Michael Moore: anti-Bush, anti-Arab
By Turi Munthe
Special to The Daily Star
Saturday, July 31, 2004
dailystar.com.lb
If Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" has shown up some of the worst hypocrisies of President George W. Bush and his administration, it has done much the same for his enemies. Liberal responses to his docu-soap have been effervescent - both in praise and disdain - and neither reaction has reflected very well on its proponents.
Those who loved the film should be horsewhipped for bowing to some of the most blatantly propagandistic cinema since Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" and "Olympia." Those who hated it should be gagged until after the November presidential election, and also horsewhipped for preferring to safeguard their political leanings over a more thorough investigation of the greasy world of politics, media-manipulation and vote-buying, which Moore somehow evokes.
The fact is, however, with Michael Moore you just cannot win.
Let's start with those at Cannes who loved Moore's film and awarded him the Palme d'Or, the festival's highest honor. Quentin Tarantino, who headed the jury awarding film prizes, later said: "When I was on stage with Michael Moore, I knew all this politics crap would be brought up, so I just whispered in his ear and said: 'I just want you to know it was not because of the politics that you won this award. You won it because we thought it was the best film that we saw.'"
"Fahrenheit 9/11," for those who haven't seen it, is the ugly stepchild of mistimed comedy and sentimentalism. It has no discernible narrative; it botches the points it tries to score with smug self-righteousness; it contradicts itself ceaselessly; it fails to construct a homogenous argument; it is haphazard, narcissistic, self-promoting, slapdash, intellectually dishonest, and even racist. The only possible way to value the movie as a movie is to regard it as spoof propaganda - a parodic take on Frank Capra for the dumbed-down 21st century. But of course the film is no such thing; it is propaganda straight, with no chaser.
This is pretty much what those who hated the film said of it, if far more effectively. Christopher Hitchens led the pack, writing in the online magazine Slate: "To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental ... 'Fahrenheit 9/11' is ... a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of 'dissenting' bravery."
Those liberals opposed to Bush who have attacked Moore's film have taken to the moral high ground because it goes against their interests to contest the broadside directed at a president they want to see lose the next election. And Moore's film might just tip the balance there. Why this crowd must prove its credentials against its own electoral interests seems only answerable with the charge of narcissism. Yes "Fahrenheit 9/11" is propaganda - but let it serve your purposes.
The cultured left that has either loved or loathed the movie should have had a more simple reaction: mild embarrassment at the fact that it risked benefiting from such crass sensationalism, and silent gratitude in the knowledge of the same.
One more thing, however, just a little thing, and hardly important for the potential voters streaming out in their tens of millions across the US to watch the film. That thing is the Arab, and more particularly the way he is depicted by Moore.
Moore's major indictment against the Bush dynasty is that over the years it has maintained overly close ties with the Saudi royal family. One suggestion is that thanks to the Saudi relationship, the Bushes have been far more concerned with making money for themselves and their entourage than with the welfare and safety of the American public. In part thanks to Saudi money, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and his former employer, Halliburton, as well as the Carlyle Group, that mega investment fund in which both Saudis and former Bush Sr. officials have a stake, all made a killing.
Given that American taxpayers pay Bush a salary of $400,000 a year, and that the Saudis have pushed over $1.4 billion into Bush-linked interests during the past three decades, Moore rhetorically asks the president: "Who's your daddy?" The implication is, very simply, that the Bush camp has betrayed America to the Saudis. More seriously, Moore implies that the Saudi link clouded how the US has dealt with the kingdom over the years, in particular its financing of Islamist militants, making the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks more likely.
But the argument goes beyond just that. There is not a single 'good' Arab in the film, barring the charred bodies of Iraqi women and children who serve only as anti-Bush scarecrows. A long sequence in the central section of the film is intended symbolically to show how the Bushes and their men have metaphorically made a pact with the "Saudi devil," as Moore runs in succession two-dozen clips of George W. Bush, his father and their advisers shaking hands with brown men in keffiyehs.
Moore, like Bush, believes in the enemy without, and that enemy happens to speak Arabic. If "Fahrenheit 9/11" has served the Kerry campaign, all the better, and good luck to America. However, for those in the Middle East Moore's anti-Bush propaganda is "friendly fire," the kind that essentially kills the very people it is intended to cover. That no major American commentator from the left thought this worth mentioning damns them and the Arab world even further |
