Hawks have only themselves to blame for Michael Moore's success
From: Psalm 110 (Melchizedek_at_USA.com)
Date: 07/05/04
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Date: 5 Jul 2004 12:52:26 -0700
The hawks have only themselves to blame for Michael Moore's success
By Matthew d'Ancona
The morning after I saw Michael Moore's new film, Fahrenheit 9/11, I
visited my local book shop to inspect the titles it stocked by the
director himself and by other writers implacably hostile to George W
Bush. On the counter was a pile of Moore's most recent bestseller,
Dude, Where's My Country?. And his 2001 polemic, Stupid White Men,
which has sold 350,000 copies in Britain alone, was also prominently
displayed.
In the same genre, though not by Moore, the shop offered such gems as
The Bush-Hater's Handbook, Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species, Ugly
Americans, What's Wrong with America?, and Amerika Psycho: Behind
Uncle Sam's Mask of Sanity. According to the assistant who served me,
there are now so many of these instant America-bashing books that the
store simply cannot stock them all. When I told her that Moore's new
film was compelling cinema and had to be seen, whether or not you
agreed with its politics, she snorted with derision: "You just wonder
how many people in the States will get to see it, since they live in a
country under censorship."
Now, one angry bookseller does not a political trend make. But when
you bear in mind that Stupid White Men has already sold more than
three million copies worldwide and that Fahrenheit 9/11 took $24
million at the US box office last weekend - the first documentary ever
to top the American film charts in its opening days - it becomes less
easy to dismiss the fat man in the baseball cap as a marginal figure.
Indeed, it looks to me as though Michael Moore is pretty much at the
centre of things these days. The subculture has invaded the
mainstream: it is an army of occupation.
As I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 - a ferocious attack on Bush's record
since September 11 and a clarion-call for "regime change" in
Washington - it struck me that Michael Moore's critics are missing the
point by directing their wrath at the dodgy detail of his work.
Certainly, some scenes in the film are downright offensive. In
particular, the slow-motion images of an allegedly idyllic Iraq before
last year's liberation campaign - children smiling, kites flying - are
an insult to the one million or more Iraqis who died as a consequence
of Saddam Hussein's policies.
Other sequences are plain daft. The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001,
Moore insinuates, was the result of a wicked plot by big business to
build a natural gas pipeline across that benighted country - in spite
of the fact that the pipeline scheme was ditched in 1998. As part of
its bid to portray the Bush family as hopelessly beholden to the
Saudis, the film also claims that the White House improperly
authorised the flights from America of bin Laden family members
immediately after the September 11 attacks. But guess what? The
flights were personally cleared by none other than Richard A Clarke,
Mr Bush's former counter-terrorism chief, who has since written his
own book attacking the President's wartime record and has consequently
become something of a hero to the Moore-istas.
Yet the forensic demolition of Fahrenheit 9/11 which has already been
carried out in the American press has apparently done nothing to
diminish Moore's appeal or his popularity around the world. He has
himself said that the film is not meant to be fair. Nor is it aimed
principally at the liberal elite, however much they may endorse its
conclusions: Fahrenheit 9/11 is a movie for viewers reared on MTV and
video games, not on arthouse cinema. This is popcorn politics,
militancy for the multiplexes. And, as such, it is extremely
successful. Moore uses all the techniques of modern mass entertainment
with supreme skill: comic intercutting, brilliantly-selected music,
shocking images of civilian casualties, a laconic voiceover
interspersed with scenes of untrammelled emotion. I confess that I
found it gripping.
Unlike Moore, I supported the destruction of the Taliban regime and
the liberation of Iraq. But I also have to acknowledge the aplomb of
his campaign, and the cunning of his strategy. He has not only touched
a nerve; he has filled a vacuum. He has identified the feebleness of
the campaign to persuade the public that the war on terror is
necessary and exploited that weakness to the hilt.
In the process, he has done much to nurture the delusion that the war
is simply the folly of a deranged President and his greedy acolytes,
rather than a deeply-rooted global crisis and the defining challenge
of our time. At precisely the moment that the horizons of Western
electorates should be broadening, they are narrowing dangerously. The
debate has grown perilously introspective: on both sides of the
Atlantic, the war on terror is in danger of becoming just another
sub-category of domestic politics.
Moore is the most powerful spokesman of the myth that gripped the
Spanish people when they elected Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero as their
Prime Minister in the wake of the Madrid bombing: namely, that if we
oust specific politicians from office - replace Bush with Kerry, Blair
with Brown - the Islamic fundamentalists will leave us alone. It is,
of course, psychologically reassuring for voters to be told that they
have this power, that there is something quick and clean they can do
about their collective predicament. But it is also a fantasy. The
theocratic guerrillas of al-Qaeda and its associates who, it emerged
last week, were planning to bomb a British primary school in Madrid
and, on Friday, promised fresh attacks in Europe, will not be appeased
by any number of political scalps. Their ambitions for the world are
much greater and more terrifying.
But who can blame Michael Moore for seizing his chance? No war in
modern history has been as badly sold to the public as this one. In
private, the Prime Minister admits to colleagues that, in this
respect, "I have failed". No Western politician, including Mr Blair,
has succesfully produced a political narrative which transcends the
old methods of spin developed in the 1990s and explains why the war on
terror is a completely new kind of struggle.
Indeed, the problem with the American "neocons" - Cheney, Rumsfeld et
al - is that they are not "neo" enough. They use old Cold War language
to describe an utterly modern conflict. This war may well, for a
start, be longer than the great struggle of the second half of the
last century. It is certainly more complex: the triple, interlocked
threat of weapons of mass destruction, global terrorist groups and
rogue states is much more difficult to explain than the monolithic
danger which was represented by the Soviet bloc and its ideology. And,
to be prosecuted successfully, the war on terror will require durable
public faith in politicians and the intelligence services that inform
them: the very trust which has taken such a terrible beating before,
during and after the Iraqi conflict. The anti-war lobby has the slick
movies of Michael Moore. And what do we hawks have? The sickening
images of Abu Ghraib, that's what.
This is why it isn't enough to say that Moore manipulates the facts,
or that he is a charlatan, or that his arguments are glib. The reality
is that his methods are working, and working for a reason. He is the
grizzled face of a culture in denial, the contrarian voice of the
millions who would rather hate Dubya than confront the awesome threat
that stalks our age. His success is an urgent warning to those who
support the war, who grasp its importance, to raise their game, and
fast. Nitpicking is not the answer. It's the big issues that count.
And it's there that Michael Moore has no answers. If he is so
visionary, why is his objective - to run Bush out of the White House -
so parochial? What would he do about the new horrors of our time?
Dude, where's your sense of history?
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