Michael Moore Comes To Town
P. Scott Cummins © 2004 The Urbane R
Michael Moore filled up Key Arena last week. He was here in Seattle, I’m told, on a mission: he wants you to vote next Tuesday. And if you are an apathetic Democrat, goodness gracious does Moore have it out for you. Local media reported that his “Slacker Uprising” tour attracted 10,000 people to Key Arena (or maybe it was the Pearl Jam guys who provided the main draw), sponsored by the local nonprofit Foolproof Arts. That Fahrenheit 9/11 just came out on DVD in the last two weeks is certainly nice for Moore as well – who has made in the range of $125 million from his self-described work of “anti-propaganda.” By the way, I am no fool and this was no arts event: if nothing else, Foolproof Arts tax free status as a non-profit should be revoked by the IRS. Can you imagine Seattle Opera sponsoring the anti-Kerry Swift Boat Veterans? Preposterous – and Foolproof should face the consequences.
Fahrenheit 9/11 won the grand prize for feature films at France’s Cannes Film Festival this year. Fahrenheit 9/11 opens with pre-television interview makeup being applied in ponderously long super-close-up crop images of administration stalwarts George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge. Again and again the camera comes back to these folks in ever tighter cropped images. On Bush, the images labor with increasingly slow motion, and focus turning to stark grainy sharpness. I am taking you to a world never seen before, Moore seems to communicate, the "World of Bush."
With suddenness the screen fades to black. In the background we hear street sounds, people shouting, cries and then, THAT crashing sound. It can only be one thing: the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. A single church bell begins a mournful toll. And the camera brings us to that place. At that same moment, Moore wants you to know, Bush is visiting an elementary school classroom in Florida. Bush gets news of the attacks. Moore again takes the camera long, slow and tight on the face of the president. The filmmaker wants you to see Moorean reality: Bush as fixed and immobile, with insinuation in the air of presidential foreknowledge of the attacks. That our government was even then going into the highest state of military alert based on these attacks, and that presidential security contingencies were kicking in to dictate Bush’s moves for many hours to come, seems to matter not one iota to Moore.
Within minutes, Moore has laid out his case on ‘war for oil’ that echoes again the conspiratorial tone of this anything-but documentary. The Bush family in bed with the Saudi royal family, and Bin Laden family members leaving the U.S. during the post-attack flight ban. (That permission for them to leave was granted by Richard Clarke, the disgruntled Clinton-Bush national security staffer upon whom Moore builds much of his case that “Bush knew” before the attacks, was not corrected on the DVD version of Fahrenheit 9/11.) Moore sets forth a case irresistible to any left wing conspiracy theorist: Bush meets a guy in the Texas Air National Guard and together they decide to control significant portions of Saudi Arabia’s investment finances and become the puppet masters behind petroleum exploration and production worldwide. Talking heads opine: “Most unseemly.” “Very discomforting.” Of Bush loyalty to Saudi royalty instead of America, Moore himself asks “Who’s yer Daddy?” pointing to the $400,000 salary Bush receives as president. And how that paltry sum pales in comparison to the $1.4 billion in Saudi money the Bush family has spread amongst friends and family members through the “special relationship” that Moore states “buys a lot of love” between them. What’s worse, Moore references, is that comfortable fat cat Democratic Party leaders seem disinterested in this incredible bombshell of journalistic sleuthing on his part.
Moore then gets to the heart of Fahrenheit 9/11, the notion that… Well, why don’t I let Moore’s own expert witness explain? I give you the psychiatrist on behalf of Michael Moore, our very own Congressman Jim McDermott explaining the Bush war on terror directly from Fahrenheit 9/11:
“They gave (us) these mixed messages that were just crazy making.”
“It was really very skillfully (sic) and ugly in what they did.”
“You can make people do anything if they’re afraid.”
“You can make them afraid by creating an aura of endless threat.”
Thanks Doc.
My response to Moore and McDermott is what anyone with a pulse would ask, then why the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the aircraft carrier? Or does paranoia run so deep for them, that this is but another Bush smokescreen – part of the elaborate case for Bush family manipulation that is at the center of this film? What irks me the most about the hay made here – is that the media and the Democrats completely ignored the crew and families of the USS Abraham Lincoln (from our own homeport here on Puget Sound), the back-to-back tours they accomplished – and who were the subject of that banner. Instead, Moore uses the image of carrier jets being launched, and then quickly cuts to happy and peaceful Iraqi children and families, with his own voiceover explaining that we went to war against “the nation which had never murdered a single American citizen.” And with that scene he uses some of the most sickeningly gratuitous images of horror against children I have ever been pained to witness – and then juxtaposes them with context-less interviews of G.I.’s that implies they were utter socio-paths. Congratulations Democrats, this is the work of a man you have made a multi-millionaire, a man who portrays himself as your party’s conscience.
Then, in glaring segue, Moore “sends up” with mock humorous parody the risk of terrorism against passenger ferries and the food supply. A newsman voiceover asks “Could these cows be a target of terrorism?” Moore manipulates the video image to show the cows nodding ‘yes’ with attempted comedic effect. On the heals of the horror images of a moment before, this is just too sick to believe.
My favorite McDermott quote is “they simply got people to believe there was a threat out there when in actual fact there wasn’t one.” Please Congressman, you never answer my emails, so let me ask here: Does this mean that Iraq-based master terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi pledging his organization to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, as he did last week, is no threat to our country? Or the Muslim extremists infiltrating Iraq, who come from all over the Muslim world, and were trained mainly in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Chechnya – do not represent an extrinsic threat that the U.S. is much better advised to deal with there rather than wait for further attack here? Thanks in large part to Fahrenheit 9/11 these are the issues which have come to dominate the 2004 presidential election. John Kerry wishes he could seize the domestic economy as the penultimate issue, but Michael Moore has put Iraq center-stage. Moore may yet be seen as Sage rather than Crackpot.
Meanwhile Moore’s “Slacker Uprising” tour rambles on. In ironic coincidence, the Ecumenical Christian organization Promise Keepers came to town barely forty eight hours after Moore left. Like Moore, their theme is Uprising - and man do they mean it! And an almost identical number attended that event, some 10,000. Hmm, I wonder how many cowboys, bike gang members, hunters, punkers, hip hoppers and Messianic Jews attended Moore’s Uprising – I saw them everywhere at Promise Keepers…
(P. Scott Cummins is a Magnolia-based writer, researcher and political pundit. Let him know what you think at flame@pscottcummins.com)
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