There are lies, damn lies and then there is Michael Moore. His current film, titled Fahrenheit 9/11, is slick and persuasive. But is it honest? Does it comprehend political reality in all its gritty detail? The idea of the film is to blacken the name of George W. Bush, decry American imperialism and by implication give a free pass to terrorist ideology. Words may describe what happens in the world, or words may deceive; and if a picture is worth a thousand words, what reply might anyone effectively offer in the face of animated images cut and pasted by a cinematic wizard? And let us acknowledge that Mr. Moore is wizard. He knows that our modern sensibilities have been corrupted by commercialism and by television; and so he advances along the path of least resistance. He knows that most pundits are intellectual pretenders; so he has a natural point of departure: the wizard as pretender in his own right.
This column is about international politics in a world threatened by mass destruction weapons and mass indoctrination, so a film like Fahrenheit 9/11, that is about mass destruction, created for purposes of mass indoctrination, is fair game (especially since it was named "best picture" at the Cannes Film Festival). This column is also about the atrophy of competence and virtue in the closing days of America's shopping mall regime. To some extent I agree with Moore's commentaries on the decline of intellectual integrity and the blindness of our corporate elite. Where we part company is the degradation of culture and manners that he personifies, the snarling resentment that animates his polemic, the profound nihilism that underlies his position, and the socialist pathos that exiles him from reality.
Cinematic propaganda born of a malicious spirit, like that of Moore, will cut the vital context from a subject, portray the sympathetic man as callous, turn truth into falsehood and do so with pictures instead of words. In the Age of Television images are authoritative. There is no counterpoint to a sequence that shows the president denouncing terrorism in one shot and playing golf in the next. The power to edit reality, to manufacture juxtaposition, is the power to slander without words.
Here we find, in the work of Michael Moore, a factory for making political fools out of non-political fools. As a demagogue, Moore knows we live in a democratized culture mediated by television imagery. He knows that his audience lacks the general knowledge, the critical sense, to fully understand complex events. Furthermore, the intellectual decline of our culture guarantees he will have an "intellectual" following, and this will bolster his prestige. The ability to manipulate images without regard for objective truth, without regard for his own country and how it is viewed overseas, puts Moore in the totalitarian camp - united in spirit with those who hate America and the free market. He is not troubled. Instead, he is funny. And then, he is not so funny.
What Moore has done is brilliant. Yet it is ill conceived because it is false. Once upon a time society condemned the bad man for his behavior. Now we blink at badness. We pay at the box office and we make the bad man into a rich man. Let us stop, for a moment, and ask a question: Who is Michael Moore? In what does he believe?
A few years ago Moore wrote the bestseller, Stupid White Men. "I am a citizen of the United States," he explained. "Our government has been overthrown. Our elected president has been exiled." According to Moore, "Al Gore is the elected President of the United States." Moore hates the idea of conservatives in authority. "Bring us the head of Antonin Scalia!" he joked (or was he really joking?). Moore depicts President Bush as an illiterate with a drinking problem. Under Bush the rich are getting rich and the poor poorer. One of Moore's chapters is titled "Kill Whitey." In it he states: "White people scare the crap out of me." He then adds: "Every mean word, every cruel act, every bit of pain and suffering in my life had a Caucasian face attached to it." Chapter Five is titled "Idiot Nation." President Bush is not the country's only idiot. According to Moore, the country is full of dangerous white idiots. He wants blacks and women to run everything. "Men are just not as smart as women," he says. In another book, titled Downsize This, Moore explains that America is "an apartheid state." And in his most recent book, Dude, Where's My Country, he voices the suspicion that Bush somehow let 9/11 happen. "George & Co. have a lot more to hide beyond why they didn't scramble the fighter jets fast enough on the morning of September 11."
Should anyone trust images pasted together by the man who wrote, "There is no terrorist threat. You need to calm down, relax, listen very carefully, and repeat after me." Should anyone trust a "documentary" film by a man who says the way to stop terrorism is to stop being terrorists ourselves? Moore is a wizard, I admit. The film is brilliant. But the content is a lie. It is poison. It is therefore not safe viewing for the immature, the simple-minded or the uninformed. It is a kind of corruption reserved for fools.
If you dare, watch the film. See what a wizard can do. But don't believe everything you see. Remember who cut and pasted it.
