Always at the cutting edge, I finally caught one of early summer's hit movies and Bill O'Reilly's midsummer whipping boy, The Bourne Ultimatum.

From his skills to his globehopping and down to his initials, Jason Bourne is the latest variation on the James Bond archetype, but every new Bond must be attuned in different ways to his times-- and the way Bourne fulfills audience action hero requirements for the post-9/11 era says something about how many of us view the situation we're in.

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On a technical level, certainly, the film is masterfully well crafted. Director Paul Greengrass-- who also did The Bourne Supremacy, United 93, and the excellent northern Ireland film Bloody Sunday-- is the thinking man's Michael Bay. Like Bay he edits his films into such tiny pieces that everything registers as pure sensation; unlike with Bay, however, the result isn't like getting pummeled by a pellet gun, but like watching a haystack emerge out of little blobs of color as Monet paints in real time.

The conventions of the action thriller are so familiar that Greengrass can give us the merest hint of a common scene-- an assassin planting a bomb, which turns out to be a decoy and the real bomb is-- and we put the scene together in our heads after it happens from the pieces, and understand everything without a word. It proves to be a perfect stylistic match for the character of Jason Bourne, instinctive spy, who takes in the world around as a series of flashes as he spots others using the same training he had and always makes the right next move to stay one step ahead of them. (Admittedly, sometimes this gets too far ahead of itself; there's one scene where, so far as I could tell, Bourne dematerialized and rematerialized in his adversary's office.)

Greengrass and his screenwriters (primarily Tony Gilroy, director of the upcoming Michael Clayton) are less successful at coming up with something new for Bourne to do, virtually remaking The Bourne Supremacy and even inducing a sense of deja vu in the casting (with Chris Cooper and Brian Cox having been cast as indie-movie-cred bad guys in the previous ones, David Straithairn could not be far behind, and Michael Gambon can surely expect a call for the next sequel after Cox and Albert Finney).

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What Bourne is about is the Bond formula turned inward: the evil plot he's up against was not Dr. No's missile threat but the fact of Bourne's own training, and in each movie he fights back against his own former bosses in the CIA, essentially finding and punishing the latest in a series of bad dads who wounded his inner child by training him to be a stone cold killer. Like the child of a large-living alcoholic, Bourne just wants the simple pleasures of domesticity, fidelity and home for dinner, but it always gets spoiled-- the CIA seems to devote most of its resources to the hopeless task of killing Bourne just to "tie things off."

And so he has to go find the latest bad Dad and tell him off-- and because Bourne doesn't want to be a super-killer any more, once he actually finds these fat middle-aged guys, that's all he really does. He can't fight them-- he'd make mincemeat of them in two seconds-- and he won't kill them. As in a Production Code movie or The Lion King, he has to maneuver them into a position where they force justice upon themselves.

So Bourne is Bond for Chomsky readers and the emo era: the evil is in America's soul, your mission if you choose to accept it is to tell the evil grownups off for all the bad things America has done, and nurse your tender, damaged self. The result is a series which, for all its globehopping (and Greengrass is superb at depicting a Europe which seems to consist solely of Norman Foster glass-and-steel structures and public transport), is almost pathologically uninterested in any other actual country.

Since Franka Potente's girlfriend in the first movie, there virtually hasn't been a speaking character in the series who wasn't an American employee of the CIA. (There's a Guardian reporter in this movie, but he's purely a prop.) Of course, all James Bond ever did was talk to the maitre'ds and bang the beautiful babes of each nation he visited, but at least there was the pretence of interest in local allies or adversaries; even the intelligence services of other countries aren't represented here, Bourne is completely oblivious to the places he goes and so are the guys trying to kill him. Chasing Bourne is a unilateral American operation.

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The movie starts to fall apart in a way the last one didn't when Greengrass et al. begin to make explicit allusions to the post-9/11 era. Bourne's flashbacks begin to include scenes of waterboarding and hooded figures a la Abu Ghraib; he goes to a middle-eastern country (Morocco) for the first time; one of the cities he races through is Madrid, and we see him at Atocha train station, site of the Madrid bombing. Straithairn's character talks about now having more freedom to order killings, in a way that can't help but recall Clinton-era legalistic reluctance to kill Osama Bin Laden (at which point many of us, surely, do not share the film's blanket horror of assassination per se). Finally Bourne comes to New York-- and the movie's establishing shots avert their eyes from the south end, where even this movie would be forced to acknowledge the absence of the World Trade Center.

Bourne's inversion of secret agent work into a purely personal brand of therapy worked as long as we were far from that reality. But the worldview underlying the Bourne movies-- that there are no real bad guys in the world, only the CIA and America committing assassinations (outlawed long ago, of course, but everyday agency business in these movies)-- falls apart as soon as you introduce the slightest sense that the CIA might have a real mission in the world beyond killing its own ex-employees on a regular basis. A single Chinese agent, a single ex-KGB type peddling nukes, a single Islamic terror cell would puncture the bubble of America-centrism that these movies exist in and make their solipsistic focus on the evil done to Bourne start to seem absurd.

In a world with real bad guys, we need men like Jason Bourne (though brainwashing and all that is not how we actually get them) who aren't afraid to do harsh, vicious things against vicious, but very real, threats. We need agencies like the CIA, generally not to go around killing people but to gain knowledge and insight into these threats and help us stop them. But clearly there's a section of the public that still doesn't think that-- that thinks we have nothing to fear, but we should fear ourselves-- and responds to the Bourne movies' silly and dangerous fantasy that the only evil is within.

After I said some of these things on a movie board, another poster there had a brilliant suggestion for a fourth Bourne movie. There's a real plot against America, and the CIA comes looking for Bourne-- not to "tie him off," but to ask him to help. To use his training and skill to save American lives and defend democracy. And so Bourne would really have to wrestle with the question-- for all that what they did to him was ugly and sordid, doesn't what they made him in fact have its uses in today's world? Wasn't it, in some real way, justified?

Call it The Bourne Reactivation.

Within a few minutes I ran across two things which strike me as our media at their best and worst. Without conducting any further research, I'll declare them both the winners in their categories:

BEST

MSNBC is rebroadcasting NBC's original coverage from September 11th in real time. (The second tower will fall in just a moment as I write.) The coverage is sober, doesn't jump to rash conclusions, acknowledges that everything we know is contingent on updates-- and it lets the viewer recover for himself or herself the mindset of that day and one's own reactions to it, with no heavy-handed narrator telling you what to think.

WORST

Gary Kamiya in Salon on The Real Lessons of 9/11. (Yes, it took six years to finally figure them out!) A more turgid, unreadably sneering collection of cliches, political prejudices and lame pop-sociology analysis can hardly be imagined-- but probably exists somewhere. Still, Kamiya's will do for now:

Petraeus' evaluation can only be "anxiously awaited" by people who are still anxiously waiting for Godot. We know what will happen next because we've been watching this movie for eight months. Gen. Petraeus, Bush's mighty-me, will insist that we're making guarded progress. Bush, whose keen grasp of military reality is reflected in his recent boast that "we're kicking ass" in Iraq, will promise that he will reassess the situation in April. The Democrats will flail their puny arms, the zombie Republicans will keep following orders, and the troops will stay.

It's all a movie! What an original insight. How real.

Gender images play a significant role. The right wing embraces a cartoonlike image of masculinity because it believes that only an alpha male can protect America from its enemies. (In a recent essay in the New York Times, Susan Faludi argued that such retrograde gender images have been used to construct the American self-image from the earliest days of our presence on this continent.) This is part of the reason that Bush has put forward Gen. Petraeus as the cheerleader for the war. Petraeus is the ultimate alpha male, right down to his rigorous workout routine.

Yeah, who could ever think that bad things happen in the world and men protect others from them? How atavistic, to use another $2 word Kamiya throws around. Any thoughts about how gender is constructed in the Taliban-style world al-Qaeda wishes on all of us, Gary? I didn't think so.

The angry bigotry that drove the war rings out loud and clear in the right-wing battle cry: "They attacked us, so we had to attack them." The recent TV ads run by war supporters repeat this theme: "They attacked us," a narrator says as an image of the burning World Trade Center appears. "They won't stop in Iraq." The key word here, of course, is "they." Just who is "they"? For Bush's die-hard supporters, "they" simply means "Arabs and Muslims." Cretinous rabble-rousers like Ann Coulter and Michael Savage play to this crowd, demanding that we nuke the evil ragheads.

Ah yes, America's real enemy: Osanna al-Koulter. No rant would be complete without mentioning her, burning the great Sataness in effigy. The rest of Kamiya's examples are suspiciously vague-- his "rightwing battle cry" sounds like no argument made in the pages of National Review or The Wall Street Journal, his TV ads most likely do not exist at all. But it's okay to invent slanted evidence for the case that rightwingers distort and smear their enemies, I'm sure.

The conclusion on this sixth anniversary: our much-maligned MSM rose to the occasion with sober, thoughtful coverage. Our intellectuals continue to disgrace themselves. Perhaps Kamiya will rate a mention in the next assembled speech of the late Osama Bin Laden for this latest effort.

Tomorrow will be an important day in history-- the day the antiwar movement began its inevitable decline going into the 2008 elections.

That's because tomorrow, Moveon.Org will commit the act that will be remembered as the moment when the bulk of the public, even the large part that thinks we should get the hell out of Iraq, developed the kind of instinctive revulsion for the hardcore peace wing of the Democratic party that it had for the Yippies and the SDS going into the Nixon-McGovern contest in '72.

And how mainstream Democrats react over the next few weeks will decide whether the Democrats go into their most promising election in decades as likely winners, or, Dukakis-style, turn a substantial lead into a catastrophic loss.

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What is the act that Moveon.Org is about to commit?

It's a full-page ad-- in the New York Times, of course-- with this headline:

General Petraeus or General Betray us?

Cooking the books for the White House.

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To Moveon-- and, apparently, to the Congressional Democrats who have evidently encouraged them to place such an ad and thus say what they don't want to say quite so blatantly-- this seems clever, pointed, catchy.

What they don't realize is that to most of America, this will cross a very bright line.

To say a military commander has betrayed his country is to accuse him of the charge of treason-- they are the same term at root. Treason is not a punchline, an acceptable bit of jocular hyperbole ("You sly SOB!" "You traitor to our country!")

It is, when applied to a uniformed officer of the United State military, a charge punishable by death. For members of an opposition party to make a charge like this cavalierly in a political fight is simply astounding. In the old days in Venice, when you pushed an accusation through the slot in the door at the Doge's Palace, it meant banishment if not the gallows for either the person you accused, or for you for making a false accusation. That's the kind of accusation Moveon is making in calling the commander of our forces in a foreign land a traitor.

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The usual Congressional Democrats-- Feinstein, Durbin, Emanuel, and so on-- were on the talk shows last week and this weekend, making the same point in subtler language. Petraeus is serving up what Bush tells him to say; Harry Reid, subtle as ever, "corrected" reporters by calling the Petraeus Report "the Bush Report." (Apparently the ultimate witticism "the Pinocchio Report" didn't occur to him in time.)

But when middle America, not just the West and South Democrats are willing to write off, but millions of swing voters in crucial states like Illinois and Michigan and Ohio and Florida, begins to react to the antiwar movement calling our commander in the field a Benedict Arnold-- one day before the September 11th anniversary and Petraeus' own appearance before Congress-- we will see the presidential candidates (well, except for Kucinich) distancing themselves from Congress and Congress desperately scrambling to deny it ever said what it just said.

The antiwar movement will begin to become radioactive. No presidential candidate with a real shot was ever going to really bring all the troops home, the inevitable bloodbath needed to happen on Bush's watch and they missed their chance to push that through in time. But they hadn't planned on developing a nuanced approach to continuing Iraqi occupation until after primary season was over. Now they'll have to find a way to sound downright bullish on my good friend, that outstanding soldier Dave Petraeus, whom I've known for many years, while hunting for the few remaining scraps of red meat they can throw to the peace movement (Hillary, I suggest this formulation: "invasion should be safe, legal and rare").

In future years, they'll teach this one in political science class-- how the inept Democratic leadership managed the one-two flub of scheduling Petraeus for September 11th and the levitation of the Pentagon for September 10th. But even as we marvel sardonically at their inability to play the game, we must remember that what's getting them into trouble is their failure to appreciate that at bottom, it's no game at all. Calling a career soldier and commander in the field a traitor isn't a trial balloon that you throw out to see if the media will pick it up, but a career-ending accusation for either the accused or the accuser. Slapping that name on a respected commander is the way to forever lose the respect of the military you seek to command, and the population who rightly view the military as a rare bastion of honor and sacrifice in a pampered, self-indulgent world.

It is wrong; it is a grave mistake; and in the next few days, many Democrats will come to realize just how wrong and just how mistaken it was.