http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/ Unfairenheit 9/11 The lies of Michael Moore. By Christopher Hitchens One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the danger of success on either front was infinitely slight. Nonetheless, it seems that an answer to this long-felt need is finally beginning to emerge. I exempt Al Franken's unintentionally funny Air America network, to which I gave a couple of interviews in its early days. There, one could hear the reassuring noise of collapsing scenery and tripped-over wires and be reminded once again that correct politics and smooth media presentation are not even distant cousins. With Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, however, an entirely new note has been struck. Here we glimpse a possible fusion between the turgid routines of MoveOn.org and the filmic standards, if not exactly the filmic skills, of Sergei Eisenstein or Leni Riefenstahl. To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery. In late 2002, almost a year after the al-Qaida assault on American society, I had an onstage debate with Michael Moore at the Telluride Film Festival. In the course of this exchange, he stated his view that Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. This was, he said, the American way. The intervention in Afghanistan, he maintained, had been at least to that extent unjustified. Something—I cannot guess what, since we knew as much then as we do now—has since apparently persuaded Moore that Osama Bin Laden is as guilty as hell. Indeed, Osama is suddenly so guilty and so all-powerful that any other discussion of any other topic is a dangerous "distraction" from the fight against him. I believe that I understand the convenience of this late conversion. Fahrenheit 9/11 makes the following points about Bin Laden and about Afghanistan, and makes them in this order: 1) The Bin Laden family (if not exactly Osama himself) had a close if convoluted business relationship with the Bush family, through the Carlyle Group. 2) Saudi capital in general is a very large element of foreign investment in the United States. 3) The Unocal company in Texas had been willing to discuss a gas pipeline across Afghanistan with the Taliban, as had other vested interests. 4) The Bush administration sent far too few ground troops to Afghanistan and thus allowed far too many Taliban and al-Qaida members to escape. 5) The Afghan government, in supporting the coalition in Iraq, was purely risible in that its non-army was purely American. 6) The American lives lost in Afghanistan have been wasted. (This I divine from the fact that this supposedly "antiwar" film is dedicated ruefully to all those killed there, as well as in Iraq.) It must be evident to anyone, despite the rapid-fire way in which Moore's direction eases the audience hastily past the contradictions, that these discrepant scatter shots do not cohere at any point. Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not. As allies and patrons of the Taliban regime, they either opposed Bush's removal of it, or they did not. (They opposed the removal, all right: They wouldn't even let Tony Blair land his own plane on their soil at the time of the operation.) Either we sent too many troops, or were wrong to send any at all—the latter was Moore's view as late as 2002—or we sent too few. If we were going to make sure no Taliban or al-Qaida forces survived or escaped, we would have had to be more ruthless than I suspect that Mr. Moore is really recommending. And these are simply observations on what is "in" the film. If we turn to the facts that are deliberately left out, we discover that there is an emerging Afghan army, that the country is now a joint NATO responsibility and thus under the protection of the broadest military alliance in history, that it has a new constitution and is preparing against hellish odds to hold a general election, and that at least a million and a half of its former refugees have opted to return. I don't think a pipeline is being constructed yet, not that Afghanistan couldn't do with a pipeline. But a highway from Kabul to Kandahar—an insurance against warlordism and a condition of nation-building—is nearing completion with infinite labor and risk. We also discover that the parties of the Afghan secular left—like the parties of the Iraqi secular left—are strongly in favor of the regime change. But this is not the sort of irony in which Moore chooses to deal. He prefers leaden sarcasm to irony and, indeed, may not appreciate the distinction. In a long and paranoid (and tedious) section at the opening of the film, he makes heavy innuendoes about the flights that took members of the Bin Laden family out of the country after Sept. 11. I banged on about this myself at the time and wrote a Nation column drawing attention to the groveling Larry King interview with the insufferable Prince Bandar, which Moore excerpts. However, recent developments have not been kind to our Mike. In the interval between Moore's triumph at Cannes and the release of the film in the United States, the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights. And Richard Clarke, Bush's former chief of counterterrorism, has come forward to say that he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing those Saudi departures. This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit 9/11, except that—as you might expect—Clarke is presented throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11 moment. And it does not seem very likely that, in his open admission about the Bin Laden family evacuation, Clarke is taking a fall, or a spear in the chest, for the Bush administration. So, that's another bust for this windy and bloated cinematic "key to all mythologies." A film that bases itself on a big lie and a big misrepresentation can only sustain itself by a dizzying succession of smaller falsehoods, beefed up by wilder and (if possible) yet more-contradictory claims. President Bush is accused of taking too many lazy vacations. (What is that about, by the way? Isn't he supposed to be an unceasing planner for future aggressive wars?) But the shot of him "relaxing at Camp David" shows him side by side with Tony Blair. I say "shows," even though this photograph is on-screen so briefly that if you sneeze or blink, you won't recognize the other figure. A meeting with the prime minister of the United Kingdom, or at least with this prime minister, is not a goof-off. The president is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, on a golf course, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the president on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm. More interesting is the moment where Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the infant school in Florida, looking stunned and useless for seven whole minutes after the news of the second plane on 9/11. Many are those who say that he should have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance, and gone to work. I could even wish that myself. But if he had done any such thing then (as he did with his "Let's roll" and "dead or alive" remarks a month later), half the Michael Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed impulse. The other half would be saying what they already say—that he knew the attack was coming, was using it to cement himself in power, and couldn't wait to get on with his coup. This is the line taken by Gore Vidal and by a scandalous recent book that also revives the charge of FDR's collusion over Pearl Harbor. At least Moore's film should put the shameful purveyors of that last theory back in their paranoid box. But it won't because it encourages their half-baked fantasies in so many other ways. We are introduced to Iraq, "a sovereign nation." (In fact, Iraq's "sovereignty" was heavily qualified by international sanctions, however questionable, which reflected its noncompliance with important U.N. resolutions.) In this peaceable kingdom, according to Moore's flabbergasting choice of film shots, children are flying little kites, shoppers are smiling in the sunshine, and the gentle rhythms of life are undisturbed. Then—wham! From the night sky come the terror weapons of American imperialism. Watching the clips Moore uses, and recalling them well, I can recognize various Saddam palaces and military and police centers getting the treatment. But these sites are not identified as such. In fact, I don't think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic. You would also be led to think that the term "civilian casualty" had not even been in the Iraqi vocabulary until March 2003. I remember asking Moore at Telluride if he was or was not a pacifist. He would not give a straight answer then, and he doesn't now, either. I'll just say that the "insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and repression and aggression is not mentioned once. (Actually, that's not quite right. It is briefly mentioned but only, and smarmily, because of the bad period when Washington preferred Saddam to the likewise unmentioned Ayatollah Khomeini.) That this—his pro-American moment—was the worst Moore could possibly say of Saddam's depravity is further suggested by some astonishing falsifications. Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American. I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible. Baghdad was for years the official, undisguised home address of Abu Nidal, then the most-wanted gangster in the world, who had been sentenced to death even by the PLO and had blown up airports in Munich and Rome. Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer. Saddam boasted publicly of his financial sponsorship of suicide bombers in Israel. (Quite a few Americans of all denominations walk the streets of Jerusalem.) In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time. After that same invasion was repelled—Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many more—the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that personally. (Though why should he not?) Should you and I not resent any foreign dictatorship that attempts to kill one of our retired chief executives? (President Clinton certainly took it that way: He ordered the destruction by cruise missiles of the Baathist "security" headquarters.) Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country. In 1993, a certain Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals for the bomb at the World Trade Center and then skipped to Iraq, where he remained a guest of the state until the overthrow of Saddam. In 2001, Saddam's regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington and described them as just the beginning of a larger revenge. Its official media regularly spewed out a stream of anti-Semitic incitement. I think one might describe that as "threatening," even if one was narrow enough to think that anti-Semitism only menaces Jews. And it was after, and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war. On Dec. 1, 2003, the New York Times reported—and the David Kay report had established—that Saddam had been secretly negotiating with the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il in a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of 2003, to buy a North Korean missile system, and missile-production system, right off the shelf. (This attempt was not uncovered until after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition's presence having meanwhile put an end to the negotiations.) Thus, in spite of the film's loaded bias against the work of the mind, you can grasp even while watching it that Michael Moore has just said, in so many words, the one thing that no reflective or informed person can possibly believe: that Saddam Hussein was no problem. No problem at all. Now look again at the facts I have cited above. If these things had been allowed to happen under any other administration, you can be sure that Moore and others would now glibly be accusing the president of ignoring, or of having ignored, some fairly unmistakable "warnings." The same "let's have it both ways" opportunism infects his treatment of another very serious subject, namely domestic counterterrorist policy. From being accused of overlooking too many warnings—not exactly an original point—the administration is now lavishly taunted for issuing too many. (Would there not have been "fear" if the harbingers of 9/11 had been taken seriously?) We are shown some American civilians who have had absurd encounters with idiotic "security" staff. (Have you ever met anyone who can't tell such a story?) Then we are immediately shown underfunded police departments that don't have the means or the manpower to do any stop-and-search: a power suddenly demanded by Moore on their behalf that we know by definition would at least lead to some ridiculous interrogations. Finally, Moore complains that there isn't enough intrusion and confiscation at airports and says that it is appalling that every air traveler is not forcibly relieved of all matches and lighters. (Cue mood music for sinister influence of Big Tobacco.) So—he wants even more pocket-rummaging by airport officials? Uh, no, not exactly. But by this stage, who's counting? Moore is having it three ways and asserting everything and nothing. Again—simply not serious. Circling back to where we began, why did Moore's evil Saudis not join "the Coalition of the Willing"? Why instead did they force the United States to switch its regional military headquarters to Qatar? If the Bush family and the al-Saud dynasty live in each other's pockets, as is alleged in a sort of vulgar sub-Brechtian scene with Arab headdresses replacing top hats, then how come the most reactionary regime in the region has been powerless to stop Bush from demolishing its clone in Kabul and its buffer regime in Baghdad? The Saudis hate, as they did in 1991, the idea that Iraq's recuperated oil industry might challenge their near-monopoly. They fear the liberation of the Shiite Muslims they so despise. To make these elementary points is to collapse the whole pathetic edifice of the film's "theory." Perhaps Moore prefers the pro-Saudi Kissinger/Scowcroft plan for the Middle East, where stability trumps every other consideration and where one dare not upset the local house of cards, or killing-field of Kurds? This would be a strange position for a purported radical. Then again, perhaps he does not take this conservative line because his real pitch is not to any audience member with a serious interest in foreign policy. It is to the provincial isolationist. I have already said that Moore's film has the staunch courage to mock Bush for his verbal infelicity. Yet it's much, much braver than that. From Fahrenheit 9/11 you can glean even more astounding and hidden disclosures, such as the capitalist nature of American society, the existence of Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," and the use of "spin" in the presentation of our politicians. It's high time someone had the nerve to point this out. There's more. Poor people often volunteer to join the army, and some of them are duskier than others. Betcha didn't know that. Back in Flint, Mich., Moore feels on safe ground. There are no martyred rabbits this time. Instead, it's the poor and black who shoulder the packs and rifles and march away. I won't dwell on the fact that black Americans have fought for almost a century and a half, from insisting on their right to join the U.S. Army and fight in the Civil War to the right to have a desegregated Army that set the pace for post-1945 civil rights. I'll merely ask this: In the film, Moore says loudly and repeatedly that not enough troops were sent to garrison Afghanistan and Iraq. (This is now a favorite cleverness of those who were, in the first place, against sending any soldiers at all.) Well, where does he think those needful heroes and heroines would have come from? Does he favor a draft—the most statist and oppressive solution? Does he think that only hapless and gullible proles sign up for the Marines? Does he think—as he seems to suggest—that parents can "send" their children, as he stupidly asks elected members of Congress to do? Would he have abandoned Gettysburg because the Union allowed civilians to pay proxies to serve in their place? Would he have supported the antidraft (and very antiblack) riots against Lincoln in New York? After a point, one realizes that it's a waste of time asking him questions of this sort. It would be too much like taking him seriously. He'll just try anything once and see if it floats or flies or gets a cheer. Indeed, Moore's affected and ostentatious concern for black America is one of the most suspect ingredients of his pitch package. In a recent interview, he yelled that if the hijacked civilians of 9/11 had been black, they would have fought back, unlike the stupid and presumably cowardly white men and women (and children). Never mind for now how many black passengers were on those planes—we happen to know what Moore does not care to mention: that Todd Beamer and a few of his co-passengers, shouting "Let's roll," rammed the hijackers with a trolley, fought them tooth and nail, and helped bring down a United Airlines plane, in Pennsylvania, that was speeding toward either the White House or the Capitol. There are no words for real, impromptu bravery like that, which helped save our republic from worse than actually befell. The Pennsylvania drama also reminds one of the self-evident fact that this war is not fought only "overseas" or in uniform, but is being brought to our cities. Yet Moore is a silly and shady man who does not recognize courage of any sort even when he sees it because he cannot summon it in himself. To him, easy applause, in front of credulous audiences, is everything. Moore has announced that he won't even appear on TV shows where he might face hostile questioning. I notice from the New York Times of June 20 that he has pompously established a rapid response team, and a fact-checking staff, and some tough lawyers, to bulwark himself against attack. He'll sue, Moore says, if anyone insults him or his pet. Some right-wing hack groups, I gather, are planning to bring pressure on their local movie theaters to drop the film. How dumb or thuggish do you have to be in order to counter one form of stupidity and cowardice with another? By all means go and see this terrible film, and take your friends, and if the fools in the audience strike up one cry, in favor of surrender or defeat, feel free to join in the conversation. However, I think we can agree that the film is so flat-out phony that "fact-checking" is beside the point. And as for the scary lawyers—get a life, or maybe see me in court. But I offer this, to Moore and to his rapid response rabble. Any time, Michael my boy. Let's redo Telluride. Any show. Any place. Any platform. Let's see what you're made of. Some people soothingly say that one should relax about all this. It's only a movie. No biggie. It's no worse than the tomfoolery of Oliver Stone. It's kick-ass entertainment. It might even help get out "the youth vote." Yeah, well, I have myself written and presented about a dozen low-budget made-for-TV documentaries, on subjects as various as Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton and the Cyprus crisis, and I also helped produce a slightly more polished one on Henry Kissinger that was shown in movie theaters. So I know, thanks, before you tell me, that a documentary must have a "POV" or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your "narrative" a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft. If you flatter and fawn upon your potential audience, I might add, you are patronizing them and insulting them. By the same token, if I write an article and I quote somebody and for space reasons put in an ellipsis like this (…), I swear on my children that I am not leaving out anything that, if quoted in full, would alter the original meaning or its significance. Those who violate this pact with readers or viewers are to be despised. At no point does Michael Moore make the smallest effort to be objective. At no moment does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer. He pitilessly focuses his camera, for minutes after he should have turned it off, on a distraught and bereaved mother whose grief we have already shared. (But then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia.) Such courage. Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban, and the Baath Party and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following: The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States … And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history. If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed. Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest book, Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship, is out in paperback.
I’m very familiar with the writings of Christopher Hitchens. He reminds me of the type of mind-set the Apartheid Brits used to have (some still do) on South Africa. Kind of a sense of royal entitlement of what’s good for others. You have to hear him talk. He's on Cspan and other political shows. By the way, he's a neocon. But doesn't agree with all of Bush's policies. Even thinks Bush's "evangelical" image makes things worse. I don't disagree with everything he says regarding the War. Just most. As far as his opinion of this movie. Eh... (shrug).
A neocon? No that's giving him too much credit. Hitchens is rarely pro- anything, he seems to solely exist in order to be anti- or counter- to something, regardless of ideology (Nixon, Kissinger, Reagan, Clinton, the anti war crowd). I don't know if he's really even pro-war; his essays tend to be anti-anti war, like this one. Such is the life of a freelance critic I guess -- alot like his idol Orwell, who opposed , communism, fascism, totalitarianism, capitalism, pretty much everything and was even an anarchist for a while but then decided to oppose that too. BTW, he betrays himself when he puts the happy bunny spin on Afghanistan; The allusion to the highway thing gives him away. A few months ago, the administration decided that it needed to finish the highway in Afghanistan before the election, and cut its timetable in half and something like quadrupled the funding for it -- precisely for moments like this. Meanwhile, the resurgent Taliban runs rampant, militias & warlords refuse to disarm, and opium exports grow.
Yeah, he's quite different than Kenneth Timmerman or Richard Perle. Those guys are quite direct! "Kill them all!" they would say. Hitchens throws around words like "eradicate" and "insurgency." Not sure if he's trying to make a point or just using superfluous words to sound regal (must be that British accent). If you really want a barn burner, I suggest you buy this... http://store.yahoo.com/c-spanstore/181454-2.html It was a panel of four well know writers/journalist...Hitchens was one of them. If you want see something funny happen to Hitchens, buy the tape. It gets heated at the end! BIG TIME! What's funny about it? Hitchens gets his ass handed to him! They lined up the speakers from left to right...but their political vies are opposite...It's not important. But it's just funny how they lined them up on stage. Wasserman, Steve, Editor, Los Angeles Times Book Review (moderator) Hitchens, Christopher, Columnist, Harper's (hard right; at least about Iraq) Ignatieff, Michael, Professor, Harvard University, Human Rights (right-moderate) Danner, Mark, Professor, University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism (left-moderate) Scheer, Robert, Syndicated Columnist (hard-left) By the way, Mark Danner makes EXCELLENT POINTS!!!
I couldn't care what Michael Hutchins or anyone else says about Farenheit 9/11. Michael Moore is not a documentor. He is a provocateur. His movies are designed to get a reaction from those he is making the movie about. Judging from all of the neocon BS that has come out against this movie, I would say he is doing a hell of a job. And, yes, I will definitely be seeing this movie over the weekend. Hutchins is just angry that somebody hasn't made a movie glorifying Dubya to be the best President since Abe Lincoln. He shouldn't hold his breath.
Exactly. As I have said several times, I take everything Moore does with a grain of salt the size of a deer lick, but he does bring up some interesting points in his "documentaries." The only movies that will be made about Bush will be VERY harsh in their criticism of him, I predict.
moore is just a leftist rush w/ a camera, who spews political vitriol disguised as "art." no wonder the french love him. here's david denby in this week's new yorker: -- GEORGE & ME by DAVID DENBY Michael Moore’s viciously funny attack on the Bush Administration. In Michael Moore’s new documentary, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” George W. Bush sets his jaw, leans forward, and tells a group of reporter that terrorism must be destroyed. Then, turning away, he says, “Now watch this drive,” and tees off. A golfer, a bird hunter, a sportiv wit at gatherings of the super-rich (“Some people call you the élite. I call you my base”), the President is often at play in “Fahrenhei 9/11.” In this incendiary and viciously funny attack on the Bush Administration—a whirlwind of political charges, sinister implications and derision—the President comes off as a betrayer and a fool who has all the substance of a stuffed doll. Moore accuses Bush o handing part of America’s sovereignty to the Saudis; he implies that the president, after 9/11, was more effective at frightening th electorate than at pursuing the terrorists. Given its mixture of anguish and contempt, “Fahrenheit 9/11” can’t miss becoming a hit, wit the result that the Republican Party and its allies will be all over Michael Moore for months. I have some difficulties with Moor myself, and I’m not entirely impressed by the standing ovation and the Palme d’Or that the film received recently at Cannes, where th audience may have been all too eager to applaud its own detestation of the United States. Still, this is Moore’s most powerful movie—the largest in scope, the most resourceful and skillful in means—and the best things in it have little to do with his usual ideological tak on American power and George Bush. In the last third of the film, Moore gets hold of a genuine protagonist, and he has the good sens to stay out of her way Her name is Lila Lipscomb, and he finds her in Flint, Michigan, the home town to which he obsessively returns—Flint, the former industrial paradise destroyed by General Motors, whose emblematic decision in the eighties to close many of its plants in the city arrived like a Biblical curse. Years have gone by since the ruination, and Lila Lipscomb is still in there fighting—she works at a non-profit agency, helping the unemployed. Lipscomb, who is white, is married to an African-American, and the couple have several children, two of whom have served in the armed forces. A conservative Democrat who used to hate antiwar protesters, she describes her family as part of the “backbone” of the country. She’s not an intellectual or analytical person, but she knows who she is and what she wants to say. All this is established in two initial interviews. Then the unimaginable happens: one of Lila’s sons, Sergeant Michael Pedersen, dies in the Iraq war. And, as we find out in a letter from Pedersen that Lila reads to her family, he died without knowing what in the world he was doing in the desert. At which point, Lila gives way to unappeasable grief. Dazed and untethered, she makes a pilgrimage to the White House. In a way, she becomes a more authentic version of Michael Moore, who is always seeking to confront power. In Washington, Moore and his crew follow her around; we can guess that he urged her along, and, sure enough, some skeptical woman—a stranger—rushes into the frame and says, “This is all staged.” Lila’s response to the intruder is devastating; it goes beyond eloquence. And at last, in the street, she loses her strength, unable to move. Why my son? As everyone who’s been through the experience says, nothing can console a parent for the death of a child. And when death is robbed of meaning, and tinged with betrayal, the pain flows over the lip of ordinary grief and engulfs us all. “Fahrenheit 9/11” has a kind of necessary shock value: it reveals the underside of the war, the bloody messes not shown on news broadcasts. Moore makes use of footage given to him by American and foreign cameramen—scenes of Americans who were blown apart near Baghdad, or of maimed and nerve-shattered men trying to put their lives back together in a Washington hospital or at their home base. One soldier achieves a memorable clarity as he says, fighting pain and incapacity, that he’s disgusted by the lying way the Republican Party conducts its business. However embroiled the movie becomes in the upcoming election, no attack can lessen the impact of these scenes or diminish the anger they create in the audience; Moore, for once, offers experience rather than attitudes, sharp immediate suffering rather than his usual exasperated nostalgia for, say, the good old days, when the unions were strong and the workingman was king. If the rest of the movie had been created with this kind of directness and force, Michael Moore would have made a masterpiece. The great documentary filmmakers of today—Frederick Wiseman, Marcel Ophuls, and Andrew Jarecki (of “Capturing th Friedmans”)—know that truth in an absolute sense is unattainable. It’s not even imaginable. Who would validate it? Who could sa that another interpretation besides the filmmaker’s was out of the question? Movies are made by men and women, not by gods hurlin thunderbolts of certitude. But the great documentary filmmakers at least make an attempt, however inadequate, compromised, o hopeless, to arrive at a many-sided understanding of some complex situation. Michael Moore is not that kind of filmmaker, nor does h want to be. He calls himself a satirist, but he’s less a satirist than a polemicist, a practitioner of mocking political burlesque: he doesn’ discover many new things but punches up what he already knows or suspects; he doesn’t challenge or persuade an audience but tickle or irritates it. He’s too slipshod intellectually to convince many except the already convinced, too eager to throw another treated lo onto the fire of righteous anger Yet Moore has talent and mother wit, and he has become a significant figure in this culture—a shrewdly manipulative humorist-crank sticking pins in the hide of American self-esteem. The persona he offers to the camera is that of a commonsense man caught in the senseless machinery of capitalism. In such documentaries as “Roger & Me” and “Bowling for Columbine,” Moore created a kind of negative utopia in which the strong and the rich enjoy a triumph marred only by the disruptive efforts of Moore himself—a discontented American Everyman who pads around with his heavy gut and his baseball cap and harasses powerful people by asking them literal-minded questions. Moore has turned pain-in-the-neck intrusiveness and self-dramatization into a political jester’s provocation. In “Fahrenheit 9/11,” he works his famous shtick one more time: in front of the Capitol, he stops congressmen who voted for the Iraq war and asks them if they would consider urging their sons and daughters to join the armed services. As polite as a wine steward, he holds out the recruiting literature. Most of the congressmen skitter away like water bugs. This is first-rate mischief. But a lot of Moore’s teasing comes off as tricky and too easy, or as motivated by a paranoia so engulfing that it has blocked out normal skepticism—his own and (if he has his way) ours, too. The ideological framework of “Fahrenheit 9/11” goes roughly like this: America is not a democracy; America is an oligarchy in which the wealthy pull the strings behind a façade of manufactured democratic consent. The Bush clan rigged the national election in 2000; still, the new Administration was failing until 9/11, an event that the President exploited to create an atmosphere of endless fear and a practice of endless warfare. In the aftermath of the attacks, the White House allowed many Saudis, including twenty-four members of the bin Laden family, to fly out of the country after perfunctory questioning by the F.B.I. Why? Because the bin Ladens, along with the house of Saud itself, have been intimately connected for decades with the rise of the Bushes—funnelling money, in return for influence, into businesses controlled by the family or their friends. In brief, the republic has been bought. Moore implies that Afghanistan was invaded partly so that American oil interests could follow up on a deal arranged earlier with the Taliban to set up a natural-gas pipeline that would run through the country; Iraq was invaded so that military contracts would be pumped up and the Bushes’ friends enriched. On the ground, the war is fought by an impoverished class created by the ruthlessness of capitalism—men and women who, faced with dim economic chances, have no choice but to “volunteer” for the armed services. Saying that pieces of this are true—or partly true, or true when joined to counterclaims (isn’t the Army mostly a boon for the workin class?)—doesn’t settle the journalistic issue. The movie’s more radical allegations, which arrive like a shower of poison darts, ar impossible to sort out and evaluate. On the Bush connections with the Saudis, for instance, Moore takes a line similar to that of Crai Ungar in his recent book, “House of Bush, House of Saud,” but Ungar cites his sources in footnotes, and you can check up on him i you want to. Moore uses documents here and there, but much of the movie is too enraged and malicious to offer proof. “Was it all jus a dream?” Moore asks at the beginning, reviewing the past four years, which have taken on the character of an ominous hallucination—so ominous that most of us, he believes, can’t quite wrap our minds around it. To jolt us out of complacency, he depends on a editing method of flat-out contradiction—say, a Donald Rumsfeld claim of “humanitarian” bombing followed by shots of an Iraq family’s home destroyed by bombs. Is Rumsfeld’s insistence that we have killed as few civilians as possible refuted by this heart-wrenching juxtaposition? No, it’s neither proved nor disproved. Moore also gathers single shots together in volleys of didactic montage—for instance, Administration figures and Saudi ministers greeting one another fervently, or images of the President’s men being mad up before television appearances, a sequence implying that the Bush people are all in the grip of frivolous vanity. But this is cheap an meaningless. Everyone who goes on television gets made up Moore teases the powerful by playing them off against cornball pop-culture archetypes—turning the Afghanistan war into a “Bonanza”-style TV Western in which Tony Blair appears in a ten-gallon hat. How much water will that joke hold? And is this joker opposed to the Afghanistan war? (In “Bowling for Columbine,” Moore presented Bill Clinton’s intervention against Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing as a case of slaphappy American militarism.) Moore never talks about Islamic fundamentalism and training camps, obsessive anti-Westernism, or suicide terrorists and the difficulty of guarding against them; he never asks how the American government should conduct itself in a war against religious totalitarians. There are, apparently, no justifiable fears, only hysterical fears manipulated by the authorities, whose every act is purposive and conspiratorial. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Moore that people like Tom Ridge may simply not know what they’re doing and are desperately trying to appear on top of the situation. Moore can’t resist amusing his campus and conspiracy-nut following, along with the gleeful sophomore in all of us, but, as the man said, when you aim at the king you had better kill him. At the moment, the stakes may be too high for shenanigans. “Fahrenheit 9/11” offers the thrill of a coherent explanation for everything, but parts of the movie are no better than a wild, lunging grab at a supposed master plan. Did Bush, as Moore implies, allow Osama bin Laden to survive because of American financial ties to Osama’s protectors, the Taliban? (If so, the Pentagon war planners were part of the plot.) Moore is a genuine populist, but what he can’t deal with is the unpleasant possibility that Bush, as people used to say of Nixon, has made a shrewd assessment of the lack of virtue and curiosity in the American public. A lot of Americans still admire the ignorant, smirking, chest-out, crotch-forward triumphalism. Michael Moore has become a sensational entertainer of the already converted, but his enduring problem as a political artist is that he has never known how to change anyone’s politics.
and the new yorker, like it's brother in alarms the Times, just can't resist politicizing every event: although, personally, i'd rather see ray charles on a bill before i saw reagan. how about a highway instead? the ray charles memorial new jersey turnpike?
The more Moore gets under the skin of the right the better! He must have really touched on some nerves for the slander machine to hit this hard! Can't wait to see it!
On a side note, they just opened a five-screen Angelika theater here in Plano, and come Friday, three of those screens will be showing Farenheit 9/11. One would think that's taking a big risk on the Angelika's part, dedicating 60% of your screens to a single movie, especially a Bush Bashing film in the middle of one of the most Republican suburbs in America.
I don't think so. Republicans will see this movie in droves just so they can disavow whatever points Moore tries to make. It's a win-win for Moore and "Farenheit 9/11" any way you slice it.
Actually I think that *most* Republicans, and Democrats too for that matter, don't think about their political views very much outside of election time. They are habitual voters who vote one way or the other based on who their folks voted, or how they decided to vote years before. I don't think the Republicans will go to this film just to get their ire up. I know I won't. I know that a very fundamental level I disagree with most of what Moore has to say so at this point I am not interested in seeing the mockumentry.
This couldn't be farther from the truth. This movie is aimed at the most extreme lunatic fringe liberals out there. This movie has already been slapped with the Bush-hate label. Obviously conservatives won't see it, and independents typically aren't into the deeply dividing partisan rhetoric that Moore spews. Factually inaccurate smear campaigns like this one simply alienate fence-sitters. This movie will play to the liberal core and nothing else.
You wouldn't know the truth if it bit you in the ass. Amazing powers you have there pal! Able to critique a movie without even seeing it. Yer good!
I challenge you, or anybody else, to see this movie and indentify something, anything that is in it that is "factually inaccurate". It's probably stuff that you and your ilk don't care to hear, but that doesn't mean it is "factually inaccurate".
Christopher Hitchens accepts your challenge. You can find his answers to your question at the top of this page. If you remember, this is the article that started the thread. Perhaps you missed the thread-starting article?
