Rousing
the US public Out of Paralysis with Fahrenheit 9/11
by Daniel Patrick Welch
OpEdNews.com
It's funny. I'd seen all this stuff before--I mean it isn't as if there
was anything really new here for anyone who's been paying attention for
the past few years. And yet, I cried. Maybe it's the deprogramming of
having at least some of what we've seen replayed with any decent focus for
One Brief Shining Moment, beyond the self-imposed straitjacket of a docile
and dangerously inept US press. Maybe it's just the oxygen given to all
those impulses so many of us have kept in check, all those shoots of
anger, sadness and embarrassment blossoming into full blown consciousness.
My own thought process in response to Michael Moore's new film reminded me
of one of those dessicated sponges you put in water-a few hours later and
voila: your tiny piece of foam has bloated into a full blown fish, or
frog, or palm tree ten times its original size. Or maybe like opening an
archive, unzipping a million saved files at once. My brain fairly exploded
with repressed anger going back to the Florida recount disaster: things I
had known in much more detail before Moore scratched the surface again and
brought it all flooding back..
In fact, as soon as we got home, my wife and I started searching through
old folders of emails from that period tucked away, too important to throw
away, yet too disheartening to face on a more regular basis. This is the
potential power of Fahrenheit 9/11: rousing the natural, inevitable rage
against the machine of war, lies and fabricated videotape. Of course, many
people will be exposed to new (for them) truths or aspects of the current
crisis they haven't fully thought through. But more, I suspect, will be
nudged into acknowledging nagging feelings that something is terribly
wrong in this country, feelings they have been harboring but afraid to
express.
What Moore does is let the cat out of the bag, so to speak. When we left
the theater, there was a crowd of young aspiring journalists waiting to
ask our impressions of the film. One young man in front of us was a bit
evasive, simply offering that it was "mostly stuff he had known all
along, but maybe people will start to wake up." As he walked away,
one of our crowd recognized him from high school. "Hey, isn't that
so-and-so? His father died in the military, right? And he just got out
from a four-year stint."
It is this level penetration that is familiar, yet still surprising. Since
even Republicans are bolting left and right from the sinking, stinking
ship that is the Bush administration, it stands to reason that the
defection goes more than skin deep. Still, it is gratifying to see that
the disaffection with The Way Things Are affects such a broad swath, from
soldiers in Iraq to unemployed workers in Michigan and elsewhere.
Of course, I was wary, as usual, that I would wind up hating something so
overhyped. But I was pleasantly surprised at how moved I was by this film.
Yes, Moore resorts to his tired old frumpy-schmuck tactics of ambushing
targets and coming away the rejected loser who is, after all, only looking
for the truth. But it is hilarious watching congresspeople scurry away
from him like cockroaches in the sun as he tries to enlist their ruling
class kids-made especially poignant by the marine at his side, who would
rather risk jail time than go back to Iraq "to kill other poor
people."
In fact, one of the more didactic subplots of the film, in which Moore
painstakingly follows the transformation of a military mother who, early
on, proclaims herself a 'conservative democrat,' is also the most moving,
probably because Moore eschews his earlier guerilla theater instincts and
lets the drama play out. Mining the dramatic gold of this mother reading
her dead son's Last Letter Home may be Moore's stock and trade, but there
were few dry eyes in the theater (mine not among them).
It may be a bit discomfiting for astute American viewers to find
themselves more focused on--and perhaps more moved by--this woman's plight
than of earlier shots of Iraqi civilian dead. Moore does create the echo
of mourning parents in each country, the plaintive Iraqi mother's cries to
Allah: "what did he do? Why did he have to die?" Michael
Pederson's mother eerily refracts this plaint, calling on Jesus to help
her and questioning "why did they have to take him? He was a good
kid!" This brilliant parallel makes the transformation one Moore
apparently hopes domestic viewers can identify with: seeing this mother,
wracked with grief, after a confrontation with some brain-dead loser who
accuses her of "staging" her son's death at an antiwar display
outside the white house. In fury and self-blame, she laments that
"People think they know, but they don't. I thought I knew, but I
didn't know." Then her legs seem to buckle under her as she cries out
with a mother's grief: "I need my son!" while Moore's probing
yet tender camera keeps running, helpless, distant, paralyzed by the same
realizations.
It is rousing the US public out of this paralysis that may be the chief
goal and result of this film, as tall an order as that may seem. It fairly
burns to see the puffy red face of Jim Baker from Florida 2000, the
oil-greased slide of power, death and war profits that motivates these
bastards, the total contempt for the poor and working-class kids they
snare in relentless, targeted recruiting shams--all while yucking it up
with the "haves and have-mores," what Bush loathsomely refers to
in one of his scripted, awkward, podium-joke deliveries: "some people
call this the elite-I call it my base!"
But more importantly, even while focusing on what a jackass Bush is--hey,
it's funny--Moore manages to delve deeper than his ill-conceived fawning
over War Hero Clark last Spring would imply. In particular, the Democrats
take the pasting they deserve for the abysmal fact that not a single
Senator would come to the aid of the Congressional Black Caucus in
officially protesting the 2000 election. Deftly, Moore is able to tie this
spineless moral failure in with an even more criminally immoral system
where salivating recruiters hunt down (there is no other word for it, as
the footage makes clear) brown and poor kids to fight the wars of the
rich. The disingenuousness of the "opposition" party is laid
bare, despite a few important interviews from members of congress fighting
the good fight, as the consummate corporate ass-kisser it is, too addicted
to campaign cash to effectively oppose the president's march to war. War
is, as one eager potential profiteer sheepishly concedes on film,
"good for business, bad for the people."
Enraged and ashamed (hopefully), the audiences at Moore's film can indeed
rise up if they seize the opportunity, throwing off the bullshit-encrusted
mantra that "we are stuck in Iraq," along with the sham
arguments that sold a pack of war crimes disguised as
"liberation." A friend's reaction was simple and succinct:
"It makes me mad. I probably should have been more aggressive with
people at the grocery store, or people at my old job. You know, people you
just feel like choking." Is it too late to turn back the rising tide
of ignorance and budding fascism? For the sake of humanity, we have to
hope not.
