Fahrenheit 9/11

Fahrenheit 9/11 was far more powerful for me than I expected it to be. Knowing a lot of the material he was going to cover, and knowing his proclivities, I guess I assumed I already knew what the movie was going to be like before going in to see it. But the force with which he connects the dots in the first section, and the way in which he depicts one of the primary absurdities of mind control that is the administration's use of the "War on Terror" - namely, what possibly Middle Americans have to fear from the real threat of terrorist attacks - was handled wonderfully. I had my problems of course, almost always coming down to the fact that Moore tends to use images of politicians that are really not all that shocking or condemning, and making them out to be more than they are - and wasting time in the process when he could be asking more pointed and pertinent questions. But even there, however, there are things that at first blush seem completely banal - for example Bush's comments at a gathering of the, as he puts it, "haves and have-mores" - that on closer examination really do spell out what this administration is all about. When Bush tells them, "Some people call you the elite. I call you my base," one suddenly realizes that a)Bush is blithely mouthing a simple truth, and that b)this simple truth is what needs to get drummed into the average American head as much as humanly possible: Bush is not in power to help middle class America, he is in power to help exactly this base of "elites".

But for me all criticisms fade in light of this fact: no one else is doing what Moore is doing and achieving the kind of exposure that he is achieving. A lot of obsessed lefties have already come to the conclusions that he has with the facts that he's laid out, or similar facts, but this is a small, tiny handful of people. Moore is putting it out there in a huge way, and whether he's right or he's wrong, he's going to have people asking questions about issues that they should have been asking for the past four years. We can factcheck and blog until the sun goes cold but even the most accurate and/or most read blogs and commentators in the land reach a fingernail paring of people compared to the amount of people Moore reaches, with his sometimes brilliant, occasionally painfully propagandist, but undeniably effective work.

Finally though, the real question on a lot of liberals' minds is this: will the movie, as so many predict, just be preaching to the choir? Will it even alienate conservatives and even moderates, or will it actually manage to swing some folks left? Certainly the conservative camp is hauling out a major offensive. Reading Andrew Sullivan, who dismisses the movie as a bore, I'd swear I had seen a different movie entirely, possibly in an alternative universe (apparently that would be the alternative universes inside each of our respective minds). Christopher Hitchens is honestly not someone I would want to take on in debate over the movie; while the inconsistencies and downright absurdities present in his own response to the film are readily apparent, the colossal extent of his distaste for the movie (a distaste which one could boil down to a prudish, overweening intellectual's distaste for populist reduction), coupled with his apparent willingness to hypothesize absurdities (for example, the idea that Moore of all people senses that Fahrenheit 9/11 lacks "gravitas") to make non-points (anyone who doesn't think that the Bush administration's manipulation of the war on terror doesn't exactly match the Orwellian model for "continuous war" must be willfully self-blinding) would make such a debate unbearable. (Still I would recommend reading the Hitchens article just to cut your teeth on it.)

But of course both of these British ex-pats supported the Iraq war (though Sully has cooled on it of late) so no doubt it's like a Scientologist, even one who has become lukewarm on Scientology "for their own reasons", watching an anti-Scientology screed - the suggestion that they've been duped (especially these two, who would be in tough competition for the overwhelming amount of pride they each take in their respective intellectual facilities) makes them want to kill the messenger. Isn't that the exact nature of cognitive dissonance?