"this issue of legitimacy has been overstated": three extra notes for the 9/11 discussion
Written: Oct 30 '04 (Updated Nov 06 '04)
Product Rating:
Pros: Important subject. True facts. Enough humor to make it go down. A politically moderate agenda.
Cons: Moore really should groom himself before the couple of scenes where he appears.
The Bottom Line: Yes, Moore knows how to be strident and careless with the facts. But no, he doesn't do that on Fahrenheit 9/11. Because, as I will demonstrate, stridency doesn't work.
I assume that it is not strictly necessary to _review_ Fahrenheit 9/11 this late in the 2004 presidential campaign, in the sense that this is the movie’s 118th review just on Epinions alone. Quick summary just in case: filmmaker Michael Moore assembles a case against the George W. Bush administration’s preparations for, and response to, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The case involves lots of camera footage; personal interviews with soliders and scholars and security guards and residents of Moore’s hometown; ice cream trucks; verifiable statistics on Federal budget details (such as Bush’s cutting of combat pay by 1/3 and his elimination of several military hospitals); and R.E.M.’s song “Shiny Happy People”, among other things.
Unlike earlier Moore films such as Bowling for Columbine (which traded in semi-fictional statistics about gun deaths and, I believe, made baseless accusations against the National Rifle Association) and Canadian Bacon (which portrayed an entire war against Canada that I swear it made up from scratch, and which uses professional actors such as Steven Wright to portray ordinary Canadian citizens), Fahrenheit 9/11 was rigorously fact-checked. It _is_ one-sided, to be sure; as Moore himself points out, Bush and his administration officials have had hundreds of hours of public air-time over the past four years to outline their view of things without interruption. But in his two hours of retaliation, Moore is careful not to misspeak: a new and welcome self-discipline I’d love to see from professional politicians*.
*(Note to people who wish to misinterpret this as solely a shot against Bush: while I’m doing Get Out the Vote work for Kerry, I’d be delighted if Kerry could get through a debate without pretending that he has a plan to give health insurance to all Americans, or to cut the deficit in half. Thank you.)
This is why so much of the criticism has focused on “why does he try to show Hussein’s Iraq as a utopia?” – based on 15 ordinary seconds of scenes showing merely that the people we bombed in Iraq did have valid, worthwhile lives to lead, a claim just as true of the people in Nazi Dresden. Or, the critics ask “why does Moore criticize Bush’s vacations when Bush has important meetings on those vacations?”. Fights over interpretation are fair and important; they are also the refuge of people who didn’t find any outright mistakes.
The rest of this essay makes three claims that I believe are still new to the Fahrenheit 9/11 discussions.
1. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a movie about friendship: about people cooperating, helping their buddies, and trying to get along.
I hear Moore described as a “conspiracy theorist”, and that’s not what I got from the movie. The first time I watched it, I came in knowing almost nothing about the bin Laden family oil business. Yet from Moore’s evidence alone, I came out pretty clear that Bush is _not_ a friend of Osama (as a few actual conspiracy freaks have argued). Bush is, as Moore explains and shows in detail, a longtime close associate of the bin Ladens, and his companies have had millions of bin Laden dollars invested in them; but Osama is shown as a black sheep of the bin Laden family. The authorized flights of the bin Laden family on September 13th, when most aviation was still shut down, were not a release of terrorists. Moore simply points out that Osama’s family was helped to leave a difficult situation and go home, and that no one questioned them to see if they might have, just in case, some info as to Osama’s whereabouts. In Dragnet (as we’re reminded via old footage) it’s normal for cops to question family members; some families just donate more than others.
It is not a “conspiracy” that results in James Bath – another investor in Bush’s oil companies – having his name blacked out of the Administration-released copy of Bush's service records. Yes, Moore's own copy of Bush’s service record shows Bath as AWOL, but hey: how many of _you_ have never kept a friend’s secret?
It is not a “conspiracy” that keeps all but one of the Senate and House children from serving the military in Iraq. We have a volunteer military; as Moore shows in extensive footage from his hometown of Flint, Michigan, people join the army or the National Guard because it’s their best option. One young black man, who we’ve seen fending off a recruiter for what is not the first time, laughs that “I see the footage of Iraq, and I think, we’ve got neighborhoods that look like that and we haven’t even been bombed!” (the camera, panning a block of houses, agrees). We meet Lila Lipscomb, proud mother of two soldiers and offspring/sibling of others, who told her children from early on that the military was their ticket to college.
For her daughter, it was; her son died in the new war in Iraq. We see her still unrolling her flag each day, careful to keep it from touching the ground; but she’s angry now, for it’s _her_ child who was sent to die. Clearly she’d denied the risks for decades. Just as clearly, U.S. Senators and Representatives don’t need to, for they set their own salaries. We see Moore badgering several with military recruitment info, trying to talk them into sending their own kids; he finds no takers.
5,000 random immigrants, many of Middle Eastern origins, have been rounded up by John Ashcroft’s domestic terrorism courts; zero have been convicted, and few even specifically charged. They were not Osama’s family members, but neither had they invested in Bush’s oil companies; they were not friends. They, unlike the bin Ladens, were vulnerable. “The American people pay you $400,000 a year; the oil companies have paid you billions of dollars over twenty years”, is Moore’s cute-but-reasonable way of putting it. “Who you gonna like? Who’s your daddy?”
Yet the most horrifying scene in the movie, to me, was nothing about Bush; it takes place in the U.S. Senate, in Vice President Al Gore’s last days as Presiding Officer. The Congressional Black Caucus is trying to lodge a formal election protest, in honor of the 15,000 black voters “mistakenly” deleted from the Florida voter rolls. In order for the motion to be considered, one Senator must join the protest. Representative after Representative stands up and pleads their case. It is Al Gore himself, with his gavel, who interrupts them asking “Do you have a Senate sponsor to your motion?”, and sends them off when the answer – be it saddened, frustrated, angry, or a rebellious “I don’t care!” – is “No”. The all-white Senate laughs when Gore gets snarky.
In his own mind, I'm sure, Gore thought of himself as a peacemaker. But – and I speak as someone who had publicly supported Bush over Gore before the election – Al had no right to make this peace. Not a single American voted for “Al Gore if, y’know, he feels up to it”. Michael Moore is showing us, not conspiracy, but friendship and co-operation: one hundred white senators refusing to offer a co-sponsorship. One hundred white senators, all feeling more in common with Bush, and far more in common with each other, than with the strange, angry black folks at the microphone.
2. Fahrenheit 9/11 is, unlike Moore himself, politically moderate – even somewhat conservative.
People who’ve read Moore’s books will probably goggle here, but it’s true. For what does he indict the Bush administration? For reducing soldiers’ combat pay. For slashing soldiers’ benefits. For deducting, in soldier Brett Podnarek’s final check, five days’ salary because he didn’t work on the days he was dead. For forcing soldiers’ families to buy equipment on e-Bay. For putting soldiers in a situation where listening to the crap band Drowning Pool (“Let the Bodies Hit the Floor”) is better than anything else they can think of. For taking soldiers whose enlisted tours are up, and refusing to let them go home. Isn’t it usually liberals who get accused of hating soldiers? (Not that we really do.)
Moore lays out the case that Bush and company lied about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction; by now, that’s so clear that even the mainstream media accepts it as a given. He spends 15 seconds showing, as I mentioned, that Iraqis didn’t spend their entire time listless and depressed and suicidal about Saddam’s evil rule. That’s a moderate-to-conservative sort of point, while it’s in left-wing work like Howard Zinn’s a People’s History of the United States that we imagine everyday Americans going “Hey! Gunnar! What are you up to today?” “Oh, I’m going to be miserable and oppressed. How about you, Rocco?” “I was gonna be oppressed and miserable instead. See ya!”. Moore shows that people have lives aside from their government: wasn’t that Ronald Reagan’s main assertion?
Moore isn’t zeroing in on sympathy for the Iraqis, or not purely. For that we’d just see a woman screaming “They destroyed our houses!”. When she progresses to several versions of “Oh Allah, Allah, may You destroy their houses!”, Moore is making a point about danger. Bombing people isn’t just mean: it gives them nothing to lose if they bomb us back.
Moore goes after the weaknesses of Bush’s homeland security policy. We spend time with sherriffs and rangers who try to deal with the Orange and Red Alerts, yet have never been given any sort of manual on how they’d recognize a terrorist if they saw one. We see an Oregon anti-terrorist specialist who can only drive by the areas he patrols once a week, real fast. We see the out-of-order telephone where another anti-terrorist unit will co-ordinate a response, or will if the attack politely occurs between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.
Moore does show, to be sure, the alert infiltration of a California peace group, aging hippies who pass around cookies (“Some of them take more than one!”, he exclaims, horrified); and the swift FBI crackdown on a 50-something man who’d made anti-Bush comments in his gym. He does show how the Patriot Act makes it easier for the FBI to monitor our library-use habits and our phone conversations. But it was Reagan, again, who popularized the phrase “Get the government off our back!” and Reagan who would make fun when his predecessor's policies failed. Moore points out that we _had_ advance information about al-Qaeda’s intent to ram planes into our buildings, and that using info, not acquiring it, was the issue. Bush refused to hold a single meeting about terrorism prior to 9/11, despite a report (Condeleezza Rice herself speaks the title) called “bin Laden Determined to Strike within U.S. Borders”. Bush has made us unsafe, is Moore’s point; he is speaking to the conservative in all of us.
3. Fahrenheit 9/11 is in many ways subtle and understated. And I don't just mean the brilliant handling of 9/11 itself, where we're treated not to cliched images of the towers, but to the brand new shock of a blank screen, followed by dozens of reaction shots of the people watching.
As funny as Moore can be – and he can, with the title sequence footage being a particular highlight, Moore not needing to comment for a moment – he’s nowhere near as funny as, say, Jim Hightower. I will probably review Hightower’s book Thieves in High Places someday, as it will still be relevant if Kerry wins, and Hightower’s book is _much_ more densely packed with both jokes and information. Books will of course be less popular than movies, but why isn’t Thieves in High Places a major book-selling phenomenon?
There’s the title, for a start. “Thieves” is a nasty term. Backing that up every step, there’s the information behind it: Hightower is making the case that Bush and company have been deadly extremists from the word go. Pick the environment as an issue (which Moore doesn’t). Hightower, in a break from humor, packs more than five small-print pages with the Bush administration’s actions against the environment over a 2-year span. It’s a litany of national parks and forests opened to drilling; toxic cleanup laws being changed to charge the public, not the companies making the mess, with the cleanup; rights to public bodies of water being given away to private companies; toxic emission standards being doubled and tripled; wetlands being opened to bulldozing; manatee refuges being opened to speed-boating; EPA enforcement staff being cut; scientific committees being erased if they disagreed with Bush policies; penalties for pollution-law violations being cut in half; citizen oversight and right-to-know laws being crossed out; and industries being allowed to write their own rules of operation.
Or take the creation of the Homeland Security Department, which Bush opposed at first. Hightower calls Bush on how he used it to strip tens of thousands of U.S. employees from union protection. Worse, he shows us the loophole in the Homeland Security law that allows any corporation to tell the H.S.D. that its illegal pollution or safety violations are part of “critical infrastructure” – and therefore can’t be prosecuted.
That’s merciless talk ... and while Hightower documents (and I’ve checked) his sources carefully, I bet some of you won’t believe it. He wrote Thieves in 2003; it’s easier still to dismiss other Bush acts that weren’t on the table then:
§ The Wall Street Journal, a Republican hotbed, confirms that in 2002, the Pentagon had clear and credible plans for taking out Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s terrorist camp, and Bush nixed it. The only explanation available? NBC’s: that Bush preferred to let a terrorist go free rather than weaken his case for war.
§ Bush publicly announced, at the end of August 2004, that American troops will assault the strongest part of the Hussein’s remaining army after the election … thus giving our enemy three months to prepare for the attacks.
§ You know Kerry’s famous statement about “I voted for the $87 billion {aid to the troops}, before I voted against it”? Kerry meant, simply, that he voted for an aid package that came with specified funding (a slight delay of Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy), and against a package that came with no funding. Yet Bush promised to veto the package that Kerry supported: to deny the troops basic military equipment if any of his favorite tax cuts were held back a year.
Fahrenheit 9/11 is _not_ about any of this … and let me be clear, I’m glad it’s not. I probably shouldn’t write about stuff like this myself; it’s too hot to handle. When I mentioned those last three facts in another Fahrenheit comment section (it was relevant to the review, yes), I was called “Weak and fact deficient, loaded with hatred and acrimony, as any one with a brain would detect and, yes, refuse to believe ... psychotic, and suggest{ing} a need for medical care and counciling”. Some of you, I know, will agree, even as I take information from Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and the Congressional Record.
I’m not even saying Bush is evil. I think Bush _is_ all about friendship, as Moore suggests, and most of us simply don’t have the good luck to be his friends. Bush wants to look good, just as you or I want to look good. He wants people to stop getting in his face with arguments, and he wants free time, and he wants to do nice things for the people who do nice things for him; hey, that’s normal, do you think I give mix cd’s to just anyone? But whatever Bush's reasons, Americans don’t want to believe a president could do these things, even as the majority of those same Americans support the death penalty (as I do) for … you know … other Americans, bad Americans.
So Moore plays a smarter, subtler hand. Fahrenheit 9/11 is funny, and chatty, and friendly. Bush and his associates are shown looking weak and silly; anyone who tries to defend Bush’s immediate post-attack reactions, as he sat holding My Pet Goat for seven long minutes, is someone who didn’t bother to show up and watch the footage, which speaks for itself (though unfortunately Moore also speaks during it). The narrative plays bait-and-switch: some evidence of administration scheming, some of incompetence.
That's fine. There’s room for both, of course, but hardly anyone would show up to a liberal tirade (like mine) about how Bush only runs the country for his buddies. The Bush of Fahrenheit 9/11 is a blurrier figure: a lousy businessmen with a weakness for Arabs bearing cash, a willing puppet for the forces of surveillance, mean to his own soldiers, but also dumb-looking and shallow and just a bad planner. A mistake. And one that, by Tuesday, we can correct.
In the most provocative film of the year, Academy Award winner Michael Moore presents a searing examination of the role played by money and oil in the...More at Buy.com
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.