About Moore outsmarting Bush’s hawks
The most interesting quote in that article published on an Australian internet news site:
"The anti-war lobby has the slick movies of Michael Moore. And what do we hawks have? The sickening images of Abu Ghraib, that's what. This is why it isn't enough to say that Moore manipulates the facts, or that he is a charlatan, or that his arguments are glib. The reality is that his methods are working, and working for a reason. He is the grizzled face of a culture in denial, the contrarian voice of the millions who would rather hate Dubya than confront the awesome threat that stalks our age."
To assume that we liberals don’t want to "confront the awesome threat that stalks our age" is nonsense. We just happen to think that the invasion of Iraq was diversionary. A failure to understand that it was so is naïve. A more rapid and complete move into Afghanistan was clearly merited. Clinton, in fact, should have gone after bin Laden there. No, Iraq has been a waste of soldiers, money, and time. It has accomplished nothing. Period. It has turned the world against us and created a haven for terrorists. There isn’t a single possibility that the situation will improve there on our watch. None. We will evacuate eventually. It’s just a matter of when.
True, as the writer also points out: "Fahrenheit 9/11 is a movie for viewers reared on MTV and video games, not on art house cinema. This is popcorn politics, militancy for the multiplexes. And, as such, it is extremely successful."
Absolutely! Moore is simply fighting fire with fire. Bush has appealed for over three years to the shallowness of the American public. Moore is now proving he is rather adept at doing the same thing.
Here's the article.
theage.com.au
How Michael Moore outsmarted Bush's hawks, July 9, 2004 (the age.com.au)
Critics of Michael Moore need to make a stronger case for fighting the war on terror, writes Matthew D'Ancona.
When you bear in mind that Michael Moore's book Stupid White Men has already sold more than 3 million copies worldwide and that his film Fahrenheit 9/11 took $US24 million ($A33 million) at the US box office last weekend--the first documentary to top the American film charts in its opening days--it becomes difficult to dismiss the fat man in the baseball cap as a marginal figure.
Indeed, it looks to me as though Michael Moore is pretty much at the centre of things these days. The subculture has invaded the mainstream: it is an army of occupation.
As I watched Fahrenheit 9/11--a ferocious attack on George Bush's record since September 11 and a clarion call for "regime change" in Washington--it struck me that Moore's critics are missing the point by directing their wrath at the dodgy detail of his work.
Certainly, some scenes in the film are downright offensive. In particular, the slow-motion images of an allegedly idyllic Iraq before last year's liberation campaign--children smiling, kites flying--are an insult to the million or more Iraqis who died as a consequence of Saddam Hussein's policies.
Other sequences are plain daft. For instance, Moore insinuates that the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was the result of a wicked plot by big business to build a natural gas pipeline across that benighted country--despite the fact that the pipeline scheme was ditched in 1998.
Yet the forensic demolition of Fahrenheit 9/11, which has already been carried out in the US press, has apparently done nothing to diminish Moore's appeal or his popularity around the world. He has himself said that the film is not meant to be fair. Nor is it aimed principally at the liberal elite, however much they may endorse its conclusions. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a movie for viewers reared on MTV and video games, not on art house cinema. This is popcorn politics, militancy for the multiplexes. And, as such, it is extremely successful.
Moore uses all the techniques of modern mass entertainment with supreme skill: comic intercutting, brilliantly selected music, shocking images of civilian casualties, a laconic voice-over interspersed with scenes of untrammelled emotion. I confess that I found it gripping.
Unlike Moore, I supported the destruction of the Taliban regime and the liberation of Iraq. But I also have to acknowledge the aplomb of his campaign, and the cunning of his strategy.
He has not only touched a nerve; he has filled a vacuum. He has identified the feebleness of the campaign to persuade the public that the war on terror is necessary and he has exploited that weakness to the hilt.
In the process, he has done much to nurture the delusion that the war is simply the folly of a deranged President and his greedy acolytes, rather than a global crisis and the defining challenge of our time.
At precisely the moment that the horizons of Western electorates should be broadening, they are narrowing dangerously. The debate has grown perilously introspective. The war on terror is in danger of becoming just another sub-category of domestic Western politics.
Moore is the most powerful spokesman of the myth that gripped the Spanish people when they elected Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero as their Prime Minister in the wake of the Madrid bombing: namely, that if we oust specific politicians from office--replace George Bush with John Kerry - the Islamic fundamentalists will leave us alone.
It is, of course, psychologically reassuring for voters to be told that they have this power, that there is something quick and clean they can do about their collective predicament.
But it is also a fantasy.
The theocratic guerillas of al-Qaeda and its associates who, it emerged last week, were planning to bomb a British primary school in Madrid and, last Friday, promised fresh attacks in Europe, will not be appeased by any number of political scalps. Their world ambitions are much greater and more terrifying.
But who can blame Michael Moore for seizing his chance? No war in modern history has been as badly sold to the public as this one. In private, Blair admits to colleagues that, in this respect, "I have failed." No Western politician has successfully produced a political narrative that transcends the old methods of spin from the 1990s and explains why this war is a completely new kind of struggle.
Indeed, the problem with the American "neo-conservatives" is that they are not "neo" enough. They use old Cold War language to describe an utterly modern conflict. This war may well, for a start, be longer than the great struggle of the second half of the past century. It is certainly more complex: the triple, interlocked threat of weapons of mass destruction, global terrorist groups and rogue states is much more difficult to explain than the monolithic danger that was represented by the Soviet bloc and its ideology.
And, to be prosecuted successfully, the war on terror will require durable public faith in politicians and the intelligence services that inform them--the very trust that has taken such a terrible beating before, during and after the Iraqi conflict.
The anti-war lobby has the slick movies of Michael Moore. And what do we hawks have? The sickening images of Abu Ghraib, that's what.
This is why it isn't enough to say that Moore manipulates the facts, or that he is a charlatan, or that his arguments are glib. The reality is that his methods are working, and working for a reason. He is the grizzled face of a culture in denial, the contrarian voice of the millions who would rather hate Dubya than confront the awesome threat that stalks our age.
Moore's success is an urgent warning to those who support the war, who grasp its importance, to raise their game, and fast. Nitpicking is not the answer. It's the big issues that count. And it's there that Michael Moore has no answers.
If he is so visionary, why is his objective--to run Bush out of the White House--so parochial? What would he do about the new horrors of our time?
Dude, where's your sense of history? |
