General Zod
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Don't hold your breathMrMacphisto said:
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Disney Trying to Block Release of Michael Moore's New Movie
- Thread starter Mimi
- Start date
MrMacphisto said:
MrMacphisto said:
MrMacphisto said:
Look at your own words. You're part of the very problem you complain about. It's you who is full of hate. Doesn't surprise me in the least that you yearn for the death of the world around you. You're frustrated by your inability to convince others of your views, and society is, according to your own words, so horrific in your eyes it needs to be destroyed. You'd rather the world be destroyed through, according to you, 'nuclear oblivion' than it go on in a manner that you disapprove of.
You don't know the first thing about me. Don't tell this athiest he worships Pat Robertson. Don't tell this registered Libertarian he's a reactionary.
You are *exactly* the sort of person you claim to hate. It's called 'projection,' when you take your own character flaws and project them onto someone else.
My dialogue here was good with BOFH666, because he's intelligent and takes the time to ask questions, and clarify responses. It's a matter of record I disagree with him. But when I can exchange views with his side of the aisle, I think there may be hope. When you chime in with your evangelical polemics, it makes me reconsider.
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Roseblossom
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Re: Just for you Cosmo............
In fact nobody here has claimed that Moore's movies are serious documentaries, including Moore himself, who chuckles as he describes some of the humor in Farenheit 9-11.
Also, referring to the shot of the dead child in the street as "cloying and sentimental" has really put your opinion into perspective.
~Rose~
Whoops, setting out to prove a point which is, in fact, NOT the point here is a very poor choice.red indian said:
In fact nobody here has claimed that Moore's movies are serious documentaries, including Moore himself, who chuckles as he describes some of the humor in Farenheit 9-11.
Also, referring to the shot of the dead child in the street as "cloying and sentimental" has really put your opinion into perspective.
~Rose~
Roseblossom
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Thanks, but I put more credence in actual news sources instead of a handful of angry ax-grinders.MikeMike said:
~Rose~
Excellent article:
Michael Moore, Humbug
Kay S. Hymowitz
City Journal
Recently a wealthy Chicago couple named Drobney announced their plan to bankroll a left-wing talk radio station. They needn’t bother: the Left already has a multimedia star—and even without a radio station, he’s bigger than Rush, has more fans than O’Reilly, and sells books faster than Coulter. Followers plead with this “folk hero for the American people” to run for president. Reviewers compare him to Twain, Voltaire, and Swift. Unlike Rush and company, the appeal of this blue-collar megastar extends far beyond the hoi polloi. Hollywood and Manhattan agents wave gazillion-dollar contracts in front of his face. He wins prestigious awards that will never grace the Limbaugh or O’Reilly dens—Oscars, Emmys, Writer’s Guild Awards, and jury prizes at Cannes (where his latest movie received a record 13-minute standing ovation). People stop him on the streets of Berlin, Paris, and London—where, according to Andrew Collins of the Guardian, they consider him “the people’s filmmaker.”
He is, of course, Michael Moore, author of the best-selling Downsize This! and Stupid White Men and the director of Roger and Me and Bowling for Columbine. Those unfamiliar with Moore probably learned about him during the Oscar ceremonies in March, when, several weeks into the war in Iraq, he won the award for best documentary and came to the stage to speak—or so he said—for his fellow documentary nominees. “We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times,” he intoned. “We live in a time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it is the fictition [sic] of duct tape or the fictition of orange alerts, we are against this war, Mr. Bush! Shame on you, Mr. Bush! Shame on you!”
Well, the speaker ought to know. As critics have pointed out repeatedly, Moore himself is a world-class expert on fictition; in fact, when it comes to truth telling, not to mention logic, you might say: less is Moore. But if the copious charges of lies and distortions don’t make a dent, it’s because Moore’s fabrications are the very source of his appeal. Not only has he created an enormously clever fictional character whose name is Michael Moore—a contemporary Will Rogers, able to channel Noam Chomsky via Chevy Chase; a working-class, truth-telling schlub in a trucker’s hat who shuffles out of his La-Z-Boy recliner to seek answers to folksy questions from the high and mighty—he has also conjured up a fictional America that seductively taps into long familiar populist resentments that have their most recent incarnation in the rage of the anti-globalization Left.
In May, I went to see Moore give a talk to graduating seniors at a liberal arts college outside New York City, and it was easy to see why the kids went nuts. Moore recalled the Left as I remembered it in the “you-can-change-the-world” sixties—funny, confident, passionate, idealistic, full of possibility. As you might expect, he poked fun at conservatives, but also at liberals, those long-suffering targets of political satirists. “You must have a conservative in your family—an uncle or someone,” he said confidingly. “That person never loses his car keys. He has every key marked: this SUV, that SUV. Our [the liberal] side goes [in a timid, whiny voice], ‘Do you know where my car keys are? . . . Where do you want to go to dinner?’ ‘Gee, I don’t know. Where do you want to go to dinner?’ Right-wingers go [slamming the podium] ‘GET IN THE CAR! WE’RE GOING TO SIZZLER!’ ”
Moore was humble. He giggled disarmingly at his own jokes. He blushed and looked at his feet during the standing ovation. He told how he was so inexperienced when he made his first movie that, during an interview, Jesse Jackson had to show him how to use his sound equipment. He was also full of concern for the little guy. “Maybe I was raised the wrong way, but my parents taught me we’ll be judged by how we treat the least among us.” He promised truth in a world of corruption and lies. “When I got out of my seat, and they all rose in standing ovation [at the Oscars], I could just stand there and soak up all the love, blow them a kiss, and get the hell out of here. But there’s a little voice, ‘You have work to do.’ ” He was upbeat and inspirational. “Americans are far more progressive than you think. . . . Change this world. Make the playing fields level for everyone. One person can make a difference!”
It was a great act—the operative word here being “act.” It’s best to think of Moore as always a performer, one who is not only the star of his own show but also its subject matter. And therefore any attempt to understand Moore or his intense appeal to an alienated Left has to begin with the man himself.
Moore grew up in Flint, Michigan, where his father assembled AC spark plugs at General Motors. It was in many respects an ordinary midwestern working-class boyhood of the 1950s. The young Moore attended mass with his parents, joined the Eagle Scouts, and learned to shoot; he became a champion marksman, a fact he would mine decades later in Bowling for Columbine. But Moore also took to activism at a young age. At 16, he gave a speech in a local contest, condemning the Elks for barring blacks. His speech won the prize, and attracted much media acclaim, including a call from CBS. According to Moore, it even prompted the Elks to change their policy. In his teens, Moore briefly joined a seminary, he says—he was a great admirer of the radical priests, the Berrigan brothers—but he soon opted for a more secular pursuit of politics. By 18, he had won a seat on the local school board.
Soon after freshman year, he quit college and started an alternative newspaper called the Flint Voice (later the Michigan Voice), and in 1986 he went to work for the national left-wing magazine Mother Jones. There—not for the first and certainly not for the last time in his life—he managed to alienate his admirers; after four months, he got fired. Moore claimed political differences, but those at the magazine said he had been utterly unprofessional: arbitrary, suspicious, and impervious to deadlines. In any case, he sued Mother Jones, eventually settling for $58,000, which he used as seed money for Roger and Me. Though he’d never made a film before, Roger and Me was screened at the Telluride film festival, resulting in a distribution deal that made it the highest-grossing non-concert documentary ever—until Bowling for Columbine.
Yet for all his fame and achievement, the most important fact about Michael Moore—and the foundation of a populist philosophy that verges on the reactionary—remains his birthplace. Moore is from Flint the way Odysseus was from Ithaca; his home haunts his every thought and feeling. “This was Flint as I remembered it, where every day was a great day,” he says in a voiceover in Roger and Me, a movie in which he sets out to track down Roger Smith, the General Motors CEO who ordered the factory closings that turned Flint into a rust-belt disaster in the 1980s. The movie is a paean to his beloved birthplace, an evocation of the populist’s lost golden age, an industrial counterpart to the agrarian Brigadoon, where life was whole, people were genuine, and everything felt secure. Moore has a wistful vision of Flint as the birthplace of the modern labor movement with the famous 1937 strike that culminated in the founding of the UAW, which he presents as a progressive union that integrated the assembly lines and secured its members health-care benefits and enough money to buy homes and cars of their own. He evokes a vanished time, when laborers and corporate elites joined in a mutual spirit of loyalty and honest exertion. “My dad didn’t live with this kind of fear,” he has said of contemporary job instability. “The social contract then was, if you worked hard and the company did well, he did well.”
Moore’s image of Flint makes him the ideal poet of the Naderite Left. The city symbolizes the sadness and populist outrage over a world lost to the New Economy and its voracious global corporation. In Roger and Me, the camera lingers on block after block of boarded-up houses, and Moore interviews desperate people, some being evicted from their homes. The fallen landscape is for Moore a symbol of a lost world, in which people like the laboring men of Flint made real stuff—steel, cars, trucks—before being swept away by the flabby and artificial post-industrial economy.
Though not without its appeal, Moore’s vision oozes with more 1950s nostalgia than a Loretta Young fan club. There’s hardly a hint of the mechanical repetition endured by the men and women who bolted thingamajigs to widgets on the assembly line; one of the workers interviewed in Roger and Me says he is happy to escape “the prison” of the GM factory floor, even though he’s taken a cut in salary, but the director does not seem to notice. And while it is true that the UAW was integrated, Flint was hardly an Eden of racial harmony. As Jim Lawrence, a black labor activist at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, describes it, during the 1960s “the union gave foremen a blank check to mistreat blacks and keep them out of the high-rate machine jobs and the skilled trades.”
More misleading still is the director’s melodramatic narrative of corporate downsizing and Flint’s decline. During Moore’s golden childhood, when his father was assembling spark plugs, the United States was the world’s preeminent manufacturer. But by the 1980s, that world was passing—and not because of black-mustachioed CEO villains. For the first time, as other industrial nations recovered fully from World War II, American companies were battling genuine competition from abroad; by 1980, the U.S. commanded only 25 percent of manufacturing output, down from 42 percent in 1962. Especially hard hit were the heavy industries of the rust belt like the automotive companies. As cheap, well-made foreign cars flooded the market, industries introduced ad campaigns to “Buy American.” But people were not easily dissuaded from purchasing Honda Civics when their last Impala had dropped its transmission and its muffler.
Faced with these realities, companies had no choice but to cut costs and improve quality and productivity. They laid off workers, and organized those who were left into teams that had to take responsibility for the quality of their product. It wasn’t just blue-collar heads that rolled. Restructuring, aided by waves of computerization, meant wiping out entire layers of management, a process that was bloody and sometimes deeply unjust: Moore is right that CEOs often compensated themselves royally, while their downsized ex-employees worried about buying shoes for their kids. But the fact is that many industries emerged from the carnage more competitive and better equipped to avoid layoffs in future recessions. Back in 1988 Ross Perot, GM’s most prominent critic before Moore, quipped that dealers complained that “[w]hen you step on the accelerator, a Cadillac needs to move.” Today, as just one example of the success of the nation’s industrial restructuring, the Cadillac is moving again, America’s luxury competitor to the Lexus and BMW—and talk about Japan as Number One stopped years ago.
In Downsize This!, Moore attempted to elaborate on the theme of the downsized economy where Roger and Me left off, but the book’s description of a rust-belt dystopia of pink slips and unemployment checks was out of date way before it hit the bookstores. By 1996, the number of jobs and heft of paychecks in the Midwest had improved markedly. In 1998, the Department of Commerce was writing that “[m]ore flexible, market-oriented companies have generated hundreds of thousands of jobs” in Michigan. A 2001 Michigan Economic Development Corporation report noted that, with the exception of still-depressed Flint, the state’s metropolitan areas saw an increase in personal income between 1989 and 1998, with income rising more than 20 percent in places like Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids.
Stuck in the Walter Reuther past, Moore can make no sense of this. A while back, he was appalled when The Nation asked him to be part of a lecture cruise, “to hold seminars during the day and then dock at Saint Kitts at night!” he hissed derisively, as if it were still the era when plutocrats in tuxedos and women in gowns and diamonds dined on caviar and champagne with the ship’s captain, while workingmen and women scrimped for a week’s vacation at a dank lake bungalow. He seems not to know that plumbers from Milwaukee and secretaries from Akron fill Caribbean cruise ships these days (though probably not those sponsored by The Nation), and that factory workers often sport two cars—and a boat on a trailer—in their driveways. Our economic system has “got to go,” he told Industry Central, before admitting, “Now don’t ask me what to replace it with because I don’t know.” How convenient: he can dwell in his mythical land of Flint and never face the manifest truth that the system that downsized and restructured with such turmoil ultimately improved living standards for millions, while at the same time absorbing hosts of poor immigrants.
Moore is hardly the first to engage in a little nostalgic mythmaking. What makes him unique is his willingness to construct his myths on a scaffolding of calculated untruths. It’s an irony worth savoring. Moore’s chief conceit is that he is the lonely truth teller, seeking out the story no one else is brave enough to touch. He repeatedly blasts the media for ignoring issues that only he, a lowly college dropout, has the courage to bring before a hoodwinked public. “In the beginning there was a free press—well not really, but it sounded good,” the announcer of his TV series, The Awful Truth, would say as the show opened. But the awful truth is that Moore himself is a virtuoso of lying—which is the only way he can give the appearance of truth to his untenable theories.
Let’s begin with his bold-faced lies. In an appearance on Comedy Central’s Daily Show in March 2002, Moore announced that during the period that planes were grounded for two days after the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration allowed a Saudi jet to whisk away bin Ladin family members over FBI objections. As Snopes.com, an Internet site devoted to tracking down urban legends, points out, the planes did pick up bin Ladin family members—on September 18 and 19, days after commercial flights had already begun flying again, and they did so only after the FBI had questioned the departing Saudis. At the college talk, I witnessed another stunner, when Moore announced—without so much as a blip on the polygraph line—that, even though the media report that children in intact families are better off, “every study shows that’s a big lie. Children of single mothers do better in life.”
Then there are lies of omission, a genre that reaches its apogee in the movie Bowling for Columbine. Prompted by the horrific murders by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999, Bowling is Moore’s putative attempt to explore why America endures so much more gun violence than other industrialized countries. It seems to make sense when he interviews the punk singer Marilyn Manson, whose violent lyrics the Columbine killers favored. Yet Moore’s point is not what you’d expect. Objecting that to “scapegoat” Manson for the murders makes as much sense as blaming bowling, since the killers supposedly bowled on the morning of the murders, Moore listens with reverence to Manson’s theory—which happens to be Moore’s own—that Americans are violent because we live in a “culture of fear.” Never mind that the investigators at Columbine have concluded that the killers did not go bowling that morning; the larger point is that Marilyn Manson chose to name himself after Charles Manson, one of America’s most infamous mass murderers. Moore says no word about any of this.
Then there are what we might call artistic lies. Bowling for Columbine opens in a branch of the North Country Bank, with Moore supposedly receiving a free gun in exchange for opening an account. At the end of the scene, he asks a bank employee, “Do you think it’s a little dangerous handing out guns in a bank?” before he runs out with the gun in his hand to the beat of a punk rock tune. It is a dazzling opening, full of energy and Dr. Strangelove absurdity. The only problem: it was staged. Commentators have been on Moore’s case about this, some even campaigning to revoke his Oscar, awarded for a genre supposed to be nonfiction. Anthony Zoubeck, a self-described “former Moore fan” who writes for the Illinois State University paper, the Daily Vidette, contacted Helen Steinman, the customer-service representative seen greeting Moore in the bank. “You can’t just come in here and get a gun,” Steinman explained. Moore “was only supposed to be coming in and pretending to open up a CD. What the girl who opened up the account really told him was that there would be a background check and that he wouldn’t get the gun for six weeks.”
There are slanted, insinuating lies. In another example from Bowling, Moore places a Lockheed Martin executive from Littleton, Colorado, right in front of a mammoth, menacing-looking rocket and asks: “So you don’t think our kids say to themselves, ‘Gee, you know, Dad goes off to the factory every day and, you know, he builds missiles. These are weapons of mass destruction.’ ” He also observes darkly that the company moves its products through the community late at night, when “the children of Columbine are asleep.” But Lockheed Martin does not make weapons in Littleton; it makes weather and communications satellites there. The missile in the film is a refurbished Titan 2 rocket used to launch one such satellite. Moreover, as Zoubeck learned from a Lockheed spokesman, the company moves the rockets at night because they are so large they need a convoy—not, as Moore insinuates, because anyone is trying to hide the awful truth about weather satellites.
And there are the lies of exaggeration—details that after marinating in Moore’s brain swell into squishy conspiracy tales, like one of those dried sponges that swell prodigiously in water. Take what happened during a March 2002 book-tour appearance for Stupid White Men, his 2001 screed against the Bush administration, corrupt corporate power, and (as one chapter title puts it) this “idiot nation.” At 11 PM, Moore was still signing books for a line of fans at a San Diego school, when event organizers announced that the janitors wanted to close up and go home, since the use permit was up. Moore paid little attention and went on signing books, until someone—apparently the janitors—called the police about half an hour later. At this point, according to Kynn Bartlett, a disappointed fan who wrote about the event on his website, two cops walked in with flashlights—Bartlett points out that it was dark in the parking lot outside—and calmly announced: “May I have your attention. The use permit for this event expired at eleven. You have to leave now.” After some grumbling, everyone did.
End of story—until Moore breathlessly posted his version on his website the next day. POLICE RAID, SHUT DOWN MY BOOK SIGNING IN SAN DIEGO. “I am told that we are getting close to the time when we will have to leave the school,” Moore’s fiction begins. “That is not good. Hundreds are still in line.” (Bartlett estimates there were 75.) Moore continues: “The San Diego police [all two of them, Bartlett says] are coming down the aisle, their large flashlights out (the auditorium lights are still on, so we all understand the implied ‘other’ use of the instruments).” People are “visibly frightened,” “bolt[ing]” toward the doors. “I remark that it feels like we’re in some sort of banana republic or East Berlin, secretly meeting so we can have our little book gathering. Sign quick, Mike, here come the police.” There’s not a word about janitors forced to work overtime to please celebrity authors.
So does that mean that Moore’s career as the pied piper of union workers is also a lie? The best that can be said is . . . not entirely. Moore appears to give a good deal of money to unions and charities. But on the road he often stays at the Ritz or Four Seasons, like other movie millionaires. (And he is always on the road: though he loves to describe himself as a slacker, he endured a 47-city book tour for Downsize This, a tour he made the subject of his disastrously narcissistic movie, The Big One, and he hit scores of cities for Stupid White Men.) Former employees have accused him of trying to stop them from joining the Writer’s Guild and, according to interviews conducted by The Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash, of creating working conditions that resemble a “sweatshop” and “indentured servitude.”
In fact, there are plenty of indications that Michael Moore is not a compassionate, big-hearted man dedicated to social justice; he just plays one on TV. When asked by a reporter from the Arcata Eye in 2002 why he wasn’t speaking at independent bookstores rather than at corporate chains, he exploded in a tirade that revealed his willingness to have his principles—in this case, his distrust of corporate power—take a backseat to his personal vengefulness. “You know in my town the small businesses that everyone wanted to protect? They were the people that supported all the right-wing groups,” he ranted. “They were the Republicans in town, they were in Kiwanis, the Chamber of Commerce—people that kept the town all white. The small hardware salesman, the small clothing store sales persons, Jesse the Barber who signed his name three different times on three different petitions to recall me from the school board. Fuck all these small businesses—fuck ’em all. Bring in the chains.”
Not that Moore isn’t capable of spouting a few nasty racial stereotypes himself. “[T]he kind of people who fly in airplanes want someone else to clean up their mess; that’s why they let hijackers take the plane,” said this frequent (first-class) flier late last fall in a one-man show in London. “If the passengers had included black men, those killers, with their puny bodies and unimpressive small knives, would have been crushed by the dudes, who as we all know take no disrespect from anybody. . . . The passengers on the planes on 11 September were scaredy-cats, because they were mostly white.”
Moore’s defense when he is charged with lying or hypocrisy, as he frequently is, sounds more like Richard Nixon than Will Rogers. He keeps voicing suspicion that large, nefarious powers are set on destroying him. A bad review of Roger and Me in Film Comment ?“Film Comment is a publication of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Lincoln Center had received a $5 million gift from GM just prior to publishing the piece trashing Roger and Me. Coincidence? Or just five big ones well spent?” The failure of his only fictional feature film, Canadian Bacon? The distributor, Polygram, buried it, because the company is “owned by Philips of the Netherlands, makers of weapons.” Booing at the Oscars? In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, Moore insisted, “Those boos were amplified . . . as I looked out at the audience no one was booing. You could see the camera desperately trying to find people who were disagreeing with me and they couldn’t.” Criticism in the online magazine Salon? Borders bookstores, one of Salon’s advertisers, was angry that he had been supporting workers who wanted to unionize—oh, and Salon’s editor has a “personal grudge” against him. Oh, and the writer, whom Moore wrongly assumes belongs to Manhattan’s literary elite, is worried because “one of ‘them’ (i.e. me) has moved into the neighborhood. Ooh, scary. A guy who’s supposed to be building Buicks in Flint is now prowling the streets. . . . Somebody circle the wagons! Protect the Starbucks!” As Moore told a Stanford student who asked him to respond to criticism of Stupid White Men, “It’s always personal.” For Moore, at least that much is true.
So how has an embittered, cynical man with a paranoid streak as wide as Montana and a dysfunctional relationship to the truth been able to present himself so successfully as a compassionate, salt-of-the-earth, truth-seeking hero? One answer is that he makes people laugh. Not only does humor make it harder for charges of lying to stick—as Moore asked Lou Dobbs, “How can there be inaccuracy in comedy?”—it also makes people open to what he has to say. “Humor is welcoming,” he told the college audience in May. “People want to listen to you at that point. . . . I don’t come off as Mr. Know-It-All.”
At his best Moore pokes fun at hypocrisy in time-honored fashion. In one of TV Nation’s yippie-style pranks, he threw a “Corp Aid” benefit concert on Wall Street to help “needy corporations.” In another episode, produced during the Gingrich years, he went to Cobb County, Georgia, and opened GOBAC, the Committee to Get Government Off the Backs of Cobb County, whose aim was to send the county’s $4 billion in federal aid back to Washington.
Moore also successfully synthesizes a style that is simultaneously Heartland Joe’s Diner and MTV—or “Leave It to Beaver meets Metallica,” as he put it in a different context. Roger and Me, the film that transformed the documentary from a professorial lecture into hip entertainment, is filled with kitschy Americana—beauty queens, marching bands, Anita Bryant songs. Moore himself speaks slowly in a flat midwestern accent and looks like someone who buys his clothes at KMart, yet he still conveys a Saturday Night Live sensibility. Moore’s hip humor also flatters the snobbery of many of his voguish fans, who ordinarily would have nothing but contempt for blubbery guys in saggy jeans and trucker’s hats.
The other key to Moore’s appeal is his simple Manichaean moral system, the kind that populists traditionally invoke to stir up easy resentments, as with today’s alienated Left. Moore’s world comprises two groups: stupid but powerful white guys in suits, like Roger Smith; and decent but powerless ordinary folks, like Michael Moore. For Moore, this is not some kind of comic-book schema; it is as real as sin itself. Nike CEO Phil Knight is “the face of evil.” President Bush, today’s incarnation of the evil plutocrat in Moore’s mind, is “capable of anything.” “The other side [the rich]—what they believe in,” Moore said in an Internet interview, “is in their own kind of sick Darwinism that says only a few shall survive to have the American dream. And they spend their time trying to enact laws to guarantee that the majority won’t.” Downsizing and welfare reform, which Moore calls “inherently evil,” are both examples of “terrorism” committed by malevolent rich men.
In Bowling for Columbine, Moore dwells on the case of the six-year-old boy who shot and killed a classmate in, coincidentally, Flint, Michigan. The boy got into trouble, Moore informs us, because welfare reform forced his mother, Tamarla Owens, to work two jobs and left her unable to care for her son. Moore does not mention that the boy and his mother were living in a crack house filled with guns, or that social workers had previously cited Tamarla Owens for being “involved with drugs” as well as for child abuse, including an incident where, according to Newhouse News Service, she admitted holding down another of her children so that two male friends could beat him with a belt. Nor does he mention that poverty rates and well-being for black children have improved markedly since the “terrorists” passed welfare reform. But why would he? The test of his moral system is the degree of resentment it inspires, not facts and reason.
Much of Moore’s Manichaeism will be yawningly familiar to anyone accustomed to the weird myopia of the far Left these days. America—or “the corporation known as The United States of America,” as Moore puts it—is inhabited by a race of greedy, uncaring, racist freaks, equipped with what Moore calls “the stupid gene.” Above all, Americans are violent. “Guns don’t kill people; Americans kill people,” Moore has said. Worldwide, people suffer for only one reason: not religious or political tyranny, but the malevolent policies of stupid white American men, descended from paranoid Puritans and covetous Italians.
More bizarre still are Moore’s theories about the attacks of September 11, an event that has plunged the filmmaker into an agony of cognitive dissonance, an ideal breeding ground for the paranoid conspiracy theories that come so naturally to him. In hundreds of letters, interviews, and articles, Moore shows no sign of having read the first thing about al-Qaida, militant Islam, or the Middle East. That hasn’t stopped him from concluding that bin Ladin is no danger. “Ooh . . . he’s everywhere,” he joked at Stanford University, waving his arms bogeyman-like. “Usama bin Ladin—he could be here tonight!” “What if there is no terrorist threat,” he has asked, and the Bush administration simply wanted an excuse to curtail civil liberties while it pursued its corporate interests?
Moore seems to forget his own stoking of fears of terrorism. “There is a rage building in this country, and if you’re like me, you’re scared shitless,” he wrote in Downsize This!. “I believe thousands of Americans are only a few figurative steps away from getting into that Ryder truck,” like the one packed with explosives by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Terrorism by downsized white Americans is one thing: that’s scary. But external threats by foreign terrorists? It just cannot be. “Many families have been devastated tonight. This is just not right,” Moore wrote on September 12, 2001, as the World Trade Center and the bodies of 3,000 lay in smoking ruins. “They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him. Boston, New York, D.C., and the planes’ destination of California—these were the places that voted AGAINST Bush.” In Moore’s Manichaean world, if Republicans alone had died on September 11, they would have had it coming.
Moore’s moral stupidity, so ratcheted up by September 11, is likely to drive his next film, a documentary about the “twin errant sons of different oilmen”—George W. Bush and Usama bin Ladin. The filmmaker is hoping to release the movie, called Fahrenheit 9/11, a few months before the presidential election, to “make sure that Bush isn’t returned.” All signs point to his usual techniques—facts stripped of context and detail, dark insinuations, and outright lies, all leavened by pop music and Strangelovian irony.
Tracing some of Moore’s recent comments, one can piece together the argument—or rather the hazy impressions, for Moore never constructs an argument—that will make up this so-called documentary. Moore will insinuate that the United States created Usama—“or USA-ma, which is more appropriate considering we trained him to be a terrorist.” He will tell us that in the late nineties the oil firm Unocal held a meeting with Taliban representatives in Houston, “when Bush was governor,” to talk about building a pipeline through Afghanistan. He will imply that this project was the reason the U.S. gave humanitarian aid to the Taliban, until “the deal went south,” and “suddenly the Taliban were evil.” And thus, Michael Moore will finally reveal the awful truth that only he is courageous enough to admit about why the United States really went to war with the Taliban.
And you can be sure that the trendy sophisticates in Cannes and Hollywood will once again rise to their feet to honor their mendacious auteur, European intellectuals will bow before his Manichaean simplicities, and the international radical Left will cheer the moral obtuseness of the man who has made his fortune turning the documentary into fiction.
Michael Moore, Humbug
Kay S. Hymowitz
City Journal
Recently a wealthy Chicago couple named Drobney announced their plan to bankroll a left-wing talk radio station. They needn’t bother: the Left already has a multimedia star—and even without a radio station, he’s bigger than Rush, has more fans than O’Reilly, and sells books faster than Coulter. Followers plead with this “folk hero for the American people” to run for president. Reviewers compare him to Twain, Voltaire, and Swift. Unlike Rush and company, the appeal of this blue-collar megastar extends far beyond the hoi polloi. Hollywood and Manhattan agents wave gazillion-dollar contracts in front of his face. He wins prestigious awards that will never grace the Limbaugh or O’Reilly dens—Oscars, Emmys, Writer’s Guild Awards, and jury prizes at Cannes (where his latest movie received a record 13-minute standing ovation). People stop him on the streets of Berlin, Paris, and London—where, according to Andrew Collins of the Guardian, they consider him “the people’s filmmaker.”
He is, of course, Michael Moore, author of the best-selling Downsize This! and Stupid White Men and the director of Roger and Me and Bowling for Columbine. Those unfamiliar with Moore probably learned about him during the Oscar ceremonies in March, when, several weeks into the war in Iraq, he won the award for best documentary and came to the stage to speak—or so he said—for his fellow documentary nominees. “We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times,” he intoned. “We live in a time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it is the fictition [sic] of duct tape or the fictition of orange alerts, we are against this war, Mr. Bush! Shame on you, Mr. Bush! Shame on you!”
Well, the speaker ought to know. As critics have pointed out repeatedly, Moore himself is a world-class expert on fictition; in fact, when it comes to truth telling, not to mention logic, you might say: less is Moore. But if the copious charges of lies and distortions don’t make a dent, it’s because Moore’s fabrications are the very source of his appeal. Not only has he created an enormously clever fictional character whose name is Michael Moore—a contemporary Will Rogers, able to channel Noam Chomsky via Chevy Chase; a working-class, truth-telling schlub in a trucker’s hat who shuffles out of his La-Z-Boy recliner to seek answers to folksy questions from the high and mighty—he has also conjured up a fictional America that seductively taps into long familiar populist resentments that have their most recent incarnation in the rage of the anti-globalization Left.
In May, I went to see Moore give a talk to graduating seniors at a liberal arts college outside New York City, and it was easy to see why the kids went nuts. Moore recalled the Left as I remembered it in the “you-can-change-the-world” sixties—funny, confident, passionate, idealistic, full of possibility. As you might expect, he poked fun at conservatives, but also at liberals, those long-suffering targets of political satirists. “You must have a conservative in your family—an uncle or someone,” he said confidingly. “That person never loses his car keys. He has every key marked: this SUV, that SUV. Our [the liberal] side goes [in a timid, whiny voice], ‘Do you know where my car keys are? . . . Where do you want to go to dinner?’ ‘Gee, I don’t know. Where do you want to go to dinner?’ Right-wingers go [slamming the podium] ‘GET IN THE CAR! WE’RE GOING TO SIZZLER!’ ”
Moore was humble. He giggled disarmingly at his own jokes. He blushed and looked at his feet during the standing ovation. He told how he was so inexperienced when he made his first movie that, during an interview, Jesse Jackson had to show him how to use his sound equipment. He was also full of concern for the little guy. “Maybe I was raised the wrong way, but my parents taught me we’ll be judged by how we treat the least among us.” He promised truth in a world of corruption and lies. “When I got out of my seat, and they all rose in standing ovation [at the Oscars], I could just stand there and soak up all the love, blow them a kiss, and get the hell out of here. But there’s a little voice, ‘You have work to do.’ ” He was upbeat and inspirational. “Americans are far more progressive than you think. . . . Change this world. Make the playing fields level for everyone. One person can make a difference!”
It was a great act—the operative word here being “act.” It’s best to think of Moore as always a performer, one who is not only the star of his own show but also its subject matter. And therefore any attempt to understand Moore or his intense appeal to an alienated Left has to begin with the man himself.
Moore grew up in Flint, Michigan, where his father assembled AC spark plugs at General Motors. It was in many respects an ordinary midwestern working-class boyhood of the 1950s. The young Moore attended mass with his parents, joined the Eagle Scouts, and learned to shoot; he became a champion marksman, a fact he would mine decades later in Bowling for Columbine. But Moore also took to activism at a young age. At 16, he gave a speech in a local contest, condemning the Elks for barring blacks. His speech won the prize, and attracted much media acclaim, including a call from CBS. According to Moore, it even prompted the Elks to change their policy. In his teens, Moore briefly joined a seminary, he says—he was a great admirer of the radical priests, the Berrigan brothers—but he soon opted for a more secular pursuit of politics. By 18, he had won a seat on the local school board.
Soon after freshman year, he quit college and started an alternative newspaper called the Flint Voice (later the Michigan Voice), and in 1986 he went to work for the national left-wing magazine Mother Jones. There—not for the first and certainly not for the last time in his life—he managed to alienate his admirers; after four months, he got fired. Moore claimed political differences, but those at the magazine said he had been utterly unprofessional: arbitrary, suspicious, and impervious to deadlines. In any case, he sued Mother Jones, eventually settling for $58,000, which he used as seed money for Roger and Me. Though he’d never made a film before, Roger and Me was screened at the Telluride film festival, resulting in a distribution deal that made it the highest-grossing non-concert documentary ever—until Bowling for Columbine.
Yet for all his fame and achievement, the most important fact about Michael Moore—and the foundation of a populist philosophy that verges on the reactionary—remains his birthplace. Moore is from Flint the way Odysseus was from Ithaca; his home haunts his every thought and feeling. “This was Flint as I remembered it, where every day was a great day,” he says in a voiceover in Roger and Me, a movie in which he sets out to track down Roger Smith, the General Motors CEO who ordered the factory closings that turned Flint into a rust-belt disaster in the 1980s. The movie is a paean to his beloved birthplace, an evocation of the populist’s lost golden age, an industrial counterpart to the agrarian Brigadoon, where life was whole, people were genuine, and everything felt secure. Moore has a wistful vision of Flint as the birthplace of the modern labor movement with the famous 1937 strike that culminated in the founding of the UAW, which he presents as a progressive union that integrated the assembly lines and secured its members health-care benefits and enough money to buy homes and cars of their own. He evokes a vanished time, when laborers and corporate elites joined in a mutual spirit of loyalty and honest exertion. “My dad didn’t live with this kind of fear,” he has said of contemporary job instability. “The social contract then was, if you worked hard and the company did well, he did well.”
Moore’s image of Flint makes him the ideal poet of the Naderite Left. The city symbolizes the sadness and populist outrage over a world lost to the New Economy and its voracious global corporation. In Roger and Me, the camera lingers on block after block of boarded-up houses, and Moore interviews desperate people, some being evicted from their homes. The fallen landscape is for Moore a symbol of a lost world, in which people like the laboring men of Flint made real stuff—steel, cars, trucks—before being swept away by the flabby and artificial post-industrial economy.
Though not without its appeal, Moore’s vision oozes with more 1950s nostalgia than a Loretta Young fan club. There’s hardly a hint of the mechanical repetition endured by the men and women who bolted thingamajigs to widgets on the assembly line; one of the workers interviewed in Roger and Me says he is happy to escape “the prison” of the GM factory floor, even though he’s taken a cut in salary, but the director does not seem to notice. And while it is true that the UAW was integrated, Flint was hardly an Eden of racial harmony. As Jim Lawrence, a black labor activist at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, describes it, during the 1960s “the union gave foremen a blank check to mistreat blacks and keep them out of the high-rate machine jobs and the skilled trades.”
More misleading still is the director’s melodramatic narrative of corporate downsizing and Flint’s decline. During Moore’s golden childhood, when his father was assembling spark plugs, the United States was the world’s preeminent manufacturer. But by the 1980s, that world was passing—and not because of black-mustachioed CEO villains. For the first time, as other industrial nations recovered fully from World War II, American companies were battling genuine competition from abroad; by 1980, the U.S. commanded only 25 percent of manufacturing output, down from 42 percent in 1962. Especially hard hit were the heavy industries of the rust belt like the automotive companies. As cheap, well-made foreign cars flooded the market, industries introduced ad campaigns to “Buy American.” But people were not easily dissuaded from purchasing Honda Civics when their last Impala had dropped its transmission and its muffler.
Faced with these realities, companies had no choice but to cut costs and improve quality and productivity. They laid off workers, and organized those who were left into teams that had to take responsibility for the quality of their product. It wasn’t just blue-collar heads that rolled. Restructuring, aided by waves of computerization, meant wiping out entire layers of management, a process that was bloody and sometimes deeply unjust: Moore is right that CEOs often compensated themselves royally, while their downsized ex-employees worried about buying shoes for their kids. But the fact is that many industries emerged from the carnage more competitive and better equipped to avoid layoffs in future recessions. Back in 1988 Ross Perot, GM’s most prominent critic before Moore, quipped that dealers complained that “[w]hen you step on the accelerator, a Cadillac needs to move.” Today, as just one example of the success of the nation’s industrial restructuring, the Cadillac is moving again, America’s luxury competitor to the Lexus and BMW—and talk about Japan as Number One stopped years ago.
In Downsize This!, Moore attempted to elaborate on the theme of the downsized economy where Roger and Me left off, but the book’s description of a rust-belt dystopia of pink slips and unemployment checks was out of date way before it hit the bookstores. By 1996, the number of jobs and heft of paychecks in the Midwest had improved markedly. In 1998, the Department of Commerce was writing that “[m]ore flexible, market-oriented companies have generated hundreds of thousands of jobs” in Michigan. A 2001 Michigan Economic Development Corporation report noted that, with the exception of still-depressed Flint, the state’s metropolitan areas saw an increase in personal income between 1989 and 1998, with income rising more than 20 percent in places like Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids.
Stuck in the Walter Reuther past, Moore can make no sense of this. A while back, he was appalled when The Nation asked him to be part of a lecture cruise, “to hold seminars during the day and then dock at Saint Kitts at night!” he hissed derisively, as if it were still the era when plutocrats in tuxedos and women in gowns and diamonds dined on caviar and champagne with the ship’s captain, while workingmen and women scrimped for a week’s vacation at a dank lake bungalow. He seems not to know that plumbers from Milwaukee and secretaries from Akron fill Caribbean cruise ships these days (though probably not those sponsored by The Nation), and that factory workers often sport two cars—and a boat on a trailer—in their driveways. Our economic system has “got to go,” he told Industry Central, before admitting, “Now don’t ask me what to replace it with because I don’t know.” How convenient: he can dwell in his mythical land of Flint and never face the manifest truth that the system that downsized and restructured with such turmoil ultimately improved living standards for millions, while at the same time absorbing hosts of poor immigrants.
Moore is hardly the first to engage in a little nostalgic mythmaking. What makes him unique is his willingness to construct his myths on a scaffolding of calculated untruths. It’s an irony worth savoring. Moore’s chief conceit is that he is the lonely truth teller, seeking out the story no one else is brave enough to touch. He repeatedly blasts the media for ignoring issues that only he, a lowly college dropout, has the courage to bring before a hoodwinked public. “In the beginning there was a free press—well not really, but it sounded good,” the announcer of his TV series, The Awful Truth, would say as the show opened. But the awful truth is that Moore himself is a virtuoso of lying—which is the only way he can give the appearance of truth to his untenable theories.
Let’s begin with his bold-faced lies. In an appearance on Comedy Central’s Daily Show in March 2002, Moore announced that during the period that planes were grounded for two days after the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration allowed a Saudi jet to whisk away bin Ladin family members over FBI objections. As Snopes.com, an Internet site devoted to tracking down urban legends, points out, the planes did pick up bin Ladin family members—on September 18 and 19, days after commercial flights had already begun flying again, and they did so only after the FBI had questioned the departing Saudis. At the college talk, I witnessed another stunner, when Moore announced—without so much as a blip on the polygraph line—that, even though the media report that children in intact families are better off, “every study shows that’s a big lie. Children of single mothers do better in life.”
Then there are lies of omission, a genre that reaches its apogee in the movie Bowling for Columbine. Prompted by the horrific murders by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999, Bowling is Moore’s putative attempt to explore why America endures so much more gun violence than other industrialized countries. It seems to make sense when he interviews the punk singer Marilyn Manson, whose violent lyrics the Columbine killers favored. Yet Moore’s point is not what you’d expect. Objecting that to “scapegoat” Manson for the murders makes as much sense as blaming bowling, since the killers supposedly bowled on the morning of the murders, Moore listens with reverence to Manson’s theory—which happens to be Moore’s own—that Americans are violent because we live in a “culture of fear.” Never mind that the investigators at Columbine have concluded that the killers did not go bowling that morning; the larger point is that Marilyn Manson chose to name himself after Charles Manson, one of America’s most infamous mass murderers. Moore says no word about any of this.
Then there are what we might call artistic lies. Bowling for Columbine opens in a branch of the North Country Bank, with Moore supposedly receiving a free gun in exchange for opening an account. At the end of the scene, he asks a bank employee, “Do you think it’s a little dangerous handing out guns in a bank?” before he runs out with the gun in his hand to the beat of a punk rock tune. It is a dazzling opening, full of energy and Dr. Strangelove absurdity. The only problem: it was staged. Commentators have been on Moore’s case about this, some even campaigning to revoke his Oscar, awarded for a genre supposed to be nonfiction. Anthony Zoubeck, a self-described “former Moore fan” who writes for the Illinois State University paper, the Daily Vidette, contacted Helen Steinman, the customer-service representative seen greeting Moore in the bank. “You can’t just come in here and get a gun,” Steinman explained. Moore “was only supposed to be coming in and pretending to open up a CD. What the girl who opened up the account really told him was that there would be a background check and that he wouldn’t get the gun for six weeks.”
There are slanted, insinuating lies. In another example from Bowling, Moore places a Lockheed Martin executive from Littleton, Colorado, right in front of a mammoth, menacing-looking rocket and asks: “So you don’t think our kids say to themselves, ‘Gee, you know, Dad goes off to the factory every day and, you know, he builds missiles. These are weapons of mass destruction.’ ” He also observes darkly that the company moves its products through the community late at night, when “the children of Columbine are asleep.” But Lockheed Martin does not make weapons in Littleton; it makes weather and communications satellites there. The missile in the film is a refurbished Titan 2 rocket used to launch one such satellite. Moreover, as Zoubeck learned from a Lockheed spokesman, the company moves the rockets at night because they are so large they need a convoy—not, as Moore insinuates, because anyone is trying to hide the awful truth about weather satellites.
And there are the lies of exaggeration—details that after marinating in Moore’s brain swell into squishy conspiracy tales, like one of those dried sponges that swell prodigiously in water. Take what happened during a March 2002 book-tour appearance for Stupid White Men, his 2001 screed against the Bush administration, corrupt corporate power, and (as one chapter title puts it) this “idiot nation.” At 11 PM, Moore was still signing books for a line of fans at a San Diego school, when event organizers announced that the janitors wanted to close up and go home, since the use permit was up. Moore paid little attention and went on signing books, until someone—apparently the janitors—called the police about half an hour later. At this point, according to Kynn Bartlett, a disappointed fan who wrote about the event on his website, two cops walked in with flashlights—Bartlett points out that it was dark in the parking lot outside—and calmly announced: “May I have your attention. The use permit for this event expired at eleven. You have to leave now.” After some grumbling, everyone did.
End of story—until Moore breathlessly posted his version on his website the next day. POLICE RAID, SHUT DOWN MY BOOK SIGNING IN SAN DIEGO. “I am told that we are getting close to the time when we will have to leave the school,” Moore’s fiction begins. “That is not good. Hundreds are still in line.” (Bartlett estimates there were 75.) Moore continues: “The San Diego police [all two of them, Bartlett says] are coming down the aisle, their large flashlights out (the auditorium lights are still on, so we all understand the implied ‘other’ use of the instruments).” People are “visibly frightened,” “bolt[ing]” toward the doors. “I remark that it feels like we’re in some sort of banana republic or East Berlin, secretly meeting so we can have our little book gathering. Sign quick, Mike, here come the police.” There’s not a word about janitors forced to work overtime to please celebrity authors.
So does that mean that Moore’s career as the pied piper of union workers is also a lie? The best that can be said is . . . not entirely. Moore appears to give a good deal of money to unions and charities. But on the road he often stays at the Ritz or Four Seasons, like other movie millionaires. (And he is always on the road: though he loves to describe himself as a slacker, he endured a 47-city book tour for Downsize This, a tour he made the subject of his disastrously narcissistic movie, The Big One, and he hit scores of cities for Stupid White Men.) Former employees have accused him of trying to stop them from joining the Writer’s Guild and, according to interviews conducted by The Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash, of creating working conditions that resemble a “sweatshop” and “indentured servitude.”
In fact, there are plenty of indications that Michael Moore is not a compassionate, big-hearted man dedicated to social justice; he just plays one on TV. When asked by a reporter from the Arcata Eye in 2002 why he wasn’t speaking at independent bookstores rather than at corporate chains, he exploded in a tirade that revealed his willingness to have his principles—in this case, his distrust of corporate power—take a backseat to his personal vengefulness. “You know in my town the small businesses that everyone wanted to protect? They were the people that supported all the right-wing groups,” he ranted. “They were the Republicans in town, they were in Kiwanis, the Chamber of Commerce—people that kept the town all white. The small hardware salesman, the small clothing store sales persons, Jesse the Barber who signed his name three different times on three different petitions to recall me from the school board. Fuck all these small businesses—fuck ’em all. Bring in the chains.”
Not that Moore isn’t capable of spouting a few nasty racial stereotypes himself. “[T]he kind of people who fly in airplanes want someone else to clean up their mess; that’s why they let hijackers take the plane,” said this frequent (first-class) flier late last fall in a one-man show in London. “If the passengers had included black men, those killers, with their puny bodies and unimpressive small knives, would have been crushed by the dudes, who as we all know take no disrespect from anybody. . . . The passengers on the planes on 11 September were scaredy-cats, because they were mostly white.”
Moore’s defense when he is charged with lying or hypocrisy, as he frequently is, sounds more like Richard Nixon than Will Rogers. He keeps voicing suspicion that large, nefarious powers are set on destroying him. A bad review of Roger and Me in Film Comment ?“Film Comment is a publication of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Lincoln Center had received a $5 million gift from GM just prior to publishing the piece trashing Roger and Me. Coincidence? Or just five big ones well spent?” The failure of his only fictional feature film, Canadian Bacon? The distributor, Polygram, buried it, because the company is “owned by Philips of the Netherlands, makers of weapons.” Booing at the Oscars? In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, Moore insisted, “Those boos were amplified . . . as I looked out at the audience no one was booing. You could see the camera desperately trying to find people who were disagreeing with me and they couldn’t.” Criticism in the online magazine Salon? Borders bookstores, one of Salon’s advertisers, was angry that he had been supporting workers who wanted to unionize—oh, and Salon’s editor has a “personal grudge” against him. Oh, and the writer, whom Moore wrongly assumes belongs to Manhattan’s literary elite, is worried because “one of ‘them’ (i.e. me) has moved into the neighborhood. Ooh, scary. A guy who’s supposed to be building Buicks in Flint is now prowling the streets. . . . Somebody circle the wagons! Protect the Starbucks!” As Moore told a Stanford student who asked him to respond to criticism of Stupid White Men, “It’s always personal.” For Moore, at least that much is true.
So how has an embittered, cynical man with a paranoid streak as wide as Montana and a dysfunctional relationship to the truth been able to present himself so successfully as a compassionate, salt-of-the-earth, truth-seeking hero? One answer is that he makes people laugh. Not only does humor make it harder for charges of lying to stick—as Moore asked Lou Dobbs, “How can there be inaccuracy in comedy?”—it also makes people open to what he has to say. “Humor is welcoming,” he told the college audience in May. “People want to listen to you at that point. . . . I don’t come off as Mr. Know-It-All.”
At his best Moore pokes fun at hypocrisy in time-honored fashion. In one of TV Nation’s yippie-style pranks, he threw a “Corp Aid” benefit concert on Wall Street to help “needy corporations.” In another episode, produced during the Gingrich years, he went to Cobb County, Georgia, and opened GOBAC, the Committee to Get Government Off the Backs of Cobb County, whose aim was to send the county’s $4 billion in federal aid back to Washington.
Moore also successfully synthesizes a style that is simultaneously Heartland Joe’s Diner and MTV—or “Leave It to Beaver meets Metallica,” as he put it in a different context. Roger and Me, the film that transformed the documentary from a professorial lecture into hip entertainment, is filled with kitschy Americana—beauty queens, marching bands, Anita Bryant songs. Moore himself speaks slowly in a flat midwestern accent and looks like someone who buys his clothes at KMart, yet he still conveys a Saturday Night Live sensibility. Moore’s hip humor also flatters the snobbery of many of his voguish fans, who ordinarily would have nothing but contempt for blubbery guys in saggy jeans and trucker’s hats.
The other key to Moore’s appeal is his simple Manichaean moral system, the kind that populists traditionally invoke to stir up easy resentments, as with today’s alienated Left. Moore’s world comprises two groups: stupid but powerful white guys in suits, like Roger Smith; and decent but powerless ordinary folks, like Michael Moore. For Moore, this is not some kind of comic-book schema; it is as real as sin itself. Nike CEO Phil Knight is “the face of evil.” President Bush, today’s incarnation of the evil plutocrat in Moore’s mind, is “capable of anything.” “The other side [the rich]—what they believe in,” Moore said in an Internet interview, “is in their own kind of sick Darwinism that says only a few shall survive to have the American dream. And they spend their time trying to enact laws to guarantee that the majority won’t.” Downsizing and welfare reform, which Moore calls “inherently evil,” are both examples of “terrorism” committed by malevolent rich men.
In Bowling for Columbine, Moore dwells on the case of the six-year-old boy who shot and killed a classmate in, coincidentally, Flint, Michigan. The boy got into trouble, Moore informs us, because welfare reform forced his mother, Tamarla Owens, to work two jobs and left her unable to care for her son. Moore does not mention that the boy and his mother were living in a crack house filled with guns, or that social workers had previously cited Tamarla Owens for being “involved with drugs” as well as for child abuse, including an incident where, according to Newhouse News Service, she admitted holding down another of her children so that two male friends could beat him with a belt. Nor does he mention that poverty rates and well-being for black children have improved markedly since the “terrorists” passed welfare reform. But why would he? The test of his moral system is the degree of resentment it inspires, not facts and reason.
Much of Moore’s Manichaeism will be yawningly familiar to anyone accustomed to the weird myopia of the far Left these days. America—or “the corporation known as The United States of America,” as Moore puts it—is inhabited by a race of greedy, uncaring, racist freaks, equipped with what Moore calls “the stupid gene.” Above all, Americans are violent. “Guns don’t kill people; Americans kill people,” Moore has said. Worldwide, people suffer for only one reason: not religious or political tyranny, but the malevolent policies of stupid white American men, descended from paranoid Puritans and covetous Italians.
More bizarre still are Moore’s theories about the attacks of September 11, an event that has plunged the filmmaker into an agony of cognitive dissonance, an ideal breeding ground for the paranoid conspiracy theories that come so naturally to him. In hundreds of letters, interviews, and articles, Moore shows no sign of having read the first thing about al-Qaida, militant Islam, or the Middle East. That hasn’t stopped him from concluding that bin Ladin is no danger. “Ooh . . . he’s everywhere,” he joked at Stanford University, waving his arms bogeyman-like. “Usama bin Ladin—he could be here tonight!” “What if there is no terrorist threat,” he has asked, and the Bush administration simply wanted an excuse to curtail civil liberties while it pursued its corporate interests?
Moore seems to forget his own stoking of fears of terrorism. “There is a rage building in this country, and if you’re like me, you’re scared shitless,” he wrote in Downsize This!. “I believe thousands of Americans are only a few figurative steps away from getting into that Ryder truck,” like the one packed with explosives by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Terrorism by downsized white Americans is one thing: that’s scary. But external threats by foreign terrorists? It just cannot be. “Many families have been devastated tonight. This is just not right,” Moore wrote on September 12, 2001, as the World Trade Center and the bodies of 3,000 lay in smoking ruins. “They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him. Boston, New York, D.C., and the planes’ destination of California—these were the places that voted AGAINST Bush.” In Moore’s Manichaean world, if Republicans alone had died on September 11, they would have had it coming.
Moore’s moral stupidity, so ratcheted up by September 11, is likely to drive his next film, a documentary about the “twin errant sons of different oilmen”—George W. Bush and Usama bin Ladin. The filmmaker is hoping to release the movie, called Fahrenheit 9/11, a few months before the presidential election, to “make sure that Bush isn’t returned.” All signs point to his usual techniques—facts stripped of context and detail, dark insinuations, and outright lies, all leavened by pop music and Strangelovian irony.
Tracing some of Moore’s recent comments, one can piece together the argument—or rather the hazy impressions, for Moore never constructs an argument—that will make up this so-called documentary. Moore will insinuate that the United States created Usama—“or USA-ma, which is more appropriate considering we trained him to be a terrorist.” He will tell us that in the late nineties the oil firm Unocal held a meeting with Taliban representatives in Houston, “when Bush was governor,” to talk about building a pipeline through Afghanistan. He will imply that this project was the reason the U.S. gave humanitarian aid to the Taliban, until “the deal went south,” and “suddenly the Taliban were evil.” And thus, Michael Moore will finally reveal the awful truth that only he is courageous enough to admit about why the United States really went to war with the Taliban.
And you can be sure that the trendy sophisticates in Cannes and Hollywood will once again rise to their feet to honor their mendacious auteur, European intellectuals will bow before his Manichaean simplicities, and the international radical Left will cheer the moral obtuseness of the man who has made his fortune turning the documentary into fiction.
august spies
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that was the worst article i have ever read. wow these people are really scared of the truth. mike must have pushed some important buttons with this film.
red indian
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Roseblossom..............
........in the absence of any other suitable description, other than maybe "fiction" I cant see any other way to describe Moores work. "Bowling for Columbine" looks like and sounds like a "documentary". If this is not the case, then it should have started with the kind of health warning you normaly find on packs of cigarettes.
Part of Moores cynical technique is to claim that "its only a joke, dont take it so seriously" when faced with difficult questions about his work. I have no problem with him taking a certain view on any number of political matters,no matter how extreme or how badly researched or how predjudiced,but it is just very cowardly to then say, "hey chill man its just a joke" when attention is drawn to the fact he is talking out of his arse.
I need more explanation regarding your cryptic comments about "sentimentallity".
The irony for me about Moores view regarding "gun culture" is that in a general sense I AGREE WITH HIM, but he is a very poor advocate for the views he tries to put across. It seems pointless to me to have a debate about the "dishonest" nature of the pro gun lobby and then indulge in all kinds of crude decete and spin youself. All he has done is weaken his own arguments.
........in the absence of any other suitable description, other than maybe "fiction" I cant see any other way to describe Moores work. "Bowling for Columbine" looks like and sounds like a "documentary". If this is not the case, then it should have started with the kind of health warning you normaly find on packs of cigarettes.
Part of Moores cynical technique is to claim that "its only a joke, dont take it so seriously" when faced with difficult questions about his work. I have no problem with him taking a certain view on any number of political matters,no matter how extreme or how badly researched or how predjudiced,but it is just very cowardly to then say, "hey chill man its just a joke" when attention is drawn to the fact he is talking out of his arse.
I need more explanation regarding your cryptic comments about "sentimentallity".
The irony for me about Moores view regarding "gun culture" is that in a general sense I AGREE WITH HIM, but he is a very poor advocate for the views he tries to put across. It seems pointless to me to have a debate about the "dishonest" nature of the pro gun lobby and then indulge in all kinds of crude decete and spin youself. All he has done is weaken his own arguments.
august spies
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Published on Sunday, May 23, 2004 by the New York Times
Michael Moore's Candid Camera
by Frank Rich
But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that? And watch him suffer."
— Barbara Bush on "Good Morning America," March 18, 2003
SHE needn't have worried. Her son wasn't suffering. In one of the several pieces of startling video exhibited for the first time in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," we catch a candid glimpse of President Bush some 36 hours after his mother's breakfast TV interview — minutes before he makes his own prime-time TV address to take the nation to war in Iraq. He is sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. A makeup woman is doing his face. And Mr. Bush is having a high old time. He darts his eyes about and grins, as if he were playing a peek-a-boo game with someone just off-camera. He could be a teenager goofing with his buds to relieve the passing tedium of a haircut.
"In your wildest dreams you couldn't imagine Franklin Roosevelt behaving this way 30 seconds before declaring war, with grave decisions and their consequences at stake," said Mr. Moore in an interview before his new documentary's premiere at Cannes last Monday. "But that may be giving him credit for thinking that the decisions were grave." As we spoke, the consequences of those decisions kept coming. The premiere of "Fahrenheit 9/11" took place as news spread of the assassination of a widely admired post-Saddam Iraqi leader, Ezzedine Salim, blown up by a suicide bomber just a hundred yards from the entrance to America's "safe" headquarters, the Green Zone, in Baghdad.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" will arrive soon enough at your local cineplex — there's lots of money to be made — so discount much of the squabbling en route. Disney hasn't succeeded in censoring Mr. Moore so much as in enhancing his stature as a master provocateur and self-promoter. And the White House, which likewise hasn't a prayer of stopping this film, may yet fan the p.r. flames. "It's so outrageously false, it's not even worth comment," was last week's blustery opening salvo by Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. New York's Daily News reported that Republican officials might even try to use the Federal Election Commission to shut the film down. That would be the best thing to happen to Michael Moore since Charlton Heston granted him an interview.
Whatever you think of Mr. Moore, there's no question he's detonating dynamite here. From a variety of sources — foreign journalists and broadcasters (like Britain's Channel Four), freelancers and sympathetic American TV workers who slipped him illicit video — he supplies war-time pictures that have been largely shielded from our view. Instead of recycling images of the planes hitting the World Trade Center on 9/11 once again, Mr. Moore can revel in extended new close-ups of the president continuing to read "My Pet Goat" to elementary school students in Florida for nearly seven long minutes after learning of the attack. Just when Abu Ghraib and the savage beheading of Nicholas Berg make us think we've seen it all, here is yet another major escalation in the nation-jolting images that have become the battleground for the war about the war.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" is not the movie Moore watchers, fans or foes, were expecting. (If it were, the foes would find it easier to ignore.) When he first announced this project last year after his boorish Oscar-night diatribe against Mr. Bush, he described it as an exposé of the connections between the Bush and bin Laden dynasties. But that story has been so strenuously told elsewhere — most notably in Craig Unger's best seller, "House of Bush, House of Saud" — that it's no longer news. Mr. Moore settles for a brisk recap in the first of his film's two hours. And, predictably, he stirs it into an over-the-top, at times tendentious replay of a Bush hater's greatest hits: Katherine Harris, the Supreme Court, Harken Energy, AWOL in Alabama, the Carlyle Group, Halliburton, the lazy Crawford vacation of August 2001, the Patriot Act. But then the movie veers off in another direction entirely. Mr. Moore takes the same hairpin turn the country has over the past 14 months and crash-lands into the gripping story that is unfolding in real time right now.
Wasn't it just weeks ago that we were debating whether we should see the coffins of the American dead and whether Ted Koppel should read their names on "Nightline"? In "Fahrenheit 9/11," we see the actual dying, of American troops and Iraqi civilians alike, with all the ripped flesh and spilled guts that the violence of war entails. (If Steven Spielberg can simulate World War II carnage in "Saving Private Ryan," it's hard to argue that Mr. Moore should shy away from the reality in a present-day war.) We also see some of the 4,000-plus American casualties: those troops hidden away in clinics at Walter Reed and at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in Fort Campbell, Ky., where they try to cope with nerve damage and multiple severed limbs. They are not silent. They talk about their pain and their morphine, and they talk about betrayal. "I was a Republican for quite a few years," one soldier says with an almost innocent air of bafflement, "and for some reason they conduct business in a very dishonest way."
Of course, Mr. Moore is being selective in what he chooses to include in his movie; he's a polemicist, not a journalist. But he implicitly raises the issue that much of what we've seen elsewhere during this war, often under the label of "news," has been just as subjectively edited. Perhaps the most damning sequence in "Fahrenheit 9/11" is the one showing American troops as they ridicule hooded detainees in a holding pen near Samara, Iraq, in December 2003. A male soldier touches the erection of a prisoner lying on a stretcher underneath a blanket, an intimation of the sexual humiliations that were happening at Abu Ghraib at that same time. Besides adding further corroboration to Seymour Hersh's report that the top command has sanctioned a culture of abuse not confined to a single prison or a single company or seven guards, this video raises another question: why didn't we see any of this on American TV before "60 Minutes II"?
Don Van Natta Jr. of The New York Times reported in March 2003 that we were using hooding and other inhumane techniques at C.I.A. interrogation centers in Afghanistan and elsewhere. CNN reported on Jan. 20, after the Army quietly announced its criminal investigation into prison abuses, that "U.S. soldiers reportedly posed for photographs with partially unclothed Iraqi prisoners." And there the matter stood for months, even though, as we know now, soldiers' relatives with knowledge of these incidents were repeatedly trying to alert Congress and news organizations to the full panorama of the story.
Mr. Moore says he obtained his video from an independent foreign journalist embedded with the Americans. "We've had this footage in our possession for two months," he says. "I saw it before any of the Abu Ghraib news broke. I think it's pretty embarrassing that a guy like me with a high school education and with no training in journalism can do this. What the hell is going on here? It's pathetic."
We already know that politicians in denial will dismiss the abuse sequence in Mr. Moore's film as mere partisanship. Someone will surely echo Senator James Inhofe's Abu Ghraib complaint that "humanitarian do-gooders" looking for human rights violations are maligning "our troops, our heroes" as they continue to fight and die. But Senator Inhofe and his colleagues might ask how much they are honoring soldiers who are overextended, undermanned and bereft of a coherent plan in Iraq. Last weekend The Los Angeles Times reported that for the first time three Army divisions, more than a third of its combat troops, are so depleted of equipment and skills that they are classified "unfit to fight." In contrast to Washington's neglect, much of "Fahrenheit 9/11" turns out to be a patriotic celebration of the heroic American troops who have been fighting and dying under these and other deplorable conditions since President Bush's declaration of war.
In particular, the movie's second hour is carried by the wrenching story of Lila Lipscomb, a flag-waving, self-described "conservative Democrat" from Mr. Moore's hometown of Flint, Mich., whose son, Sgt. Michael Pedersen, was killed in Iraq. We watch Mrs. Lipscomb, who by her own account "always hated" antiwar protesters, come undone with grief and rage. As her extended family gathers around her in the living room, she clutches her son's last letter home and reads it aloud, her shaking voice and hand contrasting with his precise handwriting on lined notebook paper. A good son, Sergeant Pedersen thanks his mother for sending "the bible and books and candy," but not before writing of the president: "He got us out here for nothing whatsoever. I am so furious right now, Mama."
By this point, Mr. Moore's jokes, some of them sub-par retreads of Jon Stewart's riffs about the coalition of the willing, have vanished from "Fahrenheit 9/11." So, pretty much, has Michael Moore himself. He told me that Harvey Weinstein of Miramax had wanted him to insert more of himself into the film — "you're the star they're coming to see" — but for once he exercised self-control, getting out of the way of a story that is bigger than he is. "It doesn't need me running around with my exclamation points," he said. He can't resist underlining one moral at the end, but by then the audience, crushed by the needlessness of Mrs. Lipscomb's loss, is ready to listen. Speaking of America's volunteer army, Mr. Moore concludes: "They serve so that we don't have to. They offer to give up their lives so that we can be free. It is, remarkably, their gift to us. And all they ask for in return is that we never send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. Will they ever trust us again?"
"Fahrenheit 9/11" doesn't push any Vietnam analogies, but you may find one in a montage at the start, in which a number of administration luminaries (Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Powell) in addition to the president are seen being made up for TV appearances. It's reminiscent of Richard Avedon's photographic portrait of the Mission Council, the American diplomats and military figures running the war in Saigon in 1971. But at least those subjects were dignified. In Mr. Moore's candid-camera portraits, a particularly unappetizing spectacle is provided by Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of both the administration's Iraqi fixation and its doctrine of "preventive" war. We watch him stick his comb in his mouth until it is wet with spit, after which he runs it through his hair. This is not the image we usually see of the deputy defense secretary, who has been ritualistically presented in the press as the most refined of intellectuals — a guy with, as Barbara Bush would have it, a beautiful mind.
Like Mrs. Bush, Mr. Wolfowitz hasn't let that mind be overly sullied by body bags and such — to the point where he underestimated the number of American deaths in Iraq by more than 200 in public last month. No one would ever accuse Michael Moore of having a beautiful mind. Subtleties and fine distinctions are not his thing. That matters very little, it turns out, when you have a story this ugly and this powerful to tell.
Michael Moore's Candid Camera
by Frank Rich
But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that? And watch him suffer."
— Barbara Bush on "Good Morning America," March 18, 2003
SHE needn't have worried. Her son wasn't suffering. In one of the several pieces of startling video exhibited for the first time in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," we catch a candid glimpse of President Bush some 36 hours after his mother's breakfast TV interview — minutes before he makes his own prime-time TV address to take the nation to war in Iraq. He is sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. A makeup woman is doing his face. And Mr. Bush is having a high old time. He darts his eyes about and grins, as if he were playing a peek-a-boo game with someone just off-camera. He could be a teenager goofing with his buds to relieve the passing tedium of a haircut.
"In your wildest dreams you couldn't imagine Franklin Roosevelt behaving this way 30 seconds before declaring war, with grave decisions and their consequences at stake," said Mr. Moore in an interview before his new documentary's premiere at Cannes last Monday. "But that may be giving him credit for thinking that the decisions were grave." As we spoke, the consequences of those decisions kept coming. The premiere of "Fahrenheit 9/11" took place as news spread of the assassination of a widely admired post-Saddam Iraqi leader, Ezzedine Salim, blown up by a suicide bomber just a hundred yards from the entrance to America's "safe" headquarters, the Green Zone, in Baghdad.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" will arrive soon enough at your local cineplex — there's lots of money to be made — so discount much of the squabbling en route. Disney hasn't succeeded in censoring Mr. Moore so much as in enhancing his stature as a master provocateur and self-promoter. And the White House, which likewise hasn't a prayer of stopping this film, may yet fan the p.r. flames. "It's so outrageously false, it's not even worth comment," was last week's blustery opening salvo by Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. New York's Daily News reported that Republican officials might even try to use the Federal Election Commission to shut the film down. That would be the best thing to happen to Michael Moore since Charlton Heston granted him an interview.
Whatever you think of Mr. Moore, there's no question he's detonating dynamite here. From a variety of sources — foreign journalists and broadcasters (like Britain's Channel Four), freelancers and sympathetic American TV workers who slipped him illicit video — he supplies war-time pictures that have been largely shielded from our view. Instead of recycling images of the planes hitting the World Trade Center on 9/11 once again, Mr. Moore can revel in extended new close-ups of the president continuing to read "My Pet Goat" to elementary school students in Florida for nearly seven long minutes after learning of the attack. Just when Abu Ghraib and the savage beheading of Nicholas Berg make us think we've seen it all, here is yet another major escalation in the nation-jolting images that have become the battleground for the war about the war.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" is not the movie Moore watchers, fans or foes, were expecting. (If it were, the foes would find it easier to ignore.) When he first announced this project last year after his boorish Oscar-night diatribe against Mr. Bush, he described it as an exposé of the connections between the Bush and bin Laden dynasties. But that story has been so strenuously told elsewhere — most notably in Craig Unger's best seller, "House of Bush, House of Saud" — that it's no longer news. Mr. Moore settles for a brisk recap in the first of his film's two hours. And, predictably, he stirs it into an over-the-top, at times tendentious replay of a Bush hater's greatest hits: Katherine Harris, the Supreme Court, Harken Energy, AWOL in Alabama, the Carlyle Group, Halliburton, the lazy Crawford vacation of August 2001, the Patriot Act. But then the movie veers off in another direction entirely. Mr. Moore takes the same hairpin turn the country has over the past 14 months and crash-lands into the gripping story that is unfolding in real time right now.
Wasn't it just weeks ago that we were debating whether we should see the coffins of the American dead and whether Ted Koppel should read their names on "Nightline"? In "Fahrenheit 9/11," we see the actual dying, of American troops and Iraqi civilians alike, with all the ripped flesh and spilled guts that the violence of war entails. (If Steven Spielberg can simulate World War II carnage in "Saving Private Ryan," it's hard to argue that Mr. Moore should shy away from the reality in a present-day war.) We also see some of the 4,000-plus American casualties: those troops hidden away in clinics at Walter Reed and at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in Fort Campbell, Ky., where they try to cope with nerve damage and multiple severed limbs. They are not silent. They talk about their pain and their morphine, and they talk about betrayal. "I was a Republican for quite a few years," one soldier says with an almost innocent air of bafflement, "and for some reason they conduct business in a very dishonest way."
Of course, Mr. Moore is being selective in what he chooses to include in his movie; he's a polemicist, not a journalist. But he implicitly raises the issue that much of what we've seen elsewhere during this war, often under the label of "news," has been just as subjectively edited. Perhaps the most damning sequence in "Fahrenheit 9/11" is the one showing American troops as they ridicule hooded detainees in a holding pen near Samara, Iraq, in December 2003. A male soldier touches the erection of a prisoner lying on a stretcher underneath a blanket, an intimation of the sexual humiliations that were happening at Abu Ghraib at that same time. Besides adding further corroboration to Seymour Hersh's report that the top command has sanctioned a culture of abuse not confined to a single prison or a single company or seven guards, this video raises another question: why didn't we see any of this on American TV before "60 Minutes II"?
Don Van Natta Jr. of The New York Times reported in March 2003 that we were using hooding and other inhumane techniques at C.I.A. interrogation centers in Afghanistan and elsewhere. CNN reported on Jan. 20, after the Army quietly announced its criminal investigation into prison abuses, that "U.S. soldiers reportedly posed for photographs with partially unclothed Iraqi prisoners." And there the matter stood for months, even though, as we know now, soldiers' relatives with knowledge of these incidents were repeatedly trying to alert Congress and news organizations to the full panorama of the story.
Mr. Moore says he obtained his video from an independent foreign journalist embedded with the Americans. "We've had this footage in our possession for two months," he says. "I saw it before any of the Abu Ghraib news broke. I think it's pretty embarrassing that a guy like me with a high school education and with no training in journalism can do this. What the hell is going on here? It's pathetic."
We already know that politicians in denial will dismiss the abuse sequence in Mr. Moore's film as mere partisanship. Someone will surely echo Senator James Inhofe's Abu Ghraib complaint that "humanitarian do-gooders" looking for human rights violations are maligning "our troops, our heroes" as they continue to fight and die. But Senator Inhofe and his colleagues might ask how much they are honoring soldiers who are overextended, undermanned and bereft of a coherent plan in Iraq. Last weekend The Los Angeles Times reported that for the first time three Army divisions, more than a third of its combat troops, are so depleted of equipment and skills that they are classified "unfit to fight." In contrast to Washington's neglect, much of "Fahrenheit 9/11" turns out to be a patriotic celebration of the heroic American troops who have been fighting and dying under these and other deplorable conditions since President Bush's declaration of war.
In particular, the movie's second hour is carried by the wrenching story of Lila Lipscomb, a flag-waving, self-described "conservative Democrat" from Mr. Moore's hometown of Flint, Mich., whose son, Sgt. Michael Pedersen, was killed in Iraq. We watch Mrs. Lipscomb, who by her own account "always hated" antiwar protesters, come undone with grief and rage. As her extended family gathers around her in the living room, she clutches her son's last letter home and reads it aloud, her shaking voice and hand contrasting with his precise handwriting on lined notebook paper. A good son, Sergeant Pedersen thanks his mother for sending "the bible and books and candy," but not before writing of the president: "He got us out here for nothing whatsoever. I am so furious right now, Mama."
By this point, Mr. Moore's jokes, some of them sub-par retreads of Jon Stewart's riffs about the coalition of the willing, have vanished from "Fahrenheit 9/11." So, pretty much, has Michael Moore himself. He told me that Harvey Weinstein of Miramax had wanted him to insert more of himself into the film — "you're the star they're coming to see" — but for once he exercised self-control, getting out of the way of a story that is bigger than he is. "It doesn't need me running around with my exclamation points," he said. He can't resist underlining one moral at the end, but by then the audience, crushed by the needlessness of Mrs. Lipscomb's loss, is ready to listen. Speaking of America's volunteer army, Mr. Moore concludes: "They serve so that we don't have to. They offer to give up their lives so that we can be free. It is, remarkably, their gift to us. And all they ask for in return is that we never send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. Will they ever trust us again?"
"Fahrenheit 9/11" doesn't push any Vietnam analogies, but you may find one in a montage at the start, in which a number of administration luminaries (Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Powell) in addition to the president are seen being made up for TV appearances. It's reminiscent of Richard Avedon's photographic portrait of the Mission Council, the American diplomats and military figures running the war in Saigon in 1971. But at least those subjects were dignified. In Mr. Moore's candid-camera portraits, a particularly unappetizing spectacle is provided by Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of both the administration's Iraqi fixation and its doctrine of "preventive" war. We watch him stick his comb in his mouth until it is wet with spit, after which he runs it through his hair. This is not the image we usually see of the deputy defense secretary, who has been ritualistically presented in the press as the most refined of intellectuals — a guy with, as Barbara Bush would have it, a beautiful mind.
Like Mrs. Bush, Mr. Wolfowitz hasn't let that mind be overly sullied by body bags and such — to the point where he underestimated the number of American deaths in Iraq by more than 200 in public last month. No one would ever accuse Michael Moore of having a beautiful mind. Subtleties and fine distinctions are not his thing. That matters very little, it turns out, when you have a story this ugly and this powerful to tell.
Roseblossom
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LOL I see your point, but here's the difference;MikeMike said:
Michael Moore works at exposing the self-serving arrogant cretins who are making life harder for the rest of the world.
Those self-serving arrogant cretins are ticked off at Moore for exposing them.
Sure, his work has flaws, but his heart is in the right place.
And as BOFH said, "Does any of this make the issues, or indeed his points on them, invalid? No, absolutely not."
~Rose~
MrMacphisto
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MikeMike said:
My my... you are a formidable one... I'll take back my mentioning of your name. You're atheist, eh? I suppose we can relate somewhat on that then, although I'm agnostic myself. Libertarian... interesting... I suppose we'd agree on most social issues then.
Projection.... perhaps, a smattering of psychological background, I detect? Good, we're getting somewhere. Sorry if my last response was "polemic." The fact that you even know what that word means is a good indication. I'll tell you what, I'll refrain from my polemics when discussing things with you because most of my angst was really aimed at Buggs.
Anyway, back to the present subject...
Roseblossom did get you with your sources, you must admit... you should have seen that one coming with a URL like: www.michaelmoorehatesamerica.com
Perhaps, it's my turn to debunk your sources.... Kay S. Hymowitz... Hmmm... City Journal... www.city-journal.org
At first glance, this looked like a viable news source with a progressive outlook on things. I'm not necessarily meaning liberal when I say progressive, I just mean looking toward the future and providing practical solutions to current problems. There are some good articles on this site, but when I went over to the Politics section, it seemed a bit strange. I was expecting viewpoints from both sides of the political fence, but every last article in that section is pro-conservative. Coincidence? I think not.... Here are some examples.... I couldn't find one by Kay, but let's look at one by Mr. William J. Stern: http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_1_sndgs08.html
It's titled: The New York Democrats' Real Problem. Now, I'm sure with a title like that, Mr. Stern couldn't possibly be Republican.
Here's another one: http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_2_illiberal.html
It's titled: Illiberal Liberalism. It talks about the name-calling that liberals engage in at length against their conservative opponents. There couldn't possibly be a conservative equivalent to this, now could there be?
Now when I got to this one: http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_1_solving_president_bushs.html , I was thinking... hmmm... maybe it's not so biased after all. It's titled: Solving President Bush's Urban Problem. However, it turns out to be a favorable explanation of compassionate conservatism and a denunciation of liberalism. But hey, Myron Magnet does say the following: "From Richard Nixon on down, the policy of Republican presidents toward the poor, especially the minority poor, has been, in Senator Moynihan's indelible phrase, benign neglect." Well well... I never would've guessed, but that "Leave No Rich White Kid Behind" program seemed a little suspicious....
I'm glad you provide sources, Mike, but try to find the type that BOFH666 usually uses. You know, the unbiased ones....
August, I must compliment you on that last post It was as unbiased an article as I have ever seen you use before. Thought provoking indeed. Well done.
That being said. I still dont have much to do with Moore and will not give him a cent to see what may very well be a movie not to miss.
My reasoning is not the material covered, but the real reasons for it. he is not out to shake the world up and propose solutions. He is out ONLY to make a buck. All of the contraversy over this was started by moore himself, only to get people to go and see it so he can make a quick buck.
I dont object to people making money. I object to peple who do so on the pretense of "making others aware" when in reality he couldnt care less. I dont object to people speaking out against the administration, I object to them doing so while accepting an award from their peers for a piece of work. Entirely out of line.
Ray
It was as unbiased an article as I have ever seen you use before. Thought provoking indeed. Well done.That being said. I still dont have much to do with Moore and will not give him a cent to see what may very well be a movie not to miss.
My reasoning is not the material covered, but the real reasons for it. he is not out to shake the world up and propose solutions. He is out ONLY to make a buck. All of the contraversy over this was started by moore himself, only to get people to go and see it so he can make a quick buck.
I dont object to people making money. I object to peple who do so on the pretense of "making others aware" when in reality he couldnt care less. I dont object to people speaking out against the administration, I object to them doing so while accepting an award from their peers for a piece of work. Entirely out of line.
Ray
Mike, sorry it took so long to get back to you on this, been busy as hell around here.
Okay, we're getting off the point here slightly as this is all Bowling for Columbine stuff rather than Fahrenheit 9/11 (sorry Mimi, damn this is the second time in a week I've apologized for something going off topic that you posted)
Some valid points in that article, but a lot of problems too. I won't try and break the whole thing down, but here's what jumps out at me while I'm reading through.
And what's wrong with that, far better than having a graduating speech used as, oh lets say, a platform to attack political opponents from for example.
This is just my opinion of course, but if his employers settled with him (and for a reasonable sum too) that suggests that he in fact had a case?
Nothing to do with Moore, but I just couldn't stop laughing when I read this. Cadillac may compete with BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar and Lexus on price but it's years behind on everything else. Japan is still the world powerhouse when it comes to automobiles, their long-term reliability is peerless, they're constantly coming up with new approaches to old problems that actually work, and the cars themselves are (almost) always a good blend of practicality, performance and driver enjoyment. Ford is in financial difficulties of varying severity depending on who you talk to (which is a shame as they make decent cars for the most part), GM just makes very mediocre cars and Chrysler are even worse. Toyota are steaming up to take Ford's place in the manufacturing standings and Honda's sales volumes are damn impressive too. I haven't got up-to-date statistics but I believe that, in 2002, five of the top ten cars sold in America were Japanese. Remember though that this is a British attitude to motoring and motorcars which is a little... different to the American approach (unsurprisingly as we have very different motoring environments).
This one annoys the HELL out of me, as it does every time I hear someone blaming music / /television / films / computer games for the latest tragedy. Manson's name is part of the stage gimmick, and I really don't see how having a surname the same as Charles Manson makes him evil. Heck, how many Manson's are there in the US anyway? Lets face it, every single time you hear about something like this the blame eventually goes back to one place: parents who had no idea what their kids were doing and had no interest in their activities. If 'satanic' music really did cause these sorts of incidents then the instant Black Sabbath hit the entire world would have been plunged into darkness overnight. Frankly Manson's interview in Bowling for Columbine is one of the most impressive bits of the film to my eyes and shows a man who's actually put some thought into this issue instead of reacting.
Not defending this but surely whoever agreed to this filming could see how this was going to play on film? Saying now "well that's not how it REALLY happens" strikes me as a little foolish, after all they did agree to hand over the gun in the bank, if that never happens in real life then why agree to do so on film? And in fact, if you REALLY go for the literal interpretation of Moore's words here, he's about right. They did indeed let him open an account and get a gun in the bank. Okay, no normal customer without a film crew could have done so but was that actually stated? As I said, not defending this approach to film making just pointing this out.
Again, same problem as above. The Martin Lockheed rep had the chance to answer the question, all he had to do was say "we build weather satellites here" and there's no issue. He failed to do so and as a PR guy he really should have done a much better job. In all honesty it always seems to me that those that object REALLY should have done a better job all round while in front of the camera. It's not as if Moore is a close-kept secret is it, they know what they're in for in the same way that appearing on certain chat shows in the state (good ol' Rush springs immediately to mind) means you're going to get grilled about certain things and in a certain way and you damn well better be ready for it.
I'm probably missing something here but how does where he stays while on the road affect his support of unions? And I can't help but notice they gloss over his charity donations as quickly as possible without the detail present elsewhere in the article.
Umm, that's a pretty sweeping generalization isn't it? And if Micheal Moore is merely a passing trend, as suggested by "voguish fans", then how is it he's still around over ten years after making his first film with a long, and mostly successful, career behind him?
That'd be a simple moral system that divides opinion into two camps, right? Sort of like "you're either with us, or against us"?
Yes, but as the vast majority of political commentators apparently haven't read up on the subject either, preferring to recite phrases from the "handy dandy five minute guide to terrorism" instead, that's surely fair?
Unfair, in context of what he was saying he was right (that IF this was done to get back at Bush, they hit the wrong targets, though I don't agree with that statement personally) and this is taking his words out of context. Besides which, let's be fair here, I think anything that was said in the immediate aftermath of September 11th is likely to be little off base no matter who said it or what they said.
No need to insinuate that as it's the truth, at least up to a point with America encouraging and supporting the Jihad against Russia in Afghanistan. Wasn't it the presence of US forces in Saudi Arabia that sparked the change in targets? And no, that's not a rhetorical question, while I know it's ONE reason for this mess we find ourselves in, I do not know that it's the MAIN reason, so if anyone wants to correct me go ahead. Just provide facts not rants please.
Except for one small thing, the Palm D'or was awarded by an international jury headed by Quentin Tarantino who has gone on record as saying, and I quote:
"I knew all this politics crap would be brought up, We all agreed that Fahrenheit 9/11 was the best movie of the competition."
In actuality, we Europeans tend to like this sort of film as it provides a starting point for discussion. I know of very few people who would watch something like this, shake their heads in disgust, and start repeating the points raised verbatim, and even those that did would find themselves being asked WHY they held that view. By and large we tend not to like the simple view of the world, it's why the whole "with us or against us" policy doesn't really work too well over here.
So, for now, I'd suggest that all those leaping to condemn the movie wait and see what it's actually like before passing judgment. By all means, take the points raised, go and research them, and provide calm, rational rebuttals to them if you find anything wrong. But let's not start jumping about complaining about falsehoods before the arguments are made.
Okay, we're getting off the point here slightly as this is all Bowling for Columbine stuff rather than Fahrenheit 9/11 (sorry Mimi, damn this is the second time in a week I've apologized for something going off topic that you posted)
Some valid points in that article, but a lot of problems too. I won't try and break the whole thing down, but here's what jumps out at me while I'm reading through.
And what's wrong with that, far better than having a graduating speech used as, oh lets say, a platform to attack political opponents from for example.
This is just my opinion of course, but if his employers settled with him (and for a reasonable sum too) that suggests that he in fact had a case?
Nothing to do with Moore, but I just couldn't stop laughing when I read this. Cadillac may compete with BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar and Lexus on price but it's years behind on everything else. Japan is still the world powerhouse when it comes to automobiles, their long-term reliability is peerless, they're constantly coming up with new approaches to old problems that actually work, and the cars themselves are (almost) always a good blend of practicality, performance and driver enjoyment. Ford is in financial difficulties of varying severity depending on who you talk to (which is a shame as they make decent cars for the most part), GM just makes very mediocre cars and Chrysler are even worse. Toyota are steaming up to take Ford's place in the manufacturing standings and Honda's sales volumes are damn impressive too. I haven't got up-to-date statistics but I believe that, in 2002, five of the top ten cars sold in America were Japanese. Remember though that this is a British attitude to motoring and motorcars which is a little... different to the American approach (unsurprisingly as we have very different motoring environments).
This one annoys the HELL out of me, as it does every time I hear someone blaming music / /television / films / computer games for the latest tragedy. Manson's name is part of the stage gimmick, and I really don't see how having a surname the same as Charles Manson makes him evil. Heck, how many Manson's are there in the US anyway? Lets face it, every single time you hear about something like this the blame eventually goes back to one place: parents who had no idea what their kids were doing and had no interest in their activities. If 'satanic' music really did cause these sorts of incidents then the instant Black Sabbath hit the entire world would have been plunged into darkness overnight. Frankly Manson's interview in Bowling for Columbine is one of the most impressive bits of the film to my eyes and shows a man who's actually put some thought into this issue instead of reacting.
Not defending this but surely whoever agreed to this filming could see how this was going to play on film? Saying now "well that's not how it REALLY happens" strikes me as a little foolish, after all they did agree to hand over the gun in the bank, if that never happens in real life then why agree to do so on film? And in fact, if you REALLY go for the literal interpretation of Moore's words here, he's about right. They did indeed let him open an account and get a gun in the bank. Okay, no normal customer without a film crew could have done so but was that actually stated? As I said, not defending this approach to film making just pointing this out.
Again, same problem as above. The Martin Lockheed rep had the chance to answer the question, all he had to do was say "we build weather satellites here" and there's no issue. He failed to do so and as a PR guy he really should have done a much better job. In all honesty it always seems to me that those that object REALLY should have done a better job all round while in front of the camera. It's not as if Moore is a close-kept secret is it, they know what they're in for in the same way that appearing on certain chat shows in the state (good ol' Rush springs immediately to mind) means you're going to get grilled about certain things and in a certain way and you damn well better be ready for it.
I'm probably missing something here but how does where he stays while on the road affect his support of unions? And I can't help but notice they gloss over his charity donations as quickly as possible without the detail present elsewhere in the article.
Umm, that's a pretty sweeping generalization isn't it? And if Micheal Moore is merely a passing trend, as suggested by "voguish fans", then how is it he's still around over ten years after making his first film with a long, and mostly successful, career behind him?
That'd be a simple moral system that divides opinion into two camps, right? Sort of like "you're either with us, or against us"?
Yes, but as the vast majority of political commentators apparently haven't read up on the subject either, preferring to recite phrases from the "handy dandy five minute guide to terrorism" instead, that's surely fair?
Unfair, in context of what he was saying he was right (that IF this was done to get back at Bush, they hit the wrong targets, though I don't agree with that statement personally) and this is taking his words out of context. Besides which, let's be fair here, I think anything that was said in the immediate aftermath of September 11th is likely to be little off base no matter who said it or what they said.
No need to insinuate that as it's the truth, at least up to a point with America encouraging and supporting the Jihad against Russia in Afghanistan. Wasn't it the presence of US forces in Saudi Arabia that sparked the change in targets? And no, that's not a rhetorical question, while I know it's ONE reason for this mess we find ourselves in, I do not know that it's the MAIN reason, so if anyone wants to correct me go ahead. Just provide facts not rants please.
Except for one small thing, the Palm D'or was awarded by an international jury headed by Quentin Tarantino who has gone on record as saying, and I quote:
"I knew all this politics crap would be brought up, We all agreed that Fahrenheit 9/11 was the best movie of the competition."
In actuality, we Europeans tend to like this sort of film as it provides a starting point for discussion. I know of very few people who would watch something like this, shake their heads in disgust, and start repeating the points raised verbatim, and even those that did would find themselves being asked WHY they held that view. By and large we tend not to like the simple view of the world, it's why the whole "with us or against us" policy doesn't really work too well over here.
So, for now, I'd suggest that all those leaping to condemn the movie wait and see what it's actually like before passing judgment. By all means, take the points raised, go and research them, and provide calm, rational rebuttals to them if you find anything wrong. But let's not start jumping about complaining about falsehoods before the arguments are made.
venray1 said:
Umm, not to sound spectacularly pedantic or anything, but that seems like kind of a blanket statement. If we apply that premise to other sources, well, it becomes a much less informed world. After all, using that premise we would have to object (and not watch/read/view/pay attention to) the following:
Any dedicated news channel that sells advertising space or accepts sponsorship, or indeed receives any financial benefit from increased viewer figures.
Any televised news program carried on a channel that sells advertising space or accepts sponsorship, or indeed receives any financial benefit from increased viewer figures for the time slot occupied by that program.
Any and all newspapers that charge more than production and distribution costs for their product AND carry any opinion piece / editorial or have a detectable bias.
Any media outlet, regardless of specific output, that receives funding from any party with any interest in any aspect of that output.
Any party political broadcasts
Any marketing campaign that uses unrealistic portrayals of the benefits of a product. Umm, actually, might as well make that any marketing campaign, period.
And the list goes on and on and on. Face it, money is what makes the world go round and virtually ALL news outlets have some vested interest in informing people of their view of the world. To misquote Fox News: "We report, you concur".If any of us want to get an accurate picture of what is going on in the world, we need to take multiple sources from different viewpoints in order to form our own conclusions. Saying you won't pay to view a particular source simply because that source is making money under false pretenses is only applicable if you apply that standard to ALL information sources.
Oh, which reminds me:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
Well, again, I find that a curious standard. First, and perhaps most important, the award in question was given to a work that DID criticize the US administration (the Clinton administration as it happens) so in the context of the work an argument can be made that this statement was appropriate. Leaving that aside for a moment, using this standard we would have to object to all those who receive an award from their peers and thank God for their success. After all this is not a religious ceremony and there is no guarantee (in fact it is extremely unlikely) that all of the peers in attendance have the same religious beliefs. Or for that matter, anyone who used such a platform to support charity causes or talk about anything not directly related to thanking the people that gave them the award should also be considered "out of line".
