I’m a sucker for espionage and war stories with a lot of action so I headed for the movie yesterday, hoping for a couple hours of escape.  The ultra-earnest Matt Damon was his serious, stoic self throughout the entire movie.  He was the good guy up against the bad guys from the Pentagon.  The movie was a very bad case of the simples, unsatisfying in its reflection of “Bush lied, people died” reductionism.  It lacked the fun of Damon in “Oceans,” and the occasionally conflicted story line of his Bourne episodes.  Not even a romance intrudes.  The failed character development contrasts Damon as good-guy warrior and the weaselly Greg Kinnear replaying, as Ross Douthat put it, some combination of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer and Douglas Feith.  The grizzled CIA operative, played by Brendan Gleason, is also a good guy in this movie, knowledgeable of Iraq, attempting to get the real story behind the war.  A grimly farcical movie, it circles around Damon gone rogue, searching to find the truth about WMD and learning that it’s all a ruse for war against Saddam.  Ho hum.So why am I writing this review?  Actually, it’s a ploy to get my readers to think about two important, but related matters.  These are matters which I hope to show influence how we think about this business of being human and eventually how we think about our careers, the main focus of my blogs.  Why does Hollywood look upon American politics as an inevitably toxic world, and distance itself from that reality?  Successful politicians can never be good or evil.  They will always be good and evil. Growing up in an evangelical church, I was taught that one would never really want to get involved in corporate business.  It was too political and thus too evil.  Of course, governmental politics was way off the screen for any “true christian.”  Those of us with the slightest knowledge of the founding fathers and their genius displayed by the constitution realize that they understood and used the self-interested agendas of political players to cancel each other out.  Their obvious intent was to limit the damage that one branch can do.  Indeed, they openly acknowledged their cynicism, and built upon flawed human nature.  They had no difficulty with self-interest.It’s also a profound mistake to think that career success will ever come without political knowledge.  Hard work and deep smarts will have to be supported by political action.  Political action in most any arena is eventually about high compromises and low moral trespasses.  We might just as well get over the adolescent notion that we can honor the distinctions between our messy, conflicted, self-interested lives.  Contrary to the “righteous,” I’m quite certain that where Yahweh resides, He is quite aware, willing to affirm the necessary foibles.In sum, the aftermath of this recession suggests that all of us, professionals,businesspeople and “politicians” need to recognize that the lines dividing the ethical are not nearly as clear as we might wish.  Hopefully, you, too, see that the Green Zone is an ethical farce. 
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