Last week, those of us who live in England were permitted to see the controversial television film, Death of a President. The film had drawn a good deal of well-aimed criticism from many quarters because of its plotline and its blatant appeal to the deepest and most frightening instincts of humanity. In the film, the deeply unpopular president of America, George W. Bush, was to be assassinated and his assassin brought to justice through the miraculous powers of special effects. The film was constructed out of archive footage, and it had a distinctively dramatic documentary feel. Clever in its conception and execution, perhaps, it was an experiment in testing the limits of the arts and contemporary taste. Revealing little about the causes of Bush’s unprecedented levels of political unpopularity, the film focused on the inadequacies of the American system of justice that rushed to judgment to convict an innocent Muslim of the assassination. As it emerged, the convicted Muslim was innocent, and the actual assassin was revealed to be the Afro-American father of a US soldier who had been killed in Iraq.