The film is at its heart a thoroughly conservative document, a fact which generally has gone unnoticed except in Robert Jensen's acute review, 'A Stupid White Movie' [at Counterpunch] Worse, it explains virtually nothing about events it claims to examine.
Michael Moore's role is to make American liberals feel good about themselves without having to question the practices of a society which cast an increasingly long, cold, dark shadow over the planet. The job pays well, and Moore is becoming a wealthy man, a kind of well-kept court jester for those with occasional twinges of liberal conscience or human decency.
[snip]Moore told the world some months back that he had found his presidential candidate in former General Wesley Clark. That announcement should have been a warning, because Clark is indistinguishable in his views from George Bush, and the general's behavior in the former Yugoslavia was arrogant, provocative, and dangerous.
Moore simply wants to be rid of Bush, and he was ready to support an opportunistic and dangerous man like Wesley Clark to do it. Now, in his movie he has assembled a pastiche of attitudes, assumptions, and interesting, but largely unenlightening, film clips hoping to elicit enough of an emotional response to be rid of Bush.
Why does Moore, and I use him to represent all of liberal America, so want to be rid of Bush that he takes what I regard as the unprincipled position of supporting someone as bad or worse?
I do not believe it is because Bush represents a danger to American values, the favorite charge of many fuzzy-thinking American liberals, because in many ways Bush accurately reflects those values. I think they are desperate to be rid of Bush because he is an embarrassment. There is something excruciatingly American about Bush, revealing some painful truths about the society he represents, much the same as was the case with President Nixon's brother and his efforts to create a fast-food empire based on Nixon-burgers or President Carter's whining, beer-swilling brother, Billy.
[snip]
The truth is that Bush is a fairly typical white, suburban, middle-aged American. He talks and thinks the way a great many Americans talk and think. He jogs and plays golf. He has a fondness for school-boy pranks, although less clever ones, similar to Michael Moore's. He unquestioningly accepts America's fairy-tale, official version of itself as God's own chosen place on the planet with liberty and justice for all - something shared by Michael Moore and most flag-waving American liberals.
[snip]
You may ask, we know Bush is a brutal, rather psychopathic man, so how can he be like so much of middle America? You see, middle America is not the harmless, gentle place it seems in Hollywood's confections. It is the place where thirty-year old couples assume they are entitled to a five-bedroom home on a sprawling lot in the suburbs with at least two lumbering vehicles in the driveway. It is the place which ignores the ugly parts of its own society, the ghettos, the broken-down schools, the lack of healthcare. It is the place where the relentless demand for still more endangers the planet's future. And it is the place that drives America to global empire.
Bush is not, as so many American liberals claim, out of step with American history. Childish slogans about taking back America or, even worse, 'Dude, Where's My Country?' are just that, childish. Bush is an awkward, unpleasant exemplar of enduring American behavior and values. Did the invasion of Iraq represent different values or attitudes than the 'Remember the Maine' invasion of Cuba? How about the invasion of Mexico, or the seizure of Hawaii, or the holocaust in Vietnam and Cambodia? Does the Patriot Act represent anything different than the Alien and Sedition laws of John Adam's day or the dark excesses of the FBI under Hoover?
[snip]
I have a problem with all the liberal whining in America over professional soldiers being killed in Iraq, actually still a small number compared to the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis killed both in the war and in the decade-long run-up of brutally harsh American-imposed restrictions, and it is no different for Moore's scene of a mother's tears. No, I'm not talking about the poor mother herself whose loss is real, but about the calculation of Moore's film in using the scene and about the very predictable result on American audiences. Pictures of a small number of flag-draped coffins appear to be almost the only thing fueling America's limp antiwar movement.
When I see pleas about dead American soldiers I can't help but think of all the tears shed at the Vietnam memorial for the relatively few who died helping in the work of bringing overwhelming destruction to another land, but there is never a tear shed for the millions of souls extinguished by America.
Mr. Chuckman concludes up condemning Senator Kerry:
. . . be very careful how you vote to get rid of Bush. Kerry has never so much as condemned the war. He has never condemned Bush, except by repeating official-report findings all thinking people on the planet understood a year before the official report. Kerry's view of the Middle East, frantic pandering to Israel's darkest interests, promises no end to future troubles. He is an unrepentant, unimaginative supporter of global empire.
That brings us to the real tragedy of America and the real cause of 9/11 and so many other horrors: America's swaggering readiness to play the game of global empire with all the brutality and incivility that it implies. You tell me how a confused film like Moore's, even if it contributes to toppling a confused President like Bush, adds anything to resolving America's great dilemma of insatiable greed and willingness to do terrible deeds while mouthing high-sounding ideals.
I suppose Mr. Chuckman would have us vote for Mr. Nader. Ugh. That won't be an option in Oklahoma!
Mr. Chuckman refers to Robert Jensen's piece--Stupid White Movie: What Michael Moore Misses About the Empire :
I have been defending Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" from the criticism in mainstream and conservative circles that the film is leftist propaganda. Nothing could be further from the truth; there is very little left critique in the movie. In fact, it's hard to find any coherent critique in the movie at all.Read Mr. Jensen's piece for more on the subtle racism of Fahrenheit 9/11, and the half-baked sloganeering about the war on terror, the Bush-bin Laden family connection, etc. For me, the most persuasive part of Jensen's article is this:The sad truth is that "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a bad movie, but not for the reasons it is being attacked in the dominant culture. It's at times a racist movie. And the analysis that underlies the film's main political points is either dangerously incomplete or virtually incoherent.
The claim that "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a conservative movie may strike some as ludicrous. But the film endorses one of the central lies that Americans tell themselves, that the U.S. military fights for our freedom. This construction of the military as a defensive force obscures the harsh reality that the military is used to project U.S. power around the world to ensure dominance, not to defend anyone's freedom, at home or abroad.Instead of confronting this mythology, Moore ends the film with it. He points out, accurately, the irony that those who benefit the least from the U.S. system -- the chronically poor and members of minority groups -- are the very people who sign up for the military. "They offer to give up their lives so we can be free," Moore says, and all they ask in return is that we not send them in harm's way unless it's necessary. After the Iraq War, he wonders, "Will they ever trust us again?"
It is no doubt true that many who join the military believe they will be fighting for freedom. But we must distinguish between the mythology that many internalize and may truly believe, from the reality of the role of the U.S. military. The film includes some comments by soldiers questioning that very claim, but Moore's narration implies that somehow a glorious tradition of U.S. military endeavors to protect freedom has now been sullied by the Iraq War.
The problem is not just that the Iraq War was fundamentally illegal and immoral. The whole rotten project of empire building has been illegal and immoral -- and every bit as much a Democratic as a Republican project. The millions of dead around the world -- in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia -- as a result of U.S. military actions and proxy wars don't care which U.S. party was pulling the strings and pulling the trigger when they were killed. It's true that much of the world hates Bush. It's also true that much of the world has hated every post-WWII U.S. president. And for good reasons.
It is one thing to express solidarity for people forced into the military by economic conditions. It is quite another to pander to the lies this country tells itself about the military. It is not disrespectful to those who join up to tell the truth. It is our obligation to try to prevent future wars in which people are sent to die not for freedom but for power and profit. It's hard to understand how we can do that by repeating the lies of the people who plan, and benefit from, those wars.
Fahrenheit 9/11 has not shown in my town (not surprising) so I probably won't get to see it. No great loss.
In whatever earthly state You will have me be
Not from sorrow, pain, or care Freedom dare I claim;
This alone shall be my prayer: Glorify Your name.
--from New Year's Hymn by Lawrence Tuttiett, 1864 (alt.)
