Unsimple

As a Filipino, I know that English is not very pronounceable to many Filipinos. Anglophones think that English is easy to pronounce, which is not true. It is full of twisted consonantal clusters, shady vowels, and unsimple diphthongizations. Their unsimple tongue makes them incapable of pronouncing Spanish "jalapeño" and Japanese "karaoke" et cetera.

I do know, though, that the cumulative effect of all these three- and five-minute film clips, with their almost unvarying implicit deference to the importance of purely military solutions (despite a few commentators' disclaimers to the contrary), and with their catering (in part unavoidably) to a popular democracy's insistent desire to view even as unbelievably complicated a war as this one in emotional terms (our guys against their guys), is surely wide of the mark, and is bound to provide these millions of people with an excessively simple, emotional and military-oriented view of what is, at best, a mighty unsimple situation.