Burning the Democrats
The following was originally published at Bloomberg.
Will `Fahrenheit 9/11’ Burn the Democrats?
by Andrew Ferguson
June 29 (Bloomberg)—A political activist rang me up and told me I had to see the new documentary about the president.
``It’s chilling,’’ he said. ``It shows what a slimeball this guy is.’’
So I saw the movie, and it was—how to put this?—a crock. Watching it I thought: Whoever produced this slanderous mess deserves to be run out of polite society.
That was 10 years ago, and the documentary was a slapdash confection of lies and innuendo called ``The Clinton Chronicles.’’
It accused Bill Clinton—slyly and indirectly—of drug- running and worse. There was no evidence but lots of insinuation, a series of meaningless coincidences presented in breathless tones so the weak-minded might connect dots that weren’t there.
Now the U.S. is being treated to the same kind of exercise, on a much grander scale, with Michael Moore’s scabrous ``Fahrenheit 9/11.’’ And once again weak-minded ideologues are lapping it up like hungry pups.
Big Difference
There’s a big difference, though. Polite society, especially the mainstream press, recognized the producers of ``The Clinton Chronicles,’’ a California-based group called Citizens for Honest Government, as the fools they were. After hawking the film on his TV show, the televangelist Jerry Falwell never quite recovered what little reputation he had once enjoyed. Years later, he was still apologizing in TV appearances for associating himself with the movie.
Now, however, the paranoid strain has so thoroughly saturated U.S. politics that Moore’s cinematic slander can be feted and extolled—not only by mainstream movie reviewers but, more ominously, by the same Democratic Party establishment that Moore accuses of colluding with President George W. Bush.
At the Washington premiere of ``Fahrenheit 9/11’’ last week, Moore was conspicuously greeted for the cameras by Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
``There might be half the Democratic Senate here,’’ Senator Bob Graham of Florida told the New York Times.
Unlike the Democratic Party, Moore has always prided himself on his radicalism. So who’s changed—Moore or the Democratic Party?
Surprised by Surprise
I saw the movie at an early showing on Saturday afternoon in a packed theater in my heavily liberal Washington suburb. As the film unspooled, the audience laughed, fell silent, and tut-tutted to Moore’s heavy-handed cues with Pavlovian discipline.
I, on the other hand, was unmoved. (Maybe you’ve noticed.) But I was surprised by the movie—and surprised by my surprise.
Shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Moore posted this on his Web site: ``We, the United States of America, are culpable in committing so many acts of terror and bloodshed that we had better get a clue about the culture of violence in which we have been active participants.’’
So I wasn’t surprised that Moore is, um, skeptical about U.S. motives for invading Iraq. To the extent he has an explicit thesis at all, it’s that the invasion was a scheme to divert attention from the Bush family’s involvement with the family of Osama bin Laden.
Shadings of Fact
And having followed Moore’s career, I wasn’t surprised by his shadings of fact. When he says that ``many studies’’ showed Al Gore won the vote in Florida, for example, he neglects to mention that many more, including recounts by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, say Gore did not.
And I wasn’t surprised that when he ridicules Bush for sitting passively in front of a classroom of schoolchildren directly after learning of the attacks, he omits the reaction of the school principal.
``I don’t think anyone could have handled it better’’ than Bush did, the principal, Gwendolyn Tose-Rigell, told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
And I wasn’t surprised that Moore accuses—if ``accuse’’ is a synonym for ``insinuate’’—Bush of approving the flight of the bin Laden family from the U.S. after Sept. 11. Why, the family’s passports weren’t even checked, Moore says, even though ``that’s what would happen to you or I.’’
I wasn’t surprised that they don’t teach grammar in film school.
Moore’s Method
What did surprise me, though, was the crudity of Moore’s method. Moore calls his movie an ``op-ed,’’ but it is written in Crayola, with a heavy grip.
He mostly avoids straightforward factual assertions—which makes the movie harder to confront and argue with—in favor of ellipsis and misdirection. The music is alternately creepy (that’s how you know he’s being serious) and chipper (that’s how you know he’s being sarcastic). His cultural allusions show the depth of the Baby Boomer satirist, ranging from TV reruns like ``Dragnet’’ to TV reruns like ``Bonanza.’’
The movie’s only powerful moments—of soldiers in Iraq, of the immediate aftermath of the Twin Towers’ collapse—come in footage Moore has acquired from other sources.
Party Embrace
Will anyone care that the movie, viewed as either art or journalism, is a mess? ``Fahrenheit 9/11’’ has a Palme d’Or from the Cannes film festival—and now the implicit endorsement of the Democratic Party establishment.
This embrace of Moore’s crackpottery is great news for Moore, very bad news for Democrats—just as the GOP’s kooky flirtations under Clinton did damage it has yet to recover from.
By the way, I eventually lost track of my political-activist friend, but I heard about him the other day. Apparently he’s urging people to boycott ``Fahrenheit 9/11.’’ It’s the work of an extremist, he says. And who would know better?
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