In Praise of the Bad Houseguest

In other words, in praise of Michael Moore.

I can't wait to see Fahrenheit 9/11. Putting aside my worries for the moment that it will end up being, instead of the political hand grenade it will no doubt deserve to be, simply another case of preaching to the choir (albeit a brilliant and massive preaching to the choir), I can't wait to experience the two hour condensation of Michael Moore's personal and therefore patently brazen and unflinching scrutiny of the Bush Administration's activities for the past three years. I've fudged a bit over Michael Moore the past year, flinching under the indisputable revelations of his own penchant for torturing fact to make a point, and wishing (stupidly) that he would learn to "behave", to keep his innate gutsiness intact but cool down his rhetoric in order to tailor his message more to the people, like my mom and dad for example, who have the most to gain (in my hopelessly lefty opinion) from what he has to say. Without even actually seeing his Oscar speech, merely on hearsay, and groans from even some of my lefty friends, and reading one critic who described Moore after this performance as that bad houseguest who, after you politely ask them into your house, pees on the furniture, I started questioning whether Moore might not even be "bad for the cause". We're a notoriously nervous crew, we lefties these days, always wondering whether our PR folks are DOING THE RIGHT THING (just witness the tedious way John Kerry's every sniffle is carefully parsed for the possibility of electoral fallout). I started to even question out loud whether he wasn't just the liberal version of the crankcases on the Right like LimbaughCoulterHannity.

But I always came back to the realization of the crucial difference between Moore and the bloviators on the Right, which was this: LimbaughCoulterHannity are essentially nothing more than professional scoffers, people paid very well to offer nothing in any way constructive to our democracy, but instead just to act as the honorary shruggers-off of all critique of the United States of America, offering instant gratification to an apparently sizable portion of the populace who for whatever personal reasons rely almost pathologically on a shining, blindingly pristine view of their country, like parents who despite glaring evidence to the contrary refuse to acknowledge even the slightest traces of their children's faults. Anyone who might suggest that (for example), well, America's roof is getting a little leaky, and um we might want to do something about those windows in the front of the house with the bullet holes in them, and well, I don't know but the way things tend to slide across the floor, it appears that the foundation is sinking a bit, or maybe more than a bit... in other words, anyone who would suggest that something needs to be done, that sacrifices might have to be made, that we as a country - an extended family - might just have to own up to our own imperfections in order to actually work at becoming a bit more actually perfect, anyone who might suggest that our work, as proud members of a hopefully still fully functioning democracy, is not yet done, gets branded as a crackpot (in the case of Limbaugh) or worse yet, a traitor (in the particularly nastily reductionist cases of Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter).

Michael Moore on the other hand, unlike these self-styled, flag-draped "patriots" who have nothing to offer their country but emptily jingoistic theatrics and open disdain for those who would dare to suggest, oh horror!, that social critique has any place in an active democracy, honestly seems to hold fast to the real American dream, that is, a dream of a country that can stand up to closer scrutiny, that can be honed to perfection, that can be made better for all members of the household, but only by close scrutiny of the house and those living under its roof, and especially close scrutiny of those who purport to be protecting the house while in fact stealing the lumber and the concrete and all of the tools that one had purchased to repair it, and stealing on the way out the door (on their way to the Cayman Islands) everything in the medicine cabinet and the kitchen sink for fair measure. Moore believes refreshingly in such a quaint concept (by today's standards) as accountability in our government, and he's singularly unafraid to be considered rude as he bangs his pots and pans to point out that while the roof might not be on fire, it certainly does seem to be producing one hell of a lot of smoke.

So now, Fahrenheit 9/11. May it be allowed to open windows into hitherto stalwartly closed minds. May the condemnation from the right come so thick and fast that the curiosity of some handful of conservatives whose brains are not yet the consistency of days-old concrete might lead them to actually venture into a theatre to see it. On Michael Moore's site, right on the home page, he proudly displays his now-infamous Oscar speech in glorious streaming video, loud boos and all. After finally getting to watch it after all the hype, I didn't honestly understand what all of this talk was about his shrillness, and I think after a year of this war his words have been more than vindicated. Watching the speech, listening to the booing, I thought Michael Moore should be proud, for being ballsy enough to say exactly what he means given a rare moment on a platform of truly global reach, despite the social niceties that dominate in a realm where politics is normally only ever allowed in through the backdoor of a joking innuendo by Whoopi or Billy, that inevitably gets washed away, no matter how pointed, in the tide of the evening's shimmering, glamorously tedious nullity.

In other words, every even slightly anti-Moore sentiment that I've uttered over the past year I summarily reject and hang my head however momentarily in shame. As for that arch critic and his snakily snarkily stabbing critique of Moore, it reminds me now, in its suggestion of Moore as a bad houseguest peeing on the furniture, of a great lyric by Joni Mitchell, describing Van Gogh: "Tourists talking about the madhouse / tourists talking about the ear. / The madman hangs in fancy homes / they wouldn't let him near. / He'd piss in their fireplace! / He'd drag them through Turbulent Indigo..." Not to suggest that Michael Moore wouldn’t use the bathroom if he came over to your house, but to remember that the reaction to every bold visionary is generally strong, initial rejection, something that fortunately for Michael Moore and for us, after his vindication at Cannes, is currently in very short supply.