The Australian progressive group GetUp (it's kind of like Australia's Moveon) just posted a great video produced by Daniel Illic of Downwind Media in support of David Hicks, the only Australian who has spent the last five years in Guantanamo Bay after being arrested by American forces in Afghanistan in 2002. This week he went before a U.S. military tribunal and plead guilty to a terrorism charge, which may get him home to Australia sooner.
GetUp wants him home too, and to publicize their mission they posted a fantastic parody of MTV's Cribs on their site and on YouTube. In the video an actor playing Hicks, wearing the notorious orange Gitmo jumpsuit, shows off his Gitmo "crib," a narrow, claustrophobic, windowless cell made of corrugated steel.
He describes his favorite corner that he spent all of 2002 and 2003 in, and points to the corner on the other side of the cell. "This corner here is my holiday corner," he says. 'It's my time, really."
The whole thing is cut in the flashy style we expect from MTV, and it really looks like it could have come from there. The end result is a twofer -- it's a both a biting critique of the perversity of Guantanamo, and of MTV Cribs. It's a great cultural mashup, and, like the Hillary "Vote Different" video, it's a biting blend of pop culture and propaganda.
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