The swamp of moral depravity in which America is sinking is illustrated by a movie glorifying the exploits of a racist killer, American Sniper, receiving six Oscar nominations, while a movie depicting the historic struggle against racism led by Martin Luther King, Selma, has been largely overlooked.
Directed by Clint Eastwood, American Sniper tells the story of Chris Kyle, a US Navy Seal who served four tours of duty in Iraq and was credited with 160 confirmed 'kills', earning him the honour of being lauded the most lethal sniper in US military history.
Played by Bradley Cooper, in the movie Kyle is an all-American hero, a Texas cowboy who joins the military out of a sense of patriotism and a yearning for purpose and direction in his life. Throughout the uber-tough selection process, he is a monument of stoicism and determination, willing to bear any amount of pain and hardship for the honour of being able to serve his country as a Navy Seal - America's version of the Samurai.
The personal struggle he endures as a result of what he experiences and does in Iraq is not, however, motivated by any regrets over the people he kills, including women and children, but on his failure to kill more and thereby save the lives of American soldiers as they go about the business of tearing the country apart, city by city, block by block, and house by house.
If American Sniper wins one Oscar, never mind the six for which its been nominated, when this annual extravaganza of movie pomp and ceremony unfolds in Hollywood on 22 February, it will not only represent an endorsement of US exceptionalism, but worse it will stand as a grievous insult to the Iraqi people. In the movie they are depicted as a dehumanised mass of savages - occupying the same role as the Indians in John Wayne Western movies of old - responsible for their own suffering and the devastation of their country, which Americans such as Kyle are in the process of civilising.
Anything resembling balance and perspective is sacrificed in American Sniper to the more pressing needs of US propaganda, which holds that the guys who served in Iraq were the very best of America, men who went through hell in order to protect the freedoms and way of life of their fellow countrymen at home. It is the cult of the soldier writ large, men who in the words of Kyle in the movie "just want to get the bad guys."
The 'bad guys' are, as mentioned, the Iraqis. In fact if you had just arrived in the movie theatre from another planet, you would be left in no doubt from the movie's opening scene that it was Iraq that had invaded and occupied America rather than the other way round.
Unsurprisingly, the real Chris Kyle was not as depicted by Clint Eastwood and played by Bradley Cooper. In his autobiography, upon which the movie is based, Kyle wrote, "I hate the damn savages. I couldn't give a flying fuck about the Iraqis."
It is clear that the movie's director, Clint Eastwood, when faced with the choice between depicting the truth and the myth, decided to go with the myth.
But should come as no surprise, given that the peddling of such myths is the very currency of Hollywood. Over many decades the US movie industry has proved itself one of the most potent weapons in the armoury of US imperialism, helping to project a myth of an America defined by lofty attributes of courage, freedom, and democracy.
As the myth has it, these values, and with them America itself, are continually under threat from the forces of evil and darkness that lurk outwith and often times within. The mountain of lies told in service to this myth has only been exceeded by the mountain of dead bodies erected on the basis of it - victims of the carnage and mayhem unleashed around the world by Washington over decades.
Chris Kyle was not the warrior or hero portrayed in American Sniper. He was in fact a racist killer for whom the only good Iraqi was a dead Iraqi. He killed men, women, and children, just as his comrades did during the course of a brutal and barbaric war of aggression waged by the richest country in the world against one of the poorest.
They say that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. In the hands of a movie director with millions of dollars and the backing of a movie studio at its disposal, it is far more dangerous than that. It is a potent weapon deployed against its victims, denying them their right to even be considered victims, exalting in the process, when it comes to Hollywood, those who murder and massacre in the name of 'Rome'.
With this in mind, it is perhaps fitting that Chris Kyle was shot and killed by a former Marine at a shooting range in Texas in 2013. "Man was born into barbarism," Martin Luther King said, "when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence."