Thursday, July 01, 2004
Getting into the Gutter with Michael Moore
When asked why he didn't directly challenge Joe McCarthy, Dwight Eisenhower declared that he "didn't want to get into the gutter with that man." Eisenhower's refusal to immediately engage the vicious Red-baiting senator from Wisconsin is a dark mark against his presidency, but one can understand his unwillingness to find himself having descended to McCarthy's level. There is something unseemly about getting involved with people who base their careers on guilt by association, by insinuation, and by half-truths. The hard right has no monopoly on people of this type, though Ann Coulter is definitely working to preserve Tail-Gunner Joe's memory. On the left, she is complemented by Michael Moore.
I have yet to see Fahrenheit 9/11. I wouldn't oppose seeing it altogether, but there is a very simple rule: no money of mine can go toward the film - no money spent on my behalf either. The optimal scenario would involve my buying tickets to White Chicks or Spider-Man 2 and then sneaking into Fahrenheit - the kind of thing I did plenty of times while a kid. Michael Moore was a wealthy man before this thing came out and the dollar or two I'd deny him wouldn't account for much. Still, I abhor the notion of rewarding him in the slightest way. Not in my name, as the anti-war protesters might say.
Why this distaste for Moore? It stems from a lot of different sources. I have doubts about anyone who has publicly declared that Americans "are possibly the dumbest people on the planet... in thrall to conniving, thieving, smug pricks." I have my doubts about the populism of anyone who crusades for causes by humiliating store clerks and lower-middle managers. I had my doubts about his ridiculing of the city of Flint in Roger & Me - their efforts to build a tourist industry to replace GM had considerably more promise than his trying to pester Roger Smith to death. Or about the extended segments with the strange rabbit-skinning woman, which seemed to be in there largely for comic effect. Or his failure to ask really hard questions as to why car manufacturers were moving out of Michigan. GM was not alone in abandoning its Michigan manufacturing center. The 1980s were not a great decade for the US auto industry, and Michigan was no longer a cheap place to make cars. Moore might have at least recognized that fact - as venal as Smith was, a more conscientious CEO would have made the same call. Instead of asking hard questions about Flint's economic future, he engaged in a Quixotic quest to beat back the ocean with a broom. It might have made for good celluloid, but Roger & Me is deficient of any economic logic.
Moore always begins his movies with his villains defined for him. Bowling for Columbine was no exception. It sought to link the murderous rampage of Klebold and Harris with the concurrent U.S. war in Kosovo (pause and think everyone: if a deal had been struck at Chateau Rambouillet in NATO-Yugoslavian negotiations averting war, would Klebold & Harris have gone to school on April 20 with peace in their hearts?). To further this distasteful argument, he falsely linked it to a Lockheed Martin plant in Littleton (the Denver suburb where Columbine was located). By Moore's account, the plant manufactured "weapons of mass destruction." Forbes revealed that the plant makes space launch vehicles for TV satellites. Worse was Moore's alteration of a 1988 Bush/Quayle campaign ad to directly link the Willie Horton smear ads with Bush/Quayle. Altering evidence should be a big no-no in documentary filmmaking, but Moore thought a little forgery would help the argument flow better.* Also, in Bowling for Columbine, Moore (irrelevantly) repeated the old saw that the U.S. aided the Taliban before 9/11. The aid package in question was humanitarian, and distributed through NGOs, not the Taliban. There is something appalling, perhaps, about lefties bashing humanitarian aid in this fashion, but I guess it relates to gun ownership in America . . . somehow. [see Spinsanity.org for extensive research on Moore]
Fahrenheit 9/11 was filmed to answer a question that no one was really asking: why Michael Moore had his celebrated outburst at the 2003 Oscars. I was watching them at the time. I did not wonder for a second why he was ranting on stage. But, Moore being Moore, we're treated to a 2 hour explanation. Lucky us.
It's pretty easy to construct a map of the movie's points if one reads about it. Most of the pieces I've read about the film are quite positive and give a lot of stress to the film's strong points. Movie reviewers tend to be pretty liberal - Fahrenheit has a 85% Fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes - so I imagine that they relish this film saying what they normally couldn't in print.
Fahrenheit 9/11 makes real hay out of relations between the Bush and bin Laden families. Well there are about 30-some bin Laden siblings and Osama is generally considered the black sheep of the family. Some of them have longstanding business ties in the U.S. The charge is made as part of a general effort to implicate the Saudis in shaping American foreign policy. He charges that crooked Bush operatives authorized the flight of the bin Ladens from the U.S. after 9/11 - with the smug certainty that he's saying something new. As Christopher Hitchens points out, this isn't a new point. More damaging, the flight was authorized by Richard Clarke, who otherwise appears as an expert witness in the film. Moore's lame excuse for omitting Clarke's authorization of the flight is that his name appears on a briefly shown news article about it.
Fahrenheit 9/11 also charges that the war in Iraq is a diversion from the war in Afghanistan. This is a new one for Moore, who hardly supported the war in Afghanistan when it kicked off. Back in 2002, Moore wrote:
Hardly the words of someone concerned about troop levels in Afghanistan. Also, as Hitchens notes,
Fahrenheit 9/11 reportedly does not embrace this tack. It borrows a more hawkish critique from others. That's basically a tactical shift. If Moore wanted to allege that bin Laden was innocent, as many on the illiberal left tried to do, this film would receive an entirely different kind of controversy. Moore does fish around with the notion that UNOCAL wanted to build a pipeline in Afghanistan, but in doing so he contradicts itself: if a pipeline was an overriding priority, why has so little been invested in securing Afghanistan? The Taliban militants running rampant are in a good position to kill construction workers and blow up the (nonexistent) pipeline - just like Iraqi insurgents are doing. As Hitchens notes, Moore is markedly ambivalent about Afghanistan.
Also distasteful, is the way Moore deals with Iraq. He utterly avoids showing the viewers anything that might make us think that something was wrong with Iraq before the U.S. invaded. As Richard Cohen - no supporter of Bush - states:
Moore was challenged about this by Jake Tapper on ABC News:
It's only a point of view. Selectivity is not defensible on those grounds. Any argument can be constructed on the basis of selective evidence. With the right combination of half-truths and omissions, Michael Moore could have blamed the 9/11 attacks on the Buffalo Bills. Moore's film is purporting to be definitive; not "the other side of the story." A more careful Moore might have made the argument by acknowledging that Saddam was terrible long after the U.S. broke its limited relations with him, but that would have involved muddying the water, making a more nuanced argument. Nuance and Michael Moore have yet to be acquainted.
We come to the famous clock scene, showing Bush's reaction after hearing of the first plane striking the World Trade Center. Perhaps he waited in the room too long. Perhaps he was genuinely did not know what to do for a few crucial moments. Perhaps he didn't want to alarm the children. Perhaps Michael Moore - who in 2000 aimed far more scorn at Al Gore than Bush, while working with Ralph Nader to undermine the Democrat - still hasn't taken the measure of a man he hates too much to fathom. Bush's reaction on 9/11 was too slow and too dazed. But let's consider the reaction of another man on that fateful day, who wrote:
These are of course words that appeared briefly at Michael Moore's website, were observed by millions, and then were wisely deleted. But we're left to conclude that he might have been more amenable to an Atlanta-based flight slamming into a Houston skyscraper. So, I think Moore would be wise to consider that he lives in a glass house on this issue.
You'll read all this and wonder how grounded it is since I (at time of writing) haven't seen it. The people I cite have. If you have, compare my points against Moore's and ask yourself where they match up. If you haven't and plan to, keep these arguments in mind when you see it.
Liberals are exulting that they have an avatar in Moore. I wouldn't be so happy. Moore contributed to the election of Bush in 2000 by his scouring attacks on Al Gore. Associating with him did Wesley Clark no good; nothing hurt the Clark campaign as much as the general's silence when Moore charged Bush with desertion. Like Richard Cohen, I think Moore's toxicity makes close association with him hazardous. The people who will most appreciate Fahrenheit 9/11 are those most appreciative of this new Coulter of the left. Not centrist independents or undecideds - whose reactions to the film will be harder to predict. For my part, I see Moore's new popularity as a sign that the entire spectrum is slowly sinking into the rhetorical gutter, where facts count for less than innuendo, a little alteration makes the story better, and half-truths trump the search for the whole.
-----
*Ironically, he didn't really need to do this. The specific Willie Horton ad was released not by the Bush/Quayle campaign, but by a closely related PAC.
When asked why he didn't directly challenge Joe McCarthy, Dwight Eisenhower declared that he "didn't want to get into the gutter with that man." Eisenhower's refusal to immediately engage the vicious Red-baiting senator from Wisconsin is a dark mark against his presidency, but one can understand his unwillingness to find himself having descended to McCarthy's level. There is something unseemly about getting involved with people who base their careers on guilt by association, by insinuation, and by half-truths. The hard right has no monopoly on people of this type, though Ann Coulter is definitely working to preserve Tail-Gunner Joe's memory. On the left, she is complemented by Michael Moore.
I have yet to see Fahrenheit 9/11. I wouldn't oppose seeing it altogether, but there is a very simple rule: no money of mine can go toward the film - no money spent on my behalf either. The optimal scenario would involve my buying tickets to White Chicks or Spider-Man 2 and then sneaking into Fahrenheit - the kind of thing I did plenty of times while a kid. Michael Moore was a wealthy man before this thing came out and the dollar or two I'd deny him wouldn't account for much. Still, I abhor the notion of rewarding him in the slightest way. Not in my name, as the anti-war protesters might say.
Why this distaste for Moore? It stems from a lot of different sources. I have doubts about anyone who has publicly declared that Americans "are possibly the dumbest people on the planet... in thrall to conniving, thieving, smug pricks." I have my doubts about the populism of anyone who crusades for causes by humiliating store clerks and lower-middle managers. I had my doubts about his ridiculing of the city of Flint in Roger & Me - their efforts to build a tourist industry to replace GM had considerably more promise than his trying to pester Roger Smith to death. Or about the extended segments with the strange rabbit-skinning woman, which seemed to be in there largely for comic effect. Or his failure to ask really hard questions as to why car manufacturers were moving out of Michigan. GM was not alone in abandoning its Michigan manufacturing center. The 1980s were not a great decade for the US auto industry, and Michigan was no longer a cheap place to make cars. Moore might have at least recognized that fact - as venal as Smith was, a more conscientious CEO would have made the same call. Instead of asking hard questions about Flint's economic future, he engaged in a Quixotic quest to beat back the ocean with a broom. It might have made for good celluloid, but Roger & Me is deficient of any economic logic.
Moore always begins his movies with his villains defined for him. Bowling for Columbine was no exception. It sought to link the murderous rampage of Klebold and Harris with the concurrent U.S. war in Kosovo (pause and think everyone: if a deal had been struck at Chateau Rambouillet in NATO-Yugoslavian negotiations averting war, would Klebold & Harris have gone to school on April 20 with peace in their hearts?). To further this distasteful argument, he falsely linked it to a Lockheed Martin plant in Littleton (the Denver suburb where Columbine was located). By Moore's account, the plant manufactured "weapons of mass destruction." Forbes revealed that the plant makes space launch vehicles for TV satellites. Worse was Moore's alteration of a 1988 Bush/Quayle campaign ad to directly link the Willie Horton smear ads with Bush/Quayle. Altering evidence should be a big no-no in documentary filmmaking, but Moore thought a little forgery would help the argument flow better.* Also, in Bowling for Columbine, Moore (irrelevantly) repeated the old saw that the U.S. aided the Taliban before 9/11. The aid package in question was humanitarian, and distributed through NGOs, not the Taliban. There is something appalling, perhaps, about lefties bashing humanitarian aid in this fashion, but I guess it relates to gun ownership in America . . . somehow. [see Spinsanity.org for extensive research on Moore]
Fahrenheit 9/11 was filmed to answer a question that no one was really asking: why Michael Moore had his celebrated outburst at the 2003 Oscars. I was watching them at the time. I did not wonder for a second why he was ranting on stage. But, Moore being Moore, we're treated to a 2 hour explanation. Lucky us.
It's pretty easy to construct a map of the movie's points if one reads about it. Most of the pieces I've read about the film are quite positive and give a lot of stress to the film's strong points. Movie reviewers tend to be pretty liberal - Fahrenheit has a 85% Fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes - so I imagine that they relish this film saying what they normally couldn't in print.
Fahrenheit 9/11 makes real hay out of relations between the Bush and bin Laden families. Well there are about 30-some bin Laden siblings and Osama is generally considered the black sheep of the family. Some of them have longstanding business ties in the U.S. The charge is made as part of a general effort to implicate the Saudis in shaping American foreign policy. He charges that crooked Bush operatives authorized the flight of the bin Ladens from the U.S. after 9/11 - with the smug certainty that he's saying something new. As Christopher Hitchens points out, this isn't a new point. More damaging, the flight was authorized by Richard Clarke, who otherwise appears as an expert witness in the film. Moore's lame excuse for omitting Clarke's authorization of the flight is that his name appears on a briefly shown news article about it.
Fahrenheit 9/11 also charges that the war in Iraq is a diversion from the war in Afghanistan. This is a new one for Moore, who hardly supported the war in Afghanistan when it kicked off. Back in 2002, Moore wrote:
- What if there is no "terrorist threat?" What if Bush and Co. need, desperately need, that "terrorist threat" more than anything in order to conduct the systematic destruction they have launched against the U.S. constitution and the good people of this country who believe in the freedoms and liberties it guarantees?
Hardly the words of someone concerned about troop levels in Afghanistan. Also, as Hitchens notes,
- In late 2002, almost a year after the al-Qaida assault on American society, I had an onstage debate with Michael Moore at the Telluride Film Festival. In the course of this exchange, he stated his view that Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. This was, he said, the American way. The intervention in Afghanistan, he maintained, had been at least to that extent unjustified.
Fahrenheit 9/11 reportedly does not embrace this tack. It borrows a more hawkish critique from others. That's basically a tactical shift. If Moore wanted to allege that bin Laden was innocent, as many on the illiberal left tried to do, this film would receive an entirely different kind of controversy. Moore does fish around with the notion that UNOCAL wanted to build a pipeline in Afghanistan, but in doing so he contradicts itself: if a pipeline was an overriding priority, why has so little been invested in securing Afghanistan? The Taliban militants running rampant are in a good position to kill construction workers and blow up the (nonexistent) pipeline - just like Iraqi insurgents are doing. As Hitchens notes, Moore is markedly ambivalent about Afghanistan.
Also distasteful, is the way Moore deals with Iraq. He utterly avoids showing the viewers anything that might make us think that something was wrong with Iraq before the U.S. invaded. As Richard Cohen - no supporter of Bush - states:
- Moore's depiction of why Bush went to war is so silly and so incomprehensible that it is easily dismissed. As far as I can tell, it is a farrago of conspiracy theories. But nothing is said about multiple U.N. resolutions violated by Iraq or the depredations of Saddam Hussein. In fact, prewar Iraq is depicted as some sort of Arab folk festival -- lots of happy, smiling, indigenous people. Was there no footage of a Kurdish village that had been gassed? This is obscenity by omission.
Moore was challenged about this by Jake Tapper on ABC News:
- TAPPER: Is it not also legitimate to question whether, however, you are doing the same thing you're accusing the U.S. government of doing? You fault Saddam Hussein for being a brutal dictator back in the '80s when the United States was allied with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, yet when it comes to the part of the movie where you discuss going to war in Iraq in 2003, that's not a part of the movie you talk about how brutal Saddam Hussein was.
MOORE: Because people like you and this network and other networks over and over and over again told us that. Look, we all get it. We all know that. I'm just trying to present another side of the story. Why don't you think that's a good idea to have a filmmaker out there presenting a point of view and a side of the story that really wasn't well represented in our mainstream media?
It's only a point of view. Selectivity is not defensible on those grounds. Any argument can be constructed on the basis of selective evidence. With the right combination of half-truths and omissions, Michael Moore could have blamed the 9/11 attacks on the Buffalo Bills. Moore's film is purporting to be definitive; not "the other side of the story." A more careful Moore might have made the argument by acknowledging that Saddam was terrible long after the U.S. broke its limited relations with him, but that would have involved muddying the water, making a more nuanced argument. Nuance and Michael Moore have yet to be acquainted.
We come to the famous clock scene, showing Bush's reaction after hearing of the first plane striking the World Trade Center. Perhaps he waited in the room too long. Perhaps he was genuinely did not know what to do for a few crucial moments. Perhaps he didn't want to alarm the children. Perhaps Michael Moore - who in 2000 aimed far more scorn at Al Gore than Bush, while working with Ralph Nader to undermine the Democrat - still hasn't taken the measure of a man he hates too much to fathom. Bush's reaction on 9/11 was too slow and too dazed. But let's consider the reaction of another man on that fateful day, who wrote:
- 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, DC and the planes' destination of California - these where places that voted AGAINST Bush!
These are of course words that appeared briefly at Michael Moore's website, were observed by millions, and then were wisely deleted. But we're left to conclude that he might have been more amenable to an Atlanta-based flight slamming into a Houston skyscraper. So, I think Moore would be wise to consider that he lives in a glass house on this issue.
You'll read all this and wonder how grounded it is since I (at time of writing) haven't seen it. The people I cite have. If you have, compare my points against Moore's and ask yourself where they match up. If you haven't and plan to, keep these arguments in mind when you see it.
Liberals are exulting that they have an avatar in Moore. I wouldn't be so happy. Moore contributed to the election of Bush in 2000 by his scouring attacks on Al Gore. Associating with him did Wesley Clark no good; nothing hurt the Clark campaign as much as the general's silence when Moore charged Bush with desertion. Like Richard Cohen, I think Moore's toxicity makes close association with him hazardous. The people who will most appreciate Fahrenheit 9/11 are those most appreciative of this new Coulter of the left. Not centrist independents or undecideds - whose reactions to the film will be harder to predict. For my part, I see Moore's new popularity as a sign that the entire spectrum is slowly sinking into the rhetorical gutter, where facts count for less than innuendo, a little alteration makes the story better, and half-truths trump the search for the whole.
-----
*Ironically, he didn't really need to do this. The specific Willie Horton ad was released not by the Bush/Quayle campaign, but by a closely related PAC.
