More on Moore
Mattson, Kevin
"People like me have to save liberals from themselves." —Michael Moore STRANGE THINGS happen when the world of entertainment crashes into politics. Remember those "Rock the Vote" scandals a...
...And—you guessed it!—the Iraq War was driven by Halliburton's greed for oil and contracts...
...As one critic put it, neither movie was "designed to persuade" but rather catered to different cultural bases...
...We need to take on the Ralph Naders and the Michael Hardts and Black Block activists while defining what we stand for...
...It was inspired by ideas, very bad ideas...
...he wants to make a fun film...
...But in Iraq, we have a war accompanied by massive privatization and cutbacks in service—the slashing of the welfare state, including veterans' benefits...
...And shouldn't these people be a part of any Democratic Party coalition—the "white working class" that Ruy Teixeira has pointed out is still crucial for Democrats...
...LBJ's war in Vietnam marched in tandem with the "Great Society...
...Unocal builds a pipeline in Afghanistan, and viewers are left with the idea that this is what the war was about...
...At one point in Fahrenheit, Moore depicts the Bush administration as slow in attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan...
...The answer is oil...
...He posts joyful accounts on his Web site about enraptured audiences watching his movie...
...Remember those "Rock the Vote" scandals a few years back...
...it's Moore who confronts Charlton Heston...
...In the past, Moore has substituted his own celebritydriven solutions for actual political work...
...poor people serve in the U.S...
...It sounded petty...
...As I said in my earlier article, Moore can't figure out if he's an entertainer or a moralist...
...Step back and assess its "big" claims rather than the smaller details: Bush's election was contested, and there was a great deal of anger among African Americans about the vote count in Florida (yup...
...Dumb white guys...
...the Dragnet theme music used to set up discussions of the FBI is dumb...
...For anyone who doubts entertainment and politics have merged today, just visit the front page of Moore's Web site where, at the time of this writing, Kerry's quote was featured prominently...
...But generally, there's a great deal of truth to the film...
...Have poor people suffered more than others?— don't invite laughter...
...I know that criticism of a big shot on the left is frowned upon at this momentous hour...
...the press then discovered that these proselytizing celebrities weren't registered to vote themselves...
...The Iraq War is the first in a long time to be initiated by a Republican president...
...The problem is that the moral questions explored in the movie—Did the president lie...
...The right has searched for mistakes in the film and found a few: Richard Clarke OK'd the quick return of Bin Laden family members to Saudi Arabia after September 11 (so the blame can't all be put on Bush) and a "headline" that Moore uses in the film was really a letter to the editor...
...I think so...
...SO FIRST THINGS FIRST: has Moore learned from his numerous critics...
...Still, he's never been able to explain why he feels no remorse about his vote for Nader in 2000 or how a vote for Nader in 2004 differs from a vote in 2000...
...There's no reason we can't be unified and still debate within our ranks...
...I know that the left wants to rally together as we head toward November...
...I still worry that Michael Moore hasn't figured out how to do this...
...Kerry's statement was not one of his best...
...HAVE I BECOME a converted Moore lover?_ Before I join the left-wing love fest for Moore, I want to ask some larger questions about the relationship between entertainment and politics in our postmodern culture...
...Political values are like lifestyles today, and you seek out affirmation rather than criticism or questioning...
...So it's good to see Moore today doing what he should: persuading people to vote and helping nonprofit political action groups like MoveOn.org get their message out...
...the disingenuous message is that entertainment can solve political problems...
...Yes, the right has been unified for a number of years, but it has also blasted the crazies—the John Birch Society or southern racists—in order to define the bounds of unity...
...At his best, Moore captures its human side...
...Some critics have pointed out a connection between Moore's film and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ...
...Moore's narration speculates about what Bush was thinking (including, doubtfully, that he was worried his ties to Saudi Arabia might be investigated...
...Moore has encouraged a return to old-fashioned politics...
...Intellectual and political history is not Moore's terrain...
...TO CALL THIS simplistic is to state the obvious...
...Michael Moore STRANGE THINGS happen when the world of entertainment crashes into politics...
...Asked what he would have done had he received the news that "America was under attack" the way George W. Bush did during a photo-op with children in a Florida elementary school, Kerry stated, "I would have told those kids very politely and nicely that the president of the United States had something he needed to attend to...
...The problem is our contemporary political culture—a culture of pundits and sound bites, where young people increasingly get their news from entertainment sources and DISSENT / Fall 2004 n 87 NOTEBOOK mistake fiction for fact...
...it made too much of personal style, not substantive policy disagreement...
...For him, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were both about oil...
...Again, I know it's supposed to be humor, but doesn't humor have to be funny...
...Liberals need to save Michael Moore from his own lampooning tendencies, his vulgar materialism, his tendency toward cynicism about American politics, his contempt for all the "dumb guys" we have to convince...
...Then you hear Moore's ominous voiceover: "Was the war in Afghanistan really about something else...
...Worse yet, Kerry was taking cues from movies rather than from serious thinking about what Bush did wrong after 9/11...
...He wants to bring humor to the humorless crowd of liberals and thereby save us from ourselves, but the times, and his own material, call for seriousness...
...And 83 percent of Limbaugh's listeners support Bush's war in Iraq, while 87 percent of Moore's viewers are opposed...
...terror alerts are starting to spark fear and dismay among Americans (yup...
...Technically and aesthetically, Fahrenheit is a better movie than Bowling...
...Finally, what about political action...
...His book has ninety-seven footnotes in the first chapter alone and a long bibliography...
...When Moore puts words into the president's head while he's reading to Florida schoolchildren, it's certainly unfair...
...role in enforcing them...
...Asking congresspeople to enlist their own children to fight in Iraq goes flat (as do most of Moore's "confrontations" with power...
...Indeed, one of the more peculiar scenes in that film captures Bush sitting for seven minutes, after his chief of staff delivers the awful news of the World Trade Center attack, while kids read "The Pet Goat...
...But is it...
...Public entertainment versus governmental secrecy: Moore's playing on dangerous terrain, but the terrain matters as much as Moore...
...Like many on the left today, he is an unreconstructed maNOTEBOOK terialist...
...Now that Arnold Schwarzenegger— with the power of celebrity and money— has successfully deposed the elected governor of California, should we really laugh about this sort of thing...
...Shouldn't he wish for anger and debate in the aisles...
...What a work of entertainment does best is confirm peoples' preexisting political values— not encourage self-examination or rethinking...
...Bush talked up a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda that didn't exist (yup...
...Bush has scary connections to Saudi Arabia (yup...
...seems a distraction...
...To assess this, let's consider Fahrenheit 9/11 in a wider context...
...It's not really clear that Moore can effectively reach swing voters or those uncertain about what they believe...
...A number of angry readers sent letters expressing their dismay at my misjudgment...
...Moore's personality doesn't crowd out the content of Fahrenheit 9/11 the way it did in The Big One and Bowling for Columbine...
...Who's there to be persuaded...
...This obsession with factual accuracy is not the only improvement...
...all war is brutal and violent, including that in Iraq (yup...
...Explaining the Iraq War requires one to go into detail about the intellectual history of the right, about the rise of a new type of neoconservative...
...So perhaps it comes as no surprise that after a Washington, D.C., showing of Fahrenheit 9/11 to leading Democrats—including Tom Daschle, who is vilified in the movie— John Kerry tried to use the movie in his campaign...
...In Dude, Where's My Country, he suggests endorsing Oprah Winfrey for president...
...You could call it the Internetting of American politics, the breaking up of a mass audience into subcultures and opinionated enclaves...
...It's also an understandable way of dealing with what will go down in history as one of the most secretive presidencies in all of American history...
...we need to save him...
...That's Moore's world...
...Kerry tried to put that scene to good use in building up his credibility on the question of terrorism...
...But let's not forget a lesson that we should have learned from the historical success of the right...
...In all these cases, American nationalism balanced obligation and service with entitlement and welfare...
...Aren't these among the people that Lila—the woman who lost her son in Iraq— refers to when speaking of "conservative Democrats...
...But in Fahrenheit 9/11, he tries to crack the world of Bush's presidency, an administration of concealment, prone to stifle independent inquiry...
...I don't want to write a hit piece about Moore's stupid politics, so let me reiterate the major point of my last article: Moore isn't the problem...
...the Korean War came from the same president who tried to give us national health care...
...There's also an important message lurking in the film that, as a historian, I considered underdeveloped...
...Here's where I stand by my original argument: the "responsible left" has to pay attention to two things simultaneously...
...Maybe the Bush administration has scared Michael Moore straight...
...He's DISSENT I Fall 2004 n 85 NOTEBOOK even offered money to anyone who can catch an error...
...Let's move away from the "facts" deployed in the film and ask how Moore interprets them...
...Moore's project rests on the idea that entertainment is the most effective realm for political criticism...
...The word "mistake" has never crossed Moore's lips, and so he doesn't encourage self-criticism in others...
...Bush declared the war over—"Mission Accomplished"— too quickly (yup...
...These two movie "events"—I use that term because both generated a buzz about distribution issues and then benefited greatly from that buzz—played to completely different audiences, even in different theaters...
...Army in higher numbers than wealthy people (yup...
...There's something shocking about this historical shift...
...It's also wrong...
...Kerry had plenty of better cases to make against Bush...
...The people behind Bush—Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz—are not just greedy materialists but believers in absolute values and in the U.S...
...Halliburton and other companies have gotten contracts in Iraq quickly enough to raise suspicions about ethics (yup...
...We made promises to the people who fought wars...
...It's clear that the reporter's question and Kerry's response were references to Fahrenheit 9/11...
...The editors asked me to revisit the subject now that Fahrenheit 9/11 and the book that it was largely based upon, Dude, Where's My Country?, have both come and gone...
...He doesn't need to save us from our humorlessness...
...Big celebrities like Madonna and Jewel sermonized to young people about voting...
...reading the Patriot Act from an ice cream truck on the streets of D.C...
...During World War II, we got FDR's "Second Bill of Rights" and the GI Bill...
...That's what makes the attempts at humor so distracting, so not funny...
...It must get its viewpoint out there and, at the same time, ensure that public debate isn't degraded in the process...
...The war in Iraq was inspired by a lot more than corporate greed...
...He slips between entertainment and criticism...
...One of Moore's most evocative characters in the film—Lila, a working-class 86 n DISSENT / Fall 2004 mother who lost her son in Iraq—points out that her "people" have suffered the most and been asked to do with less...
...In the Spring 2003 issue of Dissent, I wrote a piece critical of Michael Moore...
...Before that, there was Vice President Dan Quayle's debate with the television character Murphy Brown, and before that, Ronald Reagan's mixing up movies and reality during press conferences...
...Another major question: what's the substance of Moore's political criticism...
...The history of Bush's war cabinet requires a lot more than Moore provides...
...I became an anomaly—a guy on the left not willing to embrace one of the left's few celebrities...
...KEVIN MArrsoN's most recent book is When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism...
...88 n DISSENT / Fall 2004...
...Aren't these the same people Moore shows serving in the military and being ripped off...
...It requires taking ideas seriously—the way James Mann does in his excellent book The Rise of the Vulcans...
...There's always a one-man solution in the waiting...
...His film moves too quickly to substantiate the connections it tries to make...
...With all of this in mind, I'm drafting my memo to Kerry: Don't run to Michael Moore for any more political advice...
...He doesn't argue...
...In Moore's film, the only time we see Paul Wolfowitz is when he's combing his hair prior to a press conference...
...Or consider this point: According to an Annenberg poll, during the month of July 2004, 8 percent of Americans saw Fahrenheit 9/11 while 7 percent listened to Rush Limbaugh...
...If you go to his Web site, you'll find page after page of bibliographic sources that substantiate his main points in Fahrenheit 9/11...
...Worse yet, Moore can't figure out if he's a working-class populist—his incessant refrain— or a snobby leftist...
...In Bowling for Columbine, it's Moore who brings K-Mart to its knees...
...At the least, Bush looks indecisive and out of his league...
...In Dude, Where's My Country , Moore argues, "If the Democrats would stop watering down their beliefs to appeal to all the dumb white guys out there, they'd win...
Vol. 51 • September 2004 • No. 4
