AMERICA'S PATHETIC LIBERALS: THE SEQUEL
Featuring Michael Moore and "Fahrenheit 9/11"
By John Chuckman
July 19, 2004
The controversy over Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' provides sharp insight into contemporary American liberalism.
You might think from all the noise that something radical or revealing or important was happening.
But you would be wrong. The noise represents another example of what Robert Hughes called America's "Culture of
Complaint," an endless bickering, never deciding anything but enjoyed purely for itself.
The film is at its heart a thoroughly conservative document, a fact which generally has gone unnoticed except in Robert
Jensen's acute review, "A Stupid White Movie." Worse, it explains virtually nothing about events it claims to examine.
Michael Moore's role is to make American liberals feel good about themselves without having to question the practices of
a society which cast an increasingly long, cold, dark shadow over the planet. The job pays well, and Moore is becoming a
wealthy man, a kind of well-kept court jester for those with occasional twinges of liberal conscience or human decency.
Moore likes to play the big, innocent kid from the heartland, a kind of latter-day Spanky McFarland, only much older,
happily shuffling along with a beat-up baseball cap instead of beanie, keeping the faith with values absorbed in 1950s
Flint, Michigan, but asking bright-eyed, impertinent questions about serious things. He's America's backyard Socrates in
baggy pants and gym shoes.
The image appeals to the confused, clinging-to-childhood quality of American culture. Yet that very quality is what let
the invasion of Iraq and so many other terrible events happen.
Moore, unlike straight-shooter Spanky, also displays a streak of the somewhat unpleasant practical joker or prankster. I
do not mean the talent for funny lines that makes his books sell well, but a certain tendency to sly sniggering tricks,
a certain Eddy Haskel or Candid Camera quality which overlays and sours the honest Spanky image. We see this clearly in
the many stunts he uses, some quite clever, in movies or television to get filmed reactions from or about those who will
not respond to him in a direct manner. These are the tricks of the process server or repo-man.
Moore's film revels in exactly the kind of inconsistent thinking, full of unwarranted assumptions, thick with
suggestions of undefined conspiracy, typical to one degree or another of most media in the United States. The thinking
also is typical of a President who keeps telling us he decimated Iraq and spent a hundred billion dollars to save
American lives.
Moore told the world some months back that he had found his presidential candidate in former General Wesley Clark. That
announcement should have been a warning, because Clark is indistinguishable in his views from George Bush, and the
general's behavior in the former Yugoslavia was arrogant, provocative, and dangerous.
Moore simply wants to be rid of Bush, and he was ready to support an opportunistic and dangerous man like Wesley Clark
to do it. Now, in his movie he has assembled a pastiche of attitudes, assumptions, and interesting, but largely
unenlightening, film clips hoping to elicit enough of an emotional response to be rid of Bush.
Why does Moore, and I use him to represent all of liberal America, so want to be rid of Bush that he takes what I regard
as the unprincipled position of supporting someone as bad or worse?
I do not believe it is because Bush represents a danger to American values, the favorite charge of many fuzzy-thinking
American liberals, because in many ways Bush accurately reflects those values. I think they are desperate to be rid of
Bush because he is an embarrassment. There is something excruciatingly American about Bush, revealing some painful
truths about the society he represents, much the same as was the case with President Nixon's brother and his efforts to
create a fast-food empire based on Nixon-burgers or President Carter's whining, beer-swilling brother, Billy.
Yes, Bush has done a lot of damage in the world, but Presidents can't act alone. In Nixon's last days of wandering the
White House corridors late at night, a muttering ghost with a tumbler of Bourbon, the armed forces and others were
alerted not to respond to orders that did not pass through the appropriate chain of command. And it is not just the
cabinet that limits a President's ability to act. It is the Congress and, more generally, the people of the country. The
anti-war protests that engulfed America, once Vietnam was seen for the ugly fraud that it was, had no force of law but
they very much influenced policy. The murderous fiasco of Iraq happened with the complicity of Congress, notably
including Senator Kerry, and with the passive acceptance or indifference of most Americans.
The truth is that Bush is a fairly typical white, suburban, middle-aged American. He talks and thinks the way a great
many Americans talk and think. He jogs and plays golf. He has a fondness for school-boy pranks, although less clever
ones, similar to Michael Moore's. He unquestioningly accepts America's fairy-tale, official version of itself as God's
own chosen place on the planet with liberty and justice for all - something shared by Michael Moore and most flag-waving
American liberals.
Bush's personal redemption story is shared in tens of millions of American homes. When Americans aren't experiencing
redemption first-hand, they are consuming it from check-out-line magazines and talk shows. It's a national obsession
with its promise of being able to start life over representing another kind of clinging to childhood.
Bush has always enjoyed a comfortable life without any evidence of earning or meriting it, but that is what so many
Americans dream of doing as they throw away money on state lotteries and at casinos. Americans love watching television
families similar to Ozzie and Harriet in the 1950s where nothing real ever happened, just nice people floating in a
timeless space. Many modern shows, like Seinfeld, are just hipper versions of the same thing.
Bush's total lack of interest in serious books - there is no evidence he's ever read one - genuine art, and new ideas is
quite typical. The last President of the United States who took some interest in the arts or thinkers was Kennedy.
Bush's lack of interest in anything outside the United States - only altered as required in his role as President - and
his Blondie Bumsted behavior, right down to choking on a pretzel while watching football from a couch, put him at the
very middle of middle America.
You may ask, we know Bush is a brutal, rather psychopathic man, so how can he be like so much of middle America? You
see, middle America is not the harmless, gentle place it seems in Hollywood's confections. It is the place where
thirty-year old couples assume they are entitled to a five-bedroom home on a sprawling lot in the suburbs with at least
two lumbering vehicles in the driveway. It is the place which ignores the ugly parts of its own society, the ghettos,
the broken-down schools, the lack of healthcare. It is the place where the relentless demand for still more endangers
the planet's future. And it is the place that drives America to global empire.
Bush is not, as so many American liberals claim, out of step with American history. Childish slogans about taking back
America or, even worse, "Dude, Where's My Country?" are just that, childish. Bush is an awkward, unpleasant exemplar of
enduring American behavior and values. Did the invasion of Iraq represent different values or attitudes than the
"Remember the Maine" invasion of Cuba? How about the invasion of Mexico, or the seizure of Hawaii, or the holocaust in
Vietnam and Cambodia? Does the Patriot Act represent anything different than the Alien and Sedition laws of John Adam's
day or the dark excesses of the FBI under Hoover?
Americans are always attracted, like Marlon Brando's wonderful character in "On the Waterfront," to what used to be
called "class." The movies of Hollywood's golden era, from those with John Garfield to Humphrey Bogart, are filled with
that word used in that way. Because the entire throbbing core of America is about making as much money as possible as
quickly as possible in almost any way possible, afterwards, you are supposed to settle in for some show of class.
While the flavor of American culture has changed, especially in its complete abandonment of post-depression era sympathy
for struggling little people, the desire to display something that is the equivalent of "class" in 1950 remains
palpable. It's there in everything from the names bestowed on car models and real-estate subdivisions to the look of
popular American designers like Ralph Lauren or figures like Martha Stewart. Part of the problem with Bush, no matter
how quintessentially American he is, is that he has no class. It's unnerving to have an empire whose Caesar is laughed
at by much of the world, all those funny-talking people out there in the world sniggering at the leader of God's own
chosen place.
I have a problem with all the liberal whining in America over professional soldiers being killed in Iraq, actually still
a small number compared to the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis killed both in the war and in the decade-long run-up
of brutally harsh American-imposed restrictions, and it is no different for Moore's scene of a mother's tears. No, I'm
not talking about the poor mother herself whose loss is real, but about the calculation of Moore's film in using the
scene and about the very predictable result on American audiences. Pictures of a small number of flag-draped coffins
appear to be almost the only thing fueling America's limp antiwar movement.
When I see pleas about dead American soldiers I can't help but think of all the tears shed at the Vietnam memorial for
the relatively few who died helping in the work of bringing overwhelming destruction to another land, but there is never
a tear shed for the millions of souls extinguished by America.
There is a scene in a much more moving documentary from the Vietnam War called "Hearts and Minds" in which a poor
Vietnamese man bawls and screams over the limp limbs of his dead young child, one of countless innocents snuffed out by
Americans flying too high ever to glimpse the horror they delivered. The film then cut to an interview with General
Westmoreland sitting comfortably, pontificating about the way Asians didn't regard life the same way Americans do.
Propaganda, yes, but still shatteringly true and unforgettable.
Well, it was a fine film of its type, but it wasn't destined to make its director a wealthy man. Americans just are not
much interested in the suffering of others, especially it seems when they cause it. Although, in mitigation, it is fair
to point out how little of the suffering they ever are permitted to see, the lack of imagination over what must happen
when you drop thousands of tons of high explosives and flesh-ripping shrapnel is still appalling.
But even if you do not feel the same way I do, and you were moved by the mother's tears in the last part of the movie,
be very careful how you vote to get rid of Bush. Kerry has never so much as condemned the war. He has never condemned
Bush, except by repeating official-report findings all thinking people on the planet understood a year before the
official report. Kerry's view of the Middle East, frantic pandering to Israel's darkest interests, promises no end to
future troubles. He is an unrepentant, unimaginative supporter of global empire.
That brings us to the real tragedy of America and the real cause of 9/11 and so many other horrors: America's swaggering
readiness to play the game of global empire with all the brutality and incivility that it implies. You tell me how a
confused film like Moore's, even if it contributes to toppling a confused President like Bush, adds anything to
resolving America's great dilemma of insatiable greed and willingness to do terrible deeds while mouthing high-sounding
ideals.
ENDS