Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
This thoroughly admirable picture by documentary film-maker Patrick Creadon takes the driest subject in the world - America's national debt - and makes you deeply ashamed of not having been worried about it before now.
Its thesis is that America's crack-cocaine-style debt addiction is a more serious problem than either terrorism or global warming.
The budget deficit of the US has risen to an eye-watering $9 trillion; its trade deficit is $738.6 billion; its political leaders are casual about waste, and its feckless, want-it-now citizens buy stuff on credit and have abandoned the habit of saving, drummed into them by their provident parents and grandparents.
It's not just America's problem. Creadon doesn't mention it, but other countries are wildly in hock too.
The UK's iron finance minister-turned-prime minister, for example, feted around the globe for his multi-billion bailout plan, has long been dependent on debt, for which a solution is now more difficult to imagine than ever.
Creadon and his camera team follow General David Walker, the former US comptroller (that is: public spending watchdog) as he travels across the country, attempting to tell America what it very much does not want to hear. America is spending much, much more than it earns.
The result, as Mr Micawber might have put it, is misery. Or future misery, anyhow.
It is all very well for Keynes to say that in the long run we are all dead - but our children will be alive.
Mightn't they have to pick up the bills?
Dishonest and pusillanimous politicians of both parties are terrified of unpopular tax hikes, says Creadon. So they borrow the money.
During the Second World War, America issued war bonds, and US citizens were told that buying them was a stern patriotic duty. Nowadays, debt is quite different.
Debt is sexy; it can be repackaged and reconfigured in a hundred financial instruments that generate income.
The political right, supposedly the stern guardians of financial rectitude, are as spend-thrift as anyone else.
Tax-and-spend has become borrow-and-spend.
And naturally, only unsophisticated hayseeds who don't understand the financial world would worry about the political consequences.
But wait - who is lending America money? Not Americans, but foreigners: largely the Chinese, who in any case enjoy a massive trade imbalance.
China now has such hefty loans that these amount to what Creadon calls a 'nuclear' financial weapon.
He evokes the Suez scenario. Using financial pressure, the Americans were able to humiliate their debtors, the British, over the Nasser invasion in the 50s, and so deliver the death-blow to the British Empire.
So, in a similar manner, China might feel tempted to take a nasty slap at the enfeebled US - and no one will believe it until it happens.
Can the debt problem be deferred forever?
There is no obvious sign that Obama or Brown is particularly concerned. George Bush Sr once accused Ronald Reagan of voodoo economics, but frankly, in today's debt-laden superpower, all economics are voodoo economics.
This movie is a scary, exhilarating blast of atheist common sense.
