When I called the first Sex in the City movie “a Taliban recruitment film,” I was referring to a notion that young Arab men might be so repelled by its celebration of putrid 21st Century chick culture that joining the Taliban might seem freshly appealing. How curious, then, that a portion of the upcoming Sex and City 2 (opening 5.28.10) has triggered Taliban-ish associations by having the girls visit Morocco, an Arab-Muslim nation teeming with keffiyahs and camels and sand dunes.

It’s almost as if director-writer Michael Patrick King said to the New Line/Warner honchos, “I think we need to confront this Taliban thing head-on by taking the girls (Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon) right into the belly of the beast. Well, Morocco, I mean, which looks like it’s in the belly. It’ll be a kind of joke, a way of confronting and maybe charming a culture founded on a spiritual creed that completely despises what Sex and the City is all about! I love it!”

And I’m not kidding. I really and truly believe that films like ’08’s Sex and the City (and, I’m sure, the upcoming sequel) reflect what’s seriously corrupt and poisoned about the values that our nation has come to represent since the get-all-you-can Reaganesque ’80s. Especially in these times with the mentality of wealth-flaunters being seen as one of the root causes of our economic calamity.

“The soul of this movie is [about] the flaunting of me-me egos and the endless nurturing of the characters’ greed and/or sense of entitlement,” I wrote on 5.28.08. “It’s all about money to piss away and flashy things to wear and lush places where the the girls lunch and exchange dreary confessional chit-chat. And this, mind you, is where millions of middle-class women in every semi-developed country around the globe live in their dreams.

“All I know is that I felt ashamed, sitting in a Paris movie theatre, that this film, right now, is portraying middle-class female American values, and that this somehow reflects upon the country that I love and care deeply about.

“It’s a kind of advertisement for the cultural shallowness that’s been spreading like the plague for years, and for what young American womanhood seems to be currently about — what it wants, cherishes, pines for. Not so much the realizing of intriguing ambitions or creative dreams as much as wallowing in nouveau-riche ickiness as the girls cackle and toss back Margaritas.”