on the hilarious exploits and travels of N!xau as he makes his long journey.

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