bryguy (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} bryguypgh) wrote,@ 2004-06-26 22:32:00 |
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Who fisks the fiskers?
Warning: long post. I lay bare the erroneous reasoning of Jeff Jarvis in his review of Fahrenheit 9/11.
[intro snark snipped]
Take this scene: Moore shows dead American soldiers in Iraq, many of them, the more blood the better. Then he says we need to replace them and he asks where they'll come from. He takes us to his favorite man-of-the-people populist playground, Flint, MI, and says that we'll find soldiers "in the places that had been destroyed by the economy." He focuses on poor black men as Bush's next victims -- not even acknowledging that virtually every soldier he has just shown -- and ridiculed -- in the film is white. It's all so convenient: anti-war-pro-poor-multi-culti-heartland.
There's a whole lot of problems with this. First, the soldiers were not ridiculed- they were quoted. If what they said was embarassing, it's not Moore's fault. He plays the songs that they like to kill to in the background. Second, not all of the soldiers Moore quotes are white anyway, nor are all the recruits he shows black. But they all had this in common: they ain't no Senator's sons.
But as I leave, I hear an older woman behind me, with a voice as loud at New York traffic, saying to someone who's passing her on the escalator, obviously a stranger: "Don't you sign up, now! Don't you join!" I turn around. She's saying this to a black man, just because he's black: After all, Michael Moore said those people are all conservative cannon fodder, didn't he? The man and the woman with him are polite enough to wait until they're out the door before they laugh and then sadly shake their heads.
Hoo boy.
Yep. Racists are pretty stupid no matter whether they're left or right. Fortunately this woman meant well but was stupid. Anyway, this woman was in Jeff Jarvis' audience but was not in Michael Moore's movie, so it's kind of irrelevant.
: One of the many things I've learned from blogging confrere Jay Rosen is that you have to stand back and investigate the assumptions that underly a media enterprise.
Translation: I can't attack the movie's veracity directly so I'm going to cast some vague aspersions instead.
Moore's assumption is venality. He assumes that President Bush and his confreres are venal, that their motives are black, that they are out to do no good, only bad, and that the only choices they make in life are between greed and power.
That's inevitably a bad analysis. It's the exact same analysis Bill Clinton's enemies made of him. If they were wrong about Clinton, well then, Michael Moore is wrong about Bush.
I'm tempted to take this at face value and allow that Moore makes this assumption, even though he doesn't. Even if he did make such an assumption, the fact that it wasn't true about Clinton would in no way prove that it also wasn't true about Bush. That's really really stupid. Observe the logic:
Sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?
Anyway, Moore doesn't make this assumption, although people who like Bush might see it that way. Personally I think he was painting more of an "in over his head" picture than a simple "venal evil greedy" picture, but there's lots of room for interpretation. So far, no examples are offered to demonstrate the "assumption" that Jarvis ascribes to Moore's subconscious film-making mentality.
Life is never that simple, never that obvious, unless you're a propagandist or one who believes propaganda.
Who said "with us or against us"? That guy sure has a simple worldview.
Anyway, of course the world isn't as simple as Moore presents it to be- Moore presents it as he sees it. He is the first to admit that his work is a collection of the facts that he views as important. This is what documentaries do- they sift through mountains of footage/documents/whatever and present a compressed version of those facts to the viewer. What is important to show and what is not is a decision that must be made by the film maker.
Others are, of course, free to promote their own competing views. I find Moore's compelling.
I especially can't buy that analysis when we are a under attack as a nation, when we need to decide who the "us" and "them" are. The war on us as well as the dialogue among my confreres here online has made me question that assumption of venality in American politics.
Oh, you can argue Bush is incompetent; sometimes I do wonder. You can disagree with his policies; I disagree with many. You can question his intelligence; jury's out still. I didn't vote for Bush the last time and don't plan to this time. But I don't buy Moore's Bush. To say that he's the dark force of the universe only leads to simple-minded over-generalizations and bilious caricatures.
He doesn't make him out to be the dark force of the universe. If you don't believe me you'll either have to see the film for yourself or else wait for Jarvis to provide some examples that demonstrate this stunning conclusion.
Like Fahrenheit 9/11.
: The real problem with the film, the really offensive thing about it, is that in Fahrenheit 9/11, we -- Americans from the President on down -- are portrayed as the bad guys.
So, Lila Lipscolm and her family are not Americans? Are they Canadian or something? Did we see the same movie?
If there's something wrong about bin Laden it's that his estranged family has ties with -- cue the uh-oh music -- the Bush family. Saddam? Nothing wrong with him. No mention of torture and terror and tyranny. Moore shows scenes of Baghdad before the invasion (read: liberation) and in his weltanschauung, it's a place filled with nothing but happy, smiling, giggly, overjoyed Baghdadis. No pain and suffering there. No rape, murder, gassing, imprisoning, silencing of the citizens in these scenes.
Moore makes the point repeatedly in his public appearances that EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS THAT. And yet, life in Baghdad was fairly normal for most people, and that's something that not everyone knows.
Let me put it to you this way. Every time I hear someone talk about how bad Saddam was, they don't say "but we killed civilians in our invasion and called it collateral damage, and we abused civilians at Abu Ghraib." When you are making the point that Saddam has done something bad, the bad things we do are beside the point, right? Well when we do something bad, the fact that Saddam did something bad too is quite irrelevant.
Frankly, Saddam's behavior is not the standard we want to live down to.
When he exploits and lingers on the tears of a mother who lost her soldier-son in Iraq,
You jerk. Maybe by exploit you mean "show with her permission". Show some respect- she lost her son and her story deserves to be told.
and she wails, "Why did yo have to take him?" Moore does not cut to images of the murderers/terrorists (pardon me, "insurgents") in Iraq or killed him -- or even to God; he cuts to George Bush.
Oh I'm sorry, is God the Commander in Chief now?
When the soldier's father says the young man died and "for what?", Moore doesn't show liberated Iraqis to reply, he cuts instead to an image of Halliburton.
You know what would be really great? If Halliburton weren't making a profit on the war. Then Moore would have no argument.
He doesn't try, not for one second, to have a discussion,
Jeff, he can't hear you - the movie is a one-way medium.
to show the other side -- and then cut that other side down to size with facts and figures and the slightest effort at argument. No, he just shows the one side. And that, really, is a tragedy.
I assure you everyone has heard a million refutations to Moore's schtick already. In fact, that's why everyone wants to see it! It's not tragic that Moore doesn't present the other side- it's tragic that the facts that Moore does present are news to so many people because no one else is making a big deal about them.
It would be good if we had a discussion. It would be good to have a movie that made us think and reconsider and talk.
But polemics don't do that. They're only made of two-by-fours.
You mean, you'd prefer a strongly stated opinion that inspired you and dozens of other bloggers to type up your opinions and discuss the issues... that would be great. Tragically(tm), so far you've instead decided to whip up an attack on Moore that boils down to a straw man and an announcement that you disagree. To wit:
1.) He has a super-secret hidden assumption that Bush is pure evil, but that super-secret hidden assumption is wrong
2.) He tells his story from his perspective, leaving the very important perspective of Jeff Jarvis unheralded.
Whatever dude.
: The cheap tricks keep on coming, mostly in what is not said.
My favorite trick! Don't say something that's not true! That SLY DEVIL!
At the start of the movie, Moore fuzzes the video of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, et al to make it look as if it were recovered World War II film from Hitler's Berchtesgaden: the bad guys in happier days. The trick is unintentionally appropriate: He's trying to say that these guys are Nazis but he's also using the Nazi propaganda motif to say it.
I assure you that your point about the Berchtesgaden is totally lost on the guy with the septum piercing who was sitting next to me. You just wanted a chance to compare Moore to a Nazi, no matter how strained the comparison may be.
Countless people died because of the Nazis- Moore just rolled some footage of Wolfowitz licking his comb. Shame on you.
He asks the same questions, streteches out the same memes, we've seen on the Web regarding Bush and 9/11: Why did he sit there in that school another almost seven minutes after hearing that the second tower had been hit? The implication was that he could have done something. But how often do we hear anyone ask -- certainly Moore does not -- what he would have done? What if he had popped up in a panic and ran off? How would that have looked on TV to a nation and a world in such a moment of disorder? Is there some order he could have given in those minutes that the vast federal power structure could not -- and, in fact, was not better equipped to handle than Bush?
Here's you complaining that Moore didn't make the movie you would have made again. These are great questions that have been provoked largely by the fact that this movie is making people talk about them.
One thing I can't let slide though- his options were more varied than 1. sit there 2. jump up and start raving like a scared idiot. Don't be coy.
And if you think Bush is such a frigging idiot, isn't it better that he sat there?
Yes!
But that doesn't mean we don't want someone smarter in office next time this happens, or that we don't want to expose the fact that this was the most useful thing he could do.
The question keeps getting asked. The ellipsis carries the message. But that's no answer.
He goes after Bush ties to the Saudis again and again but never enumerates the Saudi sins.
The official Saudi beheading earned the film an R rating, did we see the same movie?
I remember three things:
1. The Saudis have an abysmal human rights record, for beheadings among other things.
2. The Saudis have invested heavily in American defense industries, which would give them a conflict of interest if they had any influence over our military decision making
3. The Saudis have a rather surprising amount of financial involvement with the Bush family. The comparison between the $400,000 Presidential salary and the Billions invested in the Bush family ventures by the Saudis was pretty striking to me.
They're there. It wouldn't be hard. It would be helpful. Why not? Just laziness? Or is it easier to end with another ellipsis? Conspiracies are spiced with silence.
The connections suggested are scandalous in and of themselves. True they suggest but don't necessarily imply some really nasty conspiracies. But why would you want Moore to say more than he can prove?
Wouldn't it be nice if we had a President who avoided even the appearance of such scandalous ties? And by "avoiding the appearance", I mean not having the ties, I don't mean censoring James Bath's name out of his National Guard records. I want him to avoid both the appearance AND the reality of such ties.
We know that Moore opposed even the war in Afghanistan but here he doesn't say that. Here he says we didn't bring enough force to Afghanistan and thereby gave bin Laden "a two-month headstart." Moore doesn't say that Bush, with his family ties to bin Laden's family, wanted that to happen. But the ellipsis whispers it.
There you go again. Moore states the facts, and you draw sinister straw-man conclusions. I left with the impression that Bush's goal was the pipeline, and that bin Laden was a pretense. The fact that Bush had ties to the bin Laden's was really just icing.
He ridicules the terror threats and alerts, showing goofy stories about poison pens and model airplanes and goofier guys from the canned-bean crowd showing off their terror shelters. He gets a congressman, Rep. Jim McDermott, to downright say that the alerts are all engineered to keep us on edge. The implication is -- the sllipsis says -- that we're not in danger. I watch this scant blocks from where almost 3,000 Americans were killed that day. Oh, yes, Moore, we are in danger.
The point McDermott was making was that a terror alert that is always on is worse than nothing. It keeps people scared but doesn't make them safer. An Orange terror rating would not have stopped those 3000 people from dying.
But of course, as this is a documentary you're free to draw your own conclusions and discuss them, no matter how "tragic" you find Moore's opinion.
But Moore wants to pooh-pooh the danger and make it into a conspiracy: "Was this really about our safety or..." [pregnant ellipsis] "...something else?" He adds (and I can't read one word of my scribbled transcription): "The terrorism threat wasn't waht this was all about. They just wanted us to be fearful enough to get behind their plan."
Of course, it was all about Iraq.... Wasn't it?...
: If you don't believe that, well, says Moore, you're an idiot. You're Britney Spears, shown in all her ditziness saying, "Honestly, I think we should just trust our President." There's your spokesman for the other side: Britney.
She was a master stroke in my opinion. She was a spokesmodel for the naive view that you should always trust the President. In reality you should make up your mind for yourself and expect your President to level with you, and raise bloody hell when he lies to you.
Or you're a bloodthirsty American goon, which is how Moore portrays soldiers who rush into battle hopped up on rock 'n' roll. He spares us the obvious napalm, morning, smell thing.
Were those interviews fictional? Is that what you're saying? Those soldiers sure looked real to me, and it certainly seems believable that a) you have to dehumanize the people you want to kill to effectively kill them and b) listening to aggresive rock music would help to give you the adrenaline rush you need to actually go through with it.
Of course I've never killed anyone, and so far as I know neither has George Bush. I trust that John Kerry knows what it's like though and will make decisions about war and peace with the wisdom that comes from having had that experience in the service of his country.
In Moore's view, you're either with him or against him. Hmmm, who else looks at the world that way?
Yup, Moore is just he mirror image of what he despises. He is the O'Reilly... the Bush of the left.
Except that Moore has neither the authority nor the intention to start a war. The President must create policy that satisfies many constituencies. Moore's obligations are to 1. the facts and 2. his audience.
: After leaving the theater and walking by the black man now shaking his head at what Moore had wrought and the people with bring-down-Bush clipboards, I made my way back to New Jersey through the PATH train at the World Trade Center where, most of you know, I was on 9/11. And now I was shaking my head. Michael Moore did not present bin Laden and the terrorists and religious fanatics (from other lands) as the enemy who did this. No, to him, our enemy is within. To him, our enemy is us. And that's worse than stupid and sad and it's most certainly not entertaining. It's disgusting.
That would be disgusting, but that's not what he says. He says that bin Laden did 9/11 and Bush decided to pin it on Saddam to justify the war in Iraq and that he didn't think too much about bin Laden specifically (and he quotes Bush to that effect in one of the most damning segments of the film).
: Later, I read Christopher Hitchens' wonderful fisking of the film.
Yeah, Hitchens plays the Nazi card too by comparing him to Leni Riefenstahl. Disqualified due to Godwin's law - first comparison to Hitler or Nazis officially ends the discussion.
And then I read A.O. Scott's mealy-mouthed review in The Times. He points out that the movie is full of crap in many ways: "...blithely trampling the boundary between documentary and demagoguery..." Hey, blurb that!
[Fahrenheit 9/11] is many things: a partisan rallying cry, an angry polemic, a muckraking inquisition into the use and abuse of power. But one thing it is not is a fair and nuanced picture of the president and his policies. What did you expect? Mr. Moore is often impolite, rarely subtle and occasionally unwise. He can be obnoxious, tendentious and maddeningly self-contradictory. He can drive even his most ardent admirers crazy.
But then Scott lets Moore off the hook -- and himself off the hook with that audience that applauded the flick in the East Village, which is Times Country, too -- with this: "He is a credit to the republic."
I guess he'd say the same thing of Rush Limbaugh, then.
I'd bet he would if Rush Limbaugh weren't
1. a patron of the torture of civilians
2. a hypocrite on drug use
3. a hypocrite on the sanctity of marriage
tough to see past those.
Scott keeps going. On the one hand:
After you leave the theater, some questions are likely to linger about Mr. Moore's views on the war in Afghanistan, about whether he thinks the homeland security program has been too intrusive or not intrusive enough, and about how he thinks the government should have responded to the murderous jihadists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11.
Right. But on the other hand:
At the same time, though, it may be that the confusions trailing Mr. Moore's narrative are what make "Fahrenheit 9/11" an authentic and indispensable document of its time. The film can be seen as an effort to wrest clarity from shock, anger and dismay, and if parts of it seem rash, overstated or muddled, well, so has the national mood.
Crap. It is not creditworthy only to attack and call that discussion and democracy; to insult our intelligence with half, quarter, and untruths; to stifle debate with polemic rather than provoke debate with facts; to mock the people he exploits on film; to gloss over his own outrageous opinions for the sake of convenience; to turn his guns on his own people, letting those who attacked us off as free as birds.
No, this is no more good democracy than it is good filmmaking.
Scott's saying that Moore's work is muddled because the issue is muddy. You again would prefer that he have written the review you would have written, but he did not.
: EPILOGUE: The movie was Topic A in Howard Stern's opening this morning and the discussion there demonstrates exactly what is wrong with Fahrenheit 9/11: Moore provided no facts for an honest discussion. He provided only fuel for the fire, bullets for bombast.
Granted, this ain't exactly the Algonquin Round Table; it doesn't pretend to be.
That sums it up pretty well, doesn't it? Why do you continue beyond this point?
Stern switched sides so completely that he tries not to acknowledge his former support for the war and for Bush as command-in-chief against the terrorists. Stern wasn't fooled about WMD as he tries to argue now; he was -- like me -- a Tom Friedman war supporter who believed that we had to do this somewhere, we had to bring democracy to somewhere in the Middle East and Iraq was a good place to do it because Saddam was a tyrant and his continued rule was, in good measure, our fault. It's possible to be against Bush in this election and still be for the war and at the same time think that we've messed up the aftermath; it's still possible to support Bush as the sitting president while wanting to unseat him. As Bill Clinton said on Today today when asked whether the release of his book would distract voters: "The American people can walk and chew gum at the same time." Nonetheless, I grant that Stern is hardly trying for a nuanced argument. And the only person to argue against him is his TV director, a graduate of Glassboro State, which ain't exactly Yale.
Stern has experienced first hand the seriousness of Bush's commitment to "freedom". He's off the air in my home town of Pittsburgh (among other ClearChannel markets) because of FCC pressure. So he more than anyone else has a legitimate beef when it comes to Bush's actual commitment to freedom, and has changed his mind about this war for a very good reason.
Still, the argument that raged for 20 loud minutes on Stern this morning will be replayed by water coolers all across America. And you could say that is good for Democracy. You could say that if the people arguing were armed by the film that causes the arguments with facts and intelligent views of the issues. But, instead, they're armed only with one side, half-facts, and bile. That doesn't make for good dialogue or democracy.
Facts are widely available. It makes for a dialogue that includes opinions other than those of Jeff Jarvis, and that is sure as hell good for democracy.
: BY THE WAY: The commercials for the film are still saying it's not rated. It has been rated R because of the copious gore and the appeal of that rating lost, even with Mario Cuomo arguing the case. So the commercial isn't quite, well, telling the truth.
Well that's a torpedo that ought to sink any ship. Give 'em hell Jeff.
Warning: long post. I lay bare the erroneous reasoning of Jeff Jarvis in his review of Fahrenheit 9/11.
[intro snark snipped]
Take this scene: Moore shows dead American soldiers in Iraq, many of them, the more blood the better. Then he says we need to replace them and he asks where they'll come from. He takes us to his favorite man-of-the-people populist playground, Flint, MI, and says that we'll find soldiers "in the places that had been destroyed by the economy." He focuses on poor black men as Bush's next victims -- not even acknowledging that virtually every soldier he has just shown -- and ridiculed -- in the film is white. It's all so convenient: anti-war-pro-poor-multi-culti-heartland.
There's a whole lot of problems with this. First, the soldiers were not ridiculed- they were quoted. If what they said was embarassing, it's not Moore's fault. He plays the songs that they like to kill to in the background. Second, not all of the soldiers Moore quotes are white anyway, nor are all the recruits he shows black. But they all had this in common: they ain't no Senator's sons.
But as I leave, I hear an older woman behind me, with a voice as loud at New York traffic, saying to someone who's passing her on the escalator, obviously a stranger: "Don't you sign up, now! Don't you join!" I turn around. She's saying this to a black man, just because he's black: After all, Michael Moore said those people are all conservative cannon fodder, didn't he? The man and the woman with him are polite enough to wait until they're out the door before they laugh and then sadly shake their heads.
Hoo boy.
Yep. Racists are pretty stupid no matter whether they're left or right. Fortunately this woman meant well but was stupid. Anyway, this woman was in Jeff Jarvis' audience but was not in Michael Moore's movie, so it's kind of irrelevant.
: One of the many things I've learned from blogging confrere Jay Rosen is that you have to stand back and investigate the assumptions that underly a media enterprise.
Translation: I can't attack the movie's veracity directly so I'm going to cast some vague aspersions instead.
Moore's assumption is venality. He assumes that President Bush and his confreres are venal, that their motives are black, that they are out to do no good, only bad, and that the only choices they make in life are between greed and power.
That's inevitably a bad analysis. It's the exact same analysis Bill Clinton's enemies made of him. If they were wrong about Clinton, well then, Michael Moore is wrong about Bush.
I'm tempted to take this at face value and allow that Moore makes this assumption, even though he doesn't. Even if he did make such an assumption, the fact that it wasn't true about Clinton would in no way prove that it also wasn't true about Bush. That's really really stupid. Observe the logic:
People said OJ killed his wife, but he was acquitted. They say Scott Peterson killed his wife too, and so he should also be acquitted.
Sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?
Anyway, Moore doesn't make this assumption, although people who like Bush might see it that way. Personally I think he was painting more of an "in over his head" picture than a simple "venal evil greedy" picture, but there's lots of room for interpretation. So far, no examples are offered to demonstrate the "assumption" that Jarvis ascribes to Moore's subconscious film-making mentality.
Life is never that simple, never that obvious, unless you're a propagandist or one who believes propaganda.
Who said "with us or against us"? That guy sure has a simple worldview.
Anyway, of course the world isn't as simple as Moore presents it to be- Moore presents it as he sees it. He is the first to admit that his work is a collection of the facts that he views as important. This is what documentaries do- they sift through mountains of footage/documents/whatever and present a compressed version of those facts to the viewer. What is important to show and what is not is a decision that must be made by the film maker.
Others are, of course, free to promote their own competing views. I find Moore's compelling.
I especially can't buy that analysis when we are a under attack as a nation, when we need to decide who the "us" and "them" are. The war on us as well as the dialogue among my confreres here online has made me question that assumption of venality in American politics.
Oh, you can argue Bush is incompetent; sometimes I do wonder. You can disagree with his policies; I disagree with many. You can question his intelligence; jury's out still. I didn't vote for Bush the last time and don't plan to this time. But I don't buy Moore's Bush. To say that he's the dark force of the universe only leads to simple-minded over-generalizations and bilious caricatures.
He doesn't make him out to be the dark force of the universe. If you don't believe me you'll either have to see the film for yourself or else wait for Jarvis to provide some examples that demonstrate this stunning conclusion.
Like Fahrenheit 9/11.
: The real problem with the film, the really offensive thing about it, is that in Fahrenheit 9/11, we -- Americans from the President on down -- are portrayed as the bad guys.
So, Lila Lipscolm and her family are not Americans? Are they Canadian or something? Did we see the same movie?
If there's something wrong about bin Laden it's that his estranged family has ties with -- cue the uh-oh music -- the Bush family. Saddam? Nothing wrong with him. No mention of torture and terror and tyranny. Moore shows scenes of Baghdad before the invasion (read: liberation) and in his weltanschauung, it's a place filled with nothing but happy, smiling, giggly, overjoyed Baghdadis. No pain and suffering there. No rape, murder, gassing, imprisoning, silencing of the citizens in these scenes.
Moore makes the point repeatedly in his public appearances that EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS THAT. And yet, life in Baghdad was fairly normal for most people, and that's something that not everyone knows.
Let me put it to you this way. Every time I hear someone talk about how bad Saddam was, they don't say "but we killed civilians in our invasion and called it collateral damage, and we abused civilians at Abu Ghraib." When you are making the point that Saddam has done something bad, the bad things we do are beside the point, right? Well when we do something bad, the fact that Saddam did something bad too is quite irrelevant.
Frankly, Saddam's behavior is not the standard we want to live down to.
When he exploits and lingers on the tears of a mother who lost her soldier-son in Iraq,
You jerk. Maybe by exploit you mean "show with her permission". Show some respect- she lost her son and her story deserves to be told.
and she wails, "Why did yo have to take him?" Moore does not cut to images of the murderers/terrorists (pardon me, "insurgents") in Iraq or killed him -- or even to God; he cuts to George Bush.
Oh I'm sorry, is God the Commander in Chief now?
When the soldier's father says the young man died and "for what?", Moore doesn't show liberated Iraqis to reply, he cuts instead to an image of Halliburton.
You know what would be really great? If Halliburton weren't making a profit on the war. Then Moore would have no argument.
He doesn't try, not for one second, to have a discussion,
Jeff, he can't hear you - the movie is a one-way medium.
to show the other side -- and then cut that other side down to size with facts and figures and the slightest effort at argument. No, he just shows the one side. And that, really, is a tragedy.
I assure you everyone has heard a million refutations to Moore's schtick already. In fact, that's why everyone wants to see it! It's not tragic that Moore doesn't present the other side- it's tragic that the facts that Moore does present are news to so many people because no one else is making a big deal about them.
It would be good if we had a discussion. It would be good to have a movie that made us think and reconsider and talk.
But polemics don't do that. They're only made of two-by-fours.
You mean, you'd prefer a strongly stated opinion that inspired you and dozens of other bloggers to type up your opinions and discuss the issues... that would be great. Tragically(tm), so far you've instead decided to whip up an attack on Moore that boils down to a straw man and an announcement that you disagree. To wit:
1.) He has a super-secret hidden assumption that Bush is pure evil, but that super-secret hidden assumption is wrong
2.) He tells his story from his perspective, leaving the very important perspective of Jeff Jarvis unheralded.
Whatever dude.
: The cheap tricks keep on coming, mostly in what is not said.
My favorite trick! Don't say something that's not true! That SLY DEVIL!
At the start of the movie, Moore fuzzes the video of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, et al to make it look as if it were recovered World War II film from Hitler's Berchtesgaden: the bad guys in happier days. The trick is unintentionally appropriate: He's trying to say that these guys are Nazis but he's also using the Nazi propaganda motif to say it.
I assure you that your point about the Berchtesgaden is totally lost on the guy with the septum piercing who was sitting next to me. You just wanted a chance to compare Moore to a Nazi, no matter how strained the comparison may be.
Countless people died because of the Nazis- Moore just rolled some footage of Wolfowitz licking his comb. Shame on you.
He asks the same questions, streteches out the same memes, we've seen on the Web regarding Bush and 9/11: Why did he sit there in that school another almost seven minutes after hearing that the second tower had been hit? The implication was that he could have done something. But how often do we hear anyone ask -- certainly Moore does not -- what he would have done? What if he had popped up in a panic and ran off? How would that have looked on TV to a nation and a world in such a moment of disorder? Is there some order he could have given in those minutes that the vast federal power structure could not -- and, in fact, was not better equipped to handle than Bush?
Here's you complaining that Moore didn't make the movie you would have made again. These are great questions that have been provoked largely by the fact that this movie is making people talk about them.
One thing I can't let slide though- his options were more varied than 1. sit there 2. jump up and start raving like a scared idiot. Don't be coy.
And if you think Bush is such a frigging idiot, isn't it better that he sat there?
Yes!
But that doesn't mean we don't want someone smarter in office next time this happens, or that we don't want to expose the fact that this was the most useful thing he could do.
The question keeps getting asked. The ellipsis carries the message. But that's no answer.
He goes after Bush ties to the Saudis again and again but never enumerates the Saudi sins.
The official Saudi beheading earned the film an R rating, did we see the same movie?
I remember three things:
1. The Saudis have an abysmal human rights record, for beheadings among other things.
2. The Saudis have invested heavily in American defense industries, which would give them a conflict of interest if they had any influence over our military decision making
3. The Saudis have a rather surprising amount of financial involvement with the Bush family. The comparison between the $400,000 Presidential salary and the Billions invested in the Bush family ventures by the Saudis was pretty striking to me.
They're there. It wouldn't be hard. It would be helpful. Why not? Just laziness? Or is it easier to end with another ellipsis? Conspiracies are spiced with silence.
The connections suggested are scandalous in and of themselves. True they suggest but don't necessarily imply some really nasty conspiracies. But why would you want Moore to say more than he can prove?
Wouldn't it be nice if we had a President who avoided even the appearance of such scandalous ties? And by "avoiding the appearance", I mean not having the ties, I don't mean censoring James Bath's name out of his National Guard records. I want him to avoid both the appearance AND the reality of such ties.
We know that Moore opposed even the war in Afghanistan but here he doesn't say that. Here he says we didn't bring enough force to Afghanistan and thereby gave bin Laden "a two-month headstart." Moore doesn't say that Bush, with his family ties to bin Laden's family, wanted that to happen. But the ellipsis whispers it.
There you go again. Moore states the facts, and you draw sinister straw-man conclusions. I left with the impression that Bush's goal was the pipeline, and that bin Laden was a pretense. The fact that Bush had ties to the bin Laden's was really just icing.
He ridicules the terror threats and alerts, showing goofy stories about poison pens and model airplanes and goofier guys from the canned-bean crowd showing off their terror shelters. He gets a congressman, Rep. Jim McDermott, to downright say that the alerts are all engineered to keep us on edge. The implication is -- the sllipsis says -- that we're not in danger. I watch this scant blocks from where almost 3,000 Americans were killed that day. Oh, yes, Moore, we are in danger.
The point McDermott was making was that a terror alert that is always on is worse than nothing. It keeps people scared but doesn't make them safer. An Orange terror rating would not have stopped those 3000 people from dying.
But of course, as this is a documentary you're free to draw your own conclusions and discuss them, no matter how "tragic" you find Moore's opinion.
But Moore wants to pooh-pooh the danger and make it into a conspiracy: "Was this really about our safety or..." [pregnant ellipsis] "...something else?" He adds (and I can't read one word of my scribbled transcription): "The terrorism threat wasn't waht this was all about. They just wanted us to be fearful enough to get behind their plan."
Of course, it was all about Iraq.... Wasn't it?...
: If you don't believe that, well, says Moore, you're an idiot. You're Britney Spears, shown in all her ditziness saying, "Honestly, I think we should just trust our President." There's your spokesman for the other side: Britney.
She was a master stroke in my opinion. She was a spokesmodel for the naive view that you should always trust the President. In reality you should make up your mind for yourself and expect your President to level with you, and raise bloody hell when he lies to you.
Or you're a bloodthirsty American goon, which is how Moore portrays soldiers who rush into battle hopped up on rock 'n' roll. He spares us the obvious napalm, morning, smell thing.
Were those interviews fictional? Is that what you're saying? Those soldiers sure looked real to me, and it certainly seems believable that a) you have to dehumanize the people you want to kill to effectively kill them and b) listening to aggresive rock music would help to give you the adrenaline rush you need to actually go through with it.
Of course I've never killed anyone, and so far as I know neither has George Bush. I trust that John Kerry knows what it's like though and will make decisions about war and peace with the wisdom that comes from having had that experience in the service of his country.
In Moore's view, you're either with him or against him. Hmmm, who else looks at the world that way?
Yup, Moore is just he mirror image of what he despises. He is the O'Reilly... the Bush of the left.
Except that Moore has neither the authority nor the intention to start a war. The President must create policy that satisfies many constituencies. Moore's obligations are to 1. the facts and 2. his audience.
: After leaving the theater and walking by the black man now shaking his head at what Moore had wrought and the people with bring-down-Bush clipboards, I made my way back to New Jersey through the PATH train at the World Trade Center where, most of you know, I was on 9/11. And now I was shaking my head. Michael Moore did not present bin Laden and the terrorists and religious fanatics (from other lands) as the enemy who did this. No, to him, our enemy is within. To him, our enemy is us. And that's worse than stupid and sad and it's most certainly not entertaining. It's disgusting.
That would be disgusting, but that's not what he says. He says that bin Laden did 9/11 and Bush decided to pin it on Saddam to justify the war in Iraq and that he didn't think too much about bin Laden specifically (and he quotes Bush to that effect in one of the most damning segments of the film).
: Later, I read Christopher Hitchens' wonderful fisking of the film.
Yeah, Hitchens plays the Nazi card too by comparing him to Leni Riefenstahl. Disqualified due to Godwin's law - first comparison to Hitler or Nazis officially ends the discussion.
And then I read A.O. Scott's mealy-mouthed review in The Times. He points out that the movie is full of crap in many ways: "...blithely trampling the boundary between documentary and demagoguery..." Hey, blurb that!
[Fahrenheit 9/11] is many things: a partisan rallying cry, an angry polemic, a muckraking inquisition into the use and abuse of power. But one thing it is not is a fair and nuanced picture of the president and his policies. What did you expect? Mr. Moore is often impolite, rarely subtle and occasionally unwise. He can be obnoxious, tendentious and maddeningly self-contradictory. He can drive even his most ardent admirers crazy.
But then Scott lets Moore off the hook -- and himself off the hook with that audience that applauded the flick in the East Village, which is Times Country, too -- with this: "He is a credit to the republic."
I guess he'd say the same thing of Rush Limbaugh, then.
I'd bet he would if Rush Limbaugh weren't
1. a patron of the torture of civilians
2. a hypocrite on drug use
3. a hypocrite on the sanctity of marriage
tough to see past those.
Scott keeps going. On the one hand:
After you leave the theater, some questions are likely to linger about Mr. Moore's views on the war in Afghanistan, about whether he thinks the homeland security program has been too intrusive or not intrusive enough, and about how he thinks the government should have responded to the murderous jihadists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11.
Right. But on the other hand:
At the same time, though, it may be that the confusions trailing Mr. Moore's narrative are what make "Fahrenheit 9/11" an authentic and indispensable document of its time. The film can be seen as an effort to wrest clarity from shock, anger and dismay, and if parts of it seem rash, overstated or muddled, well, so has the national mood.
Crap. It is not creditworthy only to attack and call that discussion and democracy; to insult our intelligence with half, quarter, and untruths; to stifle debate with polemic rather than provoke debate with facts; to mock the people he exploits on film; to gloss over his own outrageous opinions for the sake of convenience; to turn his guns on his own people, letting those who attacked us off as free as birds.
No, this is no more good democracy than it is good filmmaking.
Scott's saying that Moore's work is muddled because the issue is muddy. You again would prefer that he have written the review you would have written, but he did not.
: EPILOGUE: The movie was Topic A in Howard Stern's opening this morning and the discussion there demonstrates exactly what is wrong with Fahrenheit 9/11: Moore provided no facts for an honest discussion. He provided only fuel for the fire, bullets for bombast.
Granted, this ain't exactly the Algonquin Round Table; it doesn't pretend to be.
That sums it up pretty well, doesn't it? Why do you continue beyond this point?
Stern switched sides so completely that he tries not to acknowledge his former support for the war and for Bush as command-in-chief against the terrorists. Stern wasn't fooled about WMD as he tries to argue now; he was -- like me -- a Tom Friedman war supporter who believed that we had to do this somewhere, we had to bring democracy to somewhere in the Middle East and Iraq was a good place to do it because Saddam was a tyrant and his continued rule was, in good measure, our fault. It's possible to be against Bush in this election and still be for the war and at the same time think that we've messed up the aftermath; it's still possible to support Bush as the sitting president while wanting to unseat him. As Bill Clinton said on Today today when asked whether the release of his book would distract voters: "The American people can walk and chew gum at the same time." Nonetheless, I grant that Stern is hardly trying for a nuanced argument. And the only person to argue against him is his TV director, a graduate of Glassboro State, which ain't exactly Yale.
Stern has experienced first hand the seriousness of Bush's commitment to "freedom". He's off the air in my home town of Pittsburgh (among other ClearChannel markets) because of FCC pressure. So he more than anyone else has a legitimate beef when it comes to Bush's actual commitment to freedom, and has changed his mind about this war for a very good reason.
Still, the argument that raged for 20 loud minutes on Stern this morning will be replayed by water coolers all across America. And you could say that is good for Democracy. You could say that if the people arguing were armed by the film that causes the arguments with facts and intelligent views of the issues. But, instead, they're armed only with one side, half-facts, and bile. That doesn't make for good dialogue or democracy.
Facts are widely available. It makes for a dialogue that includes opinions other than those of Jeff Jarvis, and that is sure as hell good for democracy.
: BY THE WAY: The commercials for the film are still saying it's not rated. It has been rated R because of the copious gore and the appeal of that rating lost, even with Mario Cuomo arguing the case. So the commercial isn't quite, well, telling the truth.
Well that's a torpedo that ought to sink any ship. Give 'em hell Jeff.
