- The controversy over Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit
9/11" provides sharp insight into contemporary American liberalism.
You might think from all the noise that something radical or revealing
or important was happening.
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- But you would be wrong. The noise represents another
example of what Robert Hughes called America's "Culture of Complaint,"
an endless bickering, never deciding anything but enjoyed purely for itself.
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- The film is at its heart a thoroughly conservative document,
a fact which generally has gone unnoticed except in Robert Jensen's acute
review, "A Stupid White Movie." Worse, it explains virtually
nothing about events it claims to examine.
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- Michael Moore's role is to make American liberals feel
good about themselves without having to question the practices of a society
which cast an increasingly long, cold, dark shadow over the planet. The
job pays well, and Moore is becoming a wealthy man, a kind of well-kept
court jester for those with occasional twinges of liberal conscience or
human decency.
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- Moore likes to play the big, innocent kid from the heartland,
a kind of latter-day Spanky McFarland, only much older, happily shuffling
along with a beat-up baseball cap instead of beanie, keeping the faith
with values absorbed in 1950s Flint, Michigan, but asking bright-eyed,
impertinent questions about serious things. He's America's backyard Socrates
in baggy pants and gym shoes.
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- The image appeals to the confused, clinging-to-childhood
quality of American culture. Yet that very quality is what let the invasion
of Iraq and so many other terrible events happen.
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- Moore, unlike straight-shooter Spanky, also displays
a streak of the somewhat unpleasant practical joker or prankster. I do
not mean the talent for funny lines that makes his books sell well, but
a certain tendency to sly sniggering tricks, a certain Eddy Haskel or Candid
Camera quality which overlays and sours the honest Spanky image. We see
this clearly in the many stunts he uses, some quite clever, in movies or
television to get filmed reactions from or about those who will not respond
to him in a direct manner. These are the tricks of the process server or
repo-man.
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- Moore's film revels in exactly the kind of inconsistent
thinking, full of unwarranted assumptions, thick with suggestions of undefined
conspiracy, typical to one degree or another of most media in the United
States. The thinking also is typical of a President who keeps telling us
he decimated Iraq and spent a hundred billion dollars to save American
lives.
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- Moore told the world some months back that he had found
his presidential candidate in former General Wesley Clark. That announcement
should have been a warning, because Clark is indistinguishable in his views
from George Bush, and the general's behavior in the former Yugoslavia was
arrogant, provocative, and dangerous.
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- Moore simply wants to be rid of Bush, and he was ready
to support an opportunistic and dangerous man like Wesley Clark to do it.
Now, in his movie he has assembled a pastiche of attitudes, assumptions,
and interesting, but largely unenlightening, film clips hoping to elicit
enough of an emotional response to be rid of Bush.
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- Why does Moore, and I use him to represent all of liberal
America, so want to be rid of Bush that he takes what I regard as the unprincipled
position of supporting someone as bad or worse?
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- I do not believe it is because Bush represents a danger
to American values, the favorite charge of many fuzzy-thinking American
liberals, because in many ways Bush accurately reflects those values. I
think they are desperate to be rid of Bush because he is an embarrassment.
There is something excruciatingly American about Bush, revealing some painful
truths about the society he represents, much the same as was the case with
President Nixon's brother and his efforts to create a fast-food empire
based on Nixon-burgers or President Carter's whining, beer-swilling brother,
Billy.
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- Yes, Bush has done a lot of damage in the world, but
Presidents can't act alone. In Nixon's last days of wandering the White
House corridors late at night, a muttering ghost with a tumbler of Bourbon,
the armed forces and others were alerted not to respond to orders that
did not pass through the appropriate chain of command. And it is not just
the cabinet that limits a President's ability to act. It is the Congress
and, more generally, the people of the country. The anti-war protests that
engulfed America, once Vietnam was seen for the ugly fraud that it was,
had no force of law but they very much influenced policy. The murderous
fiasco of Iraq happened with the complicity of Congress, notably including
Senator Kerry, and with the passive acceptance or indifference of most
Americans.
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- The truth is that Bush is a fairly typical white, suburban,
middle-aged American. He talks and thinks the way a great many Americans
talk and think. He jogs and plays golf. He has a fondness for school-boy
pranks, although less clever ones, similar to Michael Moore's. He unquestioningly
accepts America's fairy-tale, official version of itself as God's own chosen
place on the planet with liberty and justice for all - something shared
by Michael Moore and most flag-waving American liberals.
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- Bush's personal redemption story is shared in tens of
millions of American homes. When Americans aren't experiencing redemption
first-hand, they are consuming it from check-out-line magazines and talk
shows. It,s a national obsession with its promise of being able to start
life over representing another kind of clinging to childhood.
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- Bush has always enjoyed a comfortable life without any
evidence of earning or meriting it, but that is what so many Americans
dream of doing as they throw away money on state lotteries and at casinos.
Americans love watching television families similar to Ozzie and Harriet
in the 1950s where nothing real ever happened, just nice people floating
in a timeless space. Many modern shows, like Seinfeld, are just hipper
versions of the same thing.
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- Bush's total lack of interest in serious books - there
is no evidence he's ever read one - genuine art, and new ideas is quite
typical. The last President of the United States who took some interest
in the arts or thinkers was Kennedy. Bush's lack of interest in anything
outside the United States - only altered as required in his role as President
- and his Blondie Bumsted behavior, right down to choking on a pretzel
while watching football from a couch, put him at the very middle of middle
America.
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- You may ask, we know Bush is a brutal, rather psychopathic
man, so how can he be like so much of middle America? You see, middle America
is not the harmless, gentle place it seems in Hollywood's confections.
It is the place where thirty-year old couples assume they are entitled
to a five-bedroom home on a sprawling lot in the suburbs with at least
two lumbering vehicles in the driveway. It is the place which ignores the
ugly parts of its own society, the ghettos, the broken-down schools, the
lack of healthcare. It is the place where the relentless demand for still
more endangers the planet's future. And it is the place that drives America
to global empire.
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- Bush is not, as so many American liberals claim, out
of step with American history. Childish slogans about taking back America
or, even worse, "Dude, Where's My Country?" are just that, childish.
Bush is an awkward, unpleasant exemplar of enduring American behavior and
values. Did the invasion of Iraq represent different values or attitudes
than the "Remember the Maine" invasion of Cuba? How about the
invasion of Mexico, or the seizure of Hawaii, or the holocaust in Vietnam
and Cambodia? Does the Patriot Act represent anything different than the
Alien and Sedition laws of John Adam's day or the dark excesses of the
FBI under Hoover?
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- Americans are always attracted, like Marlon Brando's
wonderful character in "On the Waterfront," to what used to be
called "class." The movies of Hollywood's golden era, from those
with John Garfield to Humphrey Bogart, are filled with that word used in
that way. Because the entire throbbing core of America is about making
as much money as possible as quickly as possible in almost any way possible,
afterwards, you are supposed to settle in for some show of class.
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- While the flavor of American culture has changed, especially
in its complete abandonment of post-depression era sympathy for struggling
little people, the desire to display something that is the equivalent of
"class" in 1950 remains palpable. It's there in everything from
the names bestowed on car models and real-estate subdivisions to the look
of popular American designers like Ralph Lauren or figures like Martha
Stewart. Part of the problem with Bush, no matter how quintessentially
American he is, is that he has no class. It's unnerving to have an empire
whose Caesar is laughed at by much of the world, all those funny-talking
people out there in the world sniggering at the leader of God's own chosen
place.
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- I have a problem with all the liberal whining in America
over professional soldiers being killed in Iraq, actually still a small
number compared to the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis killed both
in the war and in the decade-long run-up of brutally harsh American-imposed
restrictions, and it is no different for Moore's scene of a mother's tears.
No, I'm not talking about the poor mother herself whose loss is real, but
about the calculation of Moore's film in using the scene and about the
very predictable result on American audiences. Pictures of a small number
of flag-draped coffins appear to be almost the only thing fueling America's
limp antiwar movement.
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- When I see pleas about dead American soldiers I can't
help but think of all the tears shed at the Vietnam memorial for the relatively
few who died helping in the work of bringing overwhelming destruction to
another land, but there is never a tear shed for the millions of souls
extinguished by America.
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- There is a scene in a much more moving documentary from
the Vietnam War called "Hearts and Minds" in which a poor Vietnamese
man bawls and screams over the limp limbs of his dead young child, one
of countless innocents snuffed out by Americans flying too high ever to
glimpse the horror they delivered. The film then cut to an interview with
General Westmoreland sitting comfortably, pontificating about the way Asians
didn't regard life the same way Americans do. Propaganda, yes, but still
shatteringly true and unforgettable.
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- Well, it was a fine film of its type, but it wasn't destined
to make its director a wealthy man. Americans just are not much interested
in the suffering of others, especially it seems when they cause it. Although,
in mitigation, it is fair to point out how little of the suffering they
ever are permitted to see, the lack of imagination over what must happen
when you drop thousands of tons of high explosives and flesh-ripping shrapnel
is still appalling.
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- But even if you do not feel the same way I do, and you
were moved by the mother's tears in the last part of the movie, be very
careful how you vote to get rid of Bush. Kerry has never so much as condemned
the war. He has never condemned Bush, except by repeating official-report
findings all thinking people on the planet understood a year before the
official report. Kerry's view of the Middle East, frantic pandering to
Israel's darkest interests, promises no end to future troubles. He is an
unrepentant, unimaginative supporter of global empire.
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- That brings us to the real tragedy of America and the
real cause of 9/11 and so many other horrors: America's swaggering readiness
to play the game of global empire with all the brutality and incivility
that it implies. You tell me how a confused film like Moore's, even if
it contributes to toppling a confused President like Bush, adds anything
to resolving America's great dilemma of insatiable greed and willingness
to do terrible deeds while mouthing high-sounding ideals.
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