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Michael Moore states to an interviewer, "I was told the doughnuts
were that way."
One of the
many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American
left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too
solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and
boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did
I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical
Firing Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately
to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it,
would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings
themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the
danger of success on either front was infinitely slight.
Nonetheless, it seems that an answer to this long-felt need is finally
beginning to emerge. I exempt Al Franken's unintentionally funny
Air America network, to which I gave a couple of interviews in its
early days. There, one could hear the reassuring noise of collapsing
scenery and tripped-over wires and be reminded once again that correct
politics and smooth media presentation are not even distant cousins.
With Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, however, an entirely new note
has been struck. Here we glimpse a possible fusion between the turgid
routines of MoveOn.org and the filmic standards, if not exactly
the filmic skills, of Sergei Eisenstein or Leni Riefenstahl.
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What a light-hearted guy.
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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. Something—I cannot guess what, since we knew
as much then as we do now—has since apparently persuaded Moore
that Osama Bin Laden is as guilty as hell. Indeed, Osama is suddenly
so guilty and so all-powerful that any other discussion of any other
topic is a dangerous "distraction" from the fight against
him. I believe that I understand the convenience of this late conversion.
Recruiters in Michigan
Fahrenheit 9/11 makes the following points about Bin Laden and about
Afghanistan, and makes them in this order:
1) The Bin Laden family (if not exactly Osama himself) had a close
if convoluted business relationship with the Bush family, through
the Carlyle Group.
2) Saudi capital in general is a very large element of foreign investment
in the United States.
3) The Unocal company in Texas had been willing to discuss a gas
pipeline across Afghanistan with the Taliban, as had other vested
interests.
4) The Bush administration sent far too few ground troops to Afghanistan
and thus allowed far too many Taliban and al-Qaida members to escape.
5) The Afghan government, in supporting the coalition in Iraq, was
purely risible in that its non-army was purely American.
6) The American lives lost in Afghanistan have been wasted. (This
I divine from the fact that this supposedly "antiwar"
film is dedicated ruefully to all those killed there, as well as
in Iraq.)
It must be evident to anyone, despite the rapid-fire way in which
Moore's direction eases the audience hastily past the contradictions,
that these discrepant scatter shots do not cohere at any point.
Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming
economic interest), or they do not. As allies and patrons of the
Taliban regime, they either opposed Bush's removal of it, or they
did not. (They opposed the removal, all right: They wouldn't even
let Tony Blair land his own plane on their soil at the time of the
operation.) Either we sent too many troops, or were wrong to send
any at all—the latter was Moore's view as late as 2002—or
we sent too few. If we were going to make sure no Taliban or al-Qaida
forces survived or escaped, we would have had to be more ruthless
than I suspect that Mr. Moore is really recommending. And these
are simply observations on what is "in" the film. If we
turn to the facts that are deliberately left out, we discover that
there is an emerging Afghan army, that the country is now a joint
NATO responsibility and thus under the protection of the broadest
military alliance in history, that it has a new constitution and
is preparing against hellish odds to hold a general election, and
that at least a million and a half of its former refugees have opted
to return. I don't think a pipeline is being constructed yet, not
that Afghanistan couldn't do with a pipeline. But a highway from
Kabul to Kandahar—an insurance against warlordism and a condition
of nation-building—is nearing completion with infinite labor
and risk. We also discover that the parties of the Afghan secular
left—like the parties of the Iraqi secular left—are
strongly in favor of the regime change. But this is not the sort
of irony in which Moore chooses to deal.
He prefers leaden sarcasm to irony and, indeed, may not appreciate
the distinction. In a long and paranoid (and tedious) section at
the opening of the film, he makes heavy innuendoes about the flights
that took members of the Bin Laden family out of the country after
Sept. 11. I banged on about this myself at the time and wrote a
Nation column drawing attention to the groveling Larry King interview
with the insufferable Prince Bandar, which Moore excerpts. However,
recent developments have not been kind to our Mike. In the interval
between Moore's triumph at Cannes and the release of the film in
the United States, the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain
of in the timing or arrangement of the flights. And Richard Clarke,
Bush's former chief of counterterrorism, has come forward to say
that he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing those
Saudi departures. This might not matter so much to the ethos of
Fahrenheit 9/11, except that—as you might expect—Clarke
is presented throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the
entire post-9/11 moment. And it does not seem very likely that,
in his open admission about the Bin Laden family evacuation, Clarke
is taking a fall, or a spear in the chest, for the Bush administration.
So, that's another bust for this windy and bloated cinematic "key
to all mythologies."
A film that bases itself on a big lie and a big misrepresentation
can only sustain itself by a dizzying succession of smaller falsehoods,
beefed up by wilder and (if possible) yet more-contradictory claims.
President Bush is accused of taking too many lazy vacations. (What
is that about, by the way? Isn't he supposed to be an unceasing
planner for future aggressive wars?) But the shot of him "relaxing
at Camp David" shows him side by side with Tony Blair. I say
"shows," even though this photograph is on-screen so briefly
that if you sneeze or blink, you won't recognize the other figure.
A meeting with the prime minister of the United Kingdom, or at least
with this prime minister, is not a goof-off.
The president is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, on a
golf course, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism
and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what
you get if you catch the president on a golf course. If Eisenhower
had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as
calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it
would have shown his charm. More interesting is the moment where
Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the infant school in Florida,
looking stunned and useless for seven whole minutes after the news
of the second plane on 9/11. Many are those who say that he should
have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance, and
gone to work. I could even wish that myself. But if he had done
any such thing then (as he did with his "Let's roll" and
"dead or alive" remarks a month later), half the Michael
Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on
a hectic, crazed impulse. The other half would be saying what they
already say—that he knew the attack was coming, was using
it to cement himself in power, and couldn't wait to get on with
his coup. This is the line taken by Gore Vidal and by a scandalous
recent book that also revives the charge of FDR's collusion over
Pearl Harbor. At least Moore's film should put the shameful purveyors
of that last theory back in their paranoid box.
But it won't because it encourages their half-baked fantasies in
so many other ways. We are introduced to Iraq, "a sovereign
nation." (In fact, Iraq's "sovereignty" was heavily
qualified by international sanctions, however questionable, which
reflected its noncompliance with important U.N. resolutions.) In
this peaceable kingdom, according to Moore's flabbergasting choice
of film shots, children are flying little kites, shoppers are smiling
in the sunshine, and the gentle rhythms of life are undisturbed.
Then—wham! From the night sky come the terror weapons of American
imperialism. Watching the clips Moore uses, and recalling them well,
I can recognize various Saddam palaces and military and police centers
getting the treatment. But these sites are not identified as such.
In fact, I don't think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted
anything so utterly propagandistic. You would also be led to think
that the term "civilian casualty" had not even been in
the Iraqi vocabulary until March 2003. I remember asking Moore at
Telluride if he was or was not a pacifist. He would not give a straight
answer then, and he doesn't now, either. I'll just say that the
"insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably
outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and
repression and aggression is not mentioned once. (Actually, that's
not quite right. It is briefly mentioned but only, and smarmily,
because of the bad period when Washington preferred Saddam to the
likewise unmentioned Ayatollah Khomeini.)
That this—his pro-American moment—was the worst Moore
could possibly say of Saddam's depravity is further suggested by
some astonishing falsifications. Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam
had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any
American. I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he
looks, or even if that would be humanly possible. Baghdad was for
years the official, undisguised home address of Abu Nidal, then
the most-wanted gangster in the world, who had been sentenced to
death even by the PLO and had blown up airports in Vienna* and Rome.
Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation"
murdered Leon Klinghoffer. Saddam boasted publicly of his financial
sponsorship of suicide bombers in Israel. (Quite a few Americans
of all denominations walk the streets of Jerusalem.) In 1991, a
large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time.
After that same invasion was repelled—Saddam having killed
quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the
meantime and having threatened to kill many more—the Iraqi
secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush
during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take
that personally. (Though why should he not?) Should you and I not
resent any foreign dictatorship that attempts to kill one of our
retired chief executives? (President Clinton certainly took it that
way: He ordered the destruction by cruise missiles of the Baathist
"security" headquarters.) Iraqi forces fired, every day,
for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and
staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country.
In 1993, a certain Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals for the bomb
at the World Trade Center and then skipped to Iraq, where he remained
a guest of the state until the overthrow of Saddam. In 2001, Saddam's
regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the
attacks on New York and Washington and described them as just the
beginning of a larger revenge. Its official media regularly spewed
out a stream of anti-Semitic incitement. I think one might describe
that as "threatening," even if one was narrow enough to
think that anti-Semitism only menaces Jews. And it was after, and
not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from
Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal
design for a holy and ethnic civil war. On Dec. 1, 2003, the New
York Times reported—and the David Kay report had established—that
Saddam had been secretly negotiating with the "Dear Leader"
Kim Jong-il in a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as
the spring of 2003, to buy a North Korean missile system, and missile-production
system, right off the shelf. (This attempt was not uncovered until
after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition's presence having meanwhile
put an end to the negotiations.)
Thus, in spite of the film's loaded bias against the work of the
mind, you can grasp even while watching it that Michael Moore has
just said, in so many words, the one thing that no reflective or
informed person can possibly believe: that Saddam Hussein was no
problem. No problem at all. Now look again at the facts I have cited
above. If these things had been allowed to happen under any other
administration, you can be sure that Moore and others would now
glibly be accusing the president of ignoring, or of having ignored,
some fairly unmistakable "warnings."
The same "let's have it both ways" opportunism infects
his treatment of another very serious subject, namely domestic counterterrorist
policy. From being accused of overlooking too many warnings—not
exactly an original point—the administration is now lavishly
taunted for issuing too many. (Would there not have been "fear"
if the harbingers of 9/11 had been taken seriously?) We are shown
some American civilians who have had absurd encounters with idiotic
"security" staff. (Have you ever met anyone who can't
tell such a story?) Then we are immediately shown underfunded police
departments that don't have the means or the manpower to do any
stop-and-search: a power suddenly demanded by Moore on their behalf
that we know by definition would at least lead to some ridiculous
interrogations. Finally, Moore complains that there isn't enough
intrusion and confiscation at airports and says that it is appalling
that every air traveler is not forcibly relieved of all matches
and lighters. (Cue mood music for sinister influence of Big Tobacco.)
So—he wants even more pocket-rummaging by airport officials?
Uh, no, not exactly. But by this stage, who's counting? Moore is
having it three ways and asserting everything and nothing. Again—simply
not serious.
Circling back to where we began, why did Moore's evil Saudis not
join "the Coalition of the Willing"? Why instead did they
force the United States to switch its regional military headquarters
to Qatar? If the Bush family and the al-Saud dynasty live in each
other's pockets, as is alleged in a sort of vulgar sub-Brechtian
scene with Arab headdresses replacing top hats, then how come the
most reactionary regime in the region has been powerless to stop
Bush from demolishing its clone in Kabul and its buffer regime in
Baghdad? The Saudis hate, as they did in 1991, the idea that Iraq's
recuperated oil industry might challenge their near-monopoly. They
fear the liberation of the Shiite Muslims they so despise. To make
these elementary points is to collapse the whole pathetic edifice
of the film's "theory." Perhaps Moore prefers the pro-Saudi
Kissinger/Scowcroft plan for the Middle East, where stability trumps
every other consideration and where one dare not upset the local
house of cards, or killing-field of Kurds? This would be a strange
position for a purported radical. Then again, perhaps he does not
take this conservative line because his real pitch is not to any
audience member with a serious interest in foreign policy. It is
to the provincial isolationist.
I have already said that Moore's film has the staunch courage to
mock Bush for his verbal infelicity. Yet it's much, much braver
than that. From Fahrenheit 9/11 you can glean even more astounding
and hidden disclosures, such as the capitalist nature of American
society, the existence of Eisenhower's "military-industrial
complex," and the use of "spin" in the presentation
of our politicians. It's high time someone had the nerve to point
this out. There's more. Poor people often volunteer to join the
army, and some of them are duskier than others. Betcha didn't know
that. Back in Flint, Mich., Moore feels on safe ground. There are
no martyred rabbits this time. Instead, it's the poor and black
who shoulder the packs and rifles and march away. I won't dwell
on the fact that black Americans have fought for almost a century
and a half, from insisting on their right to join the U.S. Army
and fight in the Civil War to the right to have a desegregated Army
that set the pace for post-1945 civil rights. I'll merely ask this:
In the film, Moore says loudly and repeatedly that not enough troops
were sent to garrison Afghanistan and Iraq. (This is now a favorite
cleverness of those who were, in the first place, against sending
any soldiers at all.) Well, where does he think those needful heroes
and heroines would have come from? Does he favor a draft—the
most statist and oppressive solution? Does he think that only hapless
and gullible proles sign up for the Marines? Does he think—as
he seems to suggest—that parents can "send" their
children, as he stupidly asks elected members of Congress to do?
Would he have abandoned Gettysburg because the Union allowed civilians
to pay proxies to serve in their place? Would he have supported
the antidraft (and very antiblack) riots against Lincoln in New
York? After a point, one realizes that it's a waste of time asking
him questions of this sort. It would be too much like taking him
seriously. He'll just try anything once and see if it floats or
flies or gets a cheer.
Trying to talk congressmen into sending their sons to war
Indeed, Moore's affected and ostentatious concern for black America
is one of the most suspect ingredients of his pitch package. In
a recent interview, he yelled that if the hijacked civilians of
9/11 had been black, they would have fought back, unlike the stupid
and presumably cowardly white men and women (and children). Never
mind for now how many black passengers were on those planes—we
happen to know what Moore does not care to mention: that Todd Beamer
and a few of his co-passengers, shouting "Let's roll,"
rammed the hijackers with a trolley, fought them tooth and nail,
and helped bring down a United Airlines plane, in Pennsylvania,
that was speeding toward either the White House or the Capitol.
There are no words for real, impromptu bravery like that, which
helped save our republic from worse than actually befell. The Pennsylvania
drama also reminds one of the self-evident fact that this war is
not fought only "overseas" or in uniform, but is being
brought to our cities. Yet Moore is a silly and shady man who does
not recognize courage of any sort even when he sees it because he
cannot summon it in himself. To him, easy applause, in front of
credulous audiences, is everything.
Moore has announced that he won't even appear on TV shows where
he might face hostile questioning. I notice from the New York Times
of June 20 that he has pompously established a rapid response team,
and a fact-checking staff, and some tough lawyers, to bulwark himself
against attack. He'll sue, Moore says, if anyone insults him or
his pet. Some right-wing hack groups, I gather, are planning to
bring pressure on their local movie theaters to drop the film. How
dumb or thuggish do you have to be in order to counter one form
of stupidity and cowardice with another? By all means go and see
this terrible film, and take your friends, and if the fools in the
audience strike up one cry, in favor of surrender or defeat, feel
free to join in the conversation.
However, I think we can agree that the film is so flat-out phony
that "fact-checking" is beside the point. And as for the
scary lawyers—get a life, or maybe see me in court. But I
offer this, to Moore and to his rapid response rabble. Any time,
Michael my boy. Let's redo Telluride. Any show. Any place. Any platform.
Let's see what you're made of.
Some people soothingly say that one should relax about all this.
It's only a movie. No biggie. It's no worse than the tomfoolery
of Oliver Stone. It's kick-ass entertainment. It might even help
get out "the youth vote." Yeah, well, I have myself written
and presented about a dozen low-budget made-for-TV documentaries,
on subjects as various as Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton and the
Cyprus crisis, and I also helped produce a slightly more polished
one on Henry Kissinger that was shown in movie theaters. So I know,
thanks, before you tell me, that a documentary must have a "POV"
or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line.
But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your
"narrative" a problem and throw in any old rubbish that
might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish
flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those
who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft. If you flatter
and fawn upon your potential audience, I might add, you are patronizing
them and insulting them. By the same token, if I write an article
and I quote somebody and for space reasons put in an ellipsis like
this (…), I swear on my children that I am not leaving out
anything that, if quoted in full, would alter the original meaning
or its significance. Those who violate this pact with readers or
viewers are to be despised. At no point does Michael Moore make
the smallest effort to be objective. At no moment does he pass up
the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer. He pitilessly focuses his
camera, for minutes after he should have turned it off, on a distraught
and bereaved mother whose grief we have already shared. (But then,
this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton
Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia.)
Such courage.
Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas,
Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George
Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person
analysis of a hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three
superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this
(...) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the
United States, the Taliban, and the Baath Party and that the war
against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more,
or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own
voice, the following:
The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects
or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer
not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority
of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive
appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism.
Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is
as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of
the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by
any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost
entirely against Britain and the United States …
And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945.
A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote
Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question
of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell
if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent
history.
If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still
be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo
would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been
listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and
Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still
be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining
covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might
hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a
little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into
one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten
culture. Rock the vote, indeed.
Correction, June 22, 2004: This piece originally referred to terrorist
attacks by Abu Nidal's group on the Munich and Rome airports. The
1985 attacks occurred at the Rome and Vienna airports. (Return to
the corrected sentence.)
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest
book, Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American
Relationship, is out in paperback.
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