Farenheit 9-11

July 12, 2004
Michael Moore's Farenheit 9-11 was doing a brisk business for the 10p.m. show at the local cineplex Sunday night, which tells me that the public is hungry for someone to make sense of the events of recent years. It's too bad that Moore has been annointed the Great Explainer because he has only an attitude without a coherent point of view. That attitude mostly consists of paranoia, and it actually explains (and foretells) a lot.

It accounts for the American public's complicity in its own problems. The grossly obese and slovenly Moore is a poster child forWalMart shoppers everywhere, for their childish addiction to cheap goodies and lack of impulse control. Like the public he represents, Moore has no cognizance of the larger problems behind the churn of recent events, for instance the public's own surrender of its allegience and personal sovereignty to giant corporations and the cheap blandishments they offer in return for slavish loyalty. All you get from Moore is shopper's remorse. He's never gotten over the fact that his hometown of Flint, Michigan, sold its soul to General Motors, and eventually got fucked for doing it.

The Flint that Moore revisits is a slum partly self-made, full of people too busy watching $50-a-month cable television to paint their houses or even clean up their yards. Moore is angry that the great paternalistic institutions of American life have stopped being good Daddies, and so his ire and paranoia eventually fasten on the chief big daddy of all, the President. The fact that George W. Bush is a pure product of the Daddy class and its agencies feeds Moore's sense of betrayal -- but doesn't lead to any more understanding of the public's predicament. For instance, Moore dwells on the attempt to run an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. Does he suppose the oil would only benefit a few fat cats driving Hummers around Houston?

I say Farenheit 9-11 foretells a lot because as conditions grow more desperate in post-peak-oil America we will see politics grow more delusional -- especially grass roots politics. The poor shlubs who Michael Moore represents will demonize politicians who fail to keep up deliveries of cheap gasoline and bargain merchandise, and in their wrath they'll eventually elect maniacs who will make George W. Bush look like a paragon of prudence. Like the flag-waving angry mother of a dead soldier Moore portrays blundering in rage around Lafayette Park in Washington (a pitiful Moore set-up), the American public will choke on its inchoate grievance as reality withdraws all the presumed entitlements to the world's highest standard of living.

Michael Moore gives me the chills and the creeps. I see America's future in his ponderous, slovenly, lurching figure, stalking congressmen with his video camera and his childish rhetorical questions. I see a nation of feckless, clueless overfed crybabies building up to tantrum. It will be a long, destructive tantrum with no times-out and it will prevent the nation from getting on with life under the new realities of the 21st century.

Comments

[aj]

Jim, you make a lot of good points here.

I think a lot of people had hopes and personal pet issues attached to this movie and were either heartened or disheartened at the film's attention to those details. Unfortunately, yes, the film doesn't address the greater 'why' in securing energy resources / changing our lifestyle for the future.

I think the documentary that *does* address that has already been made - The End Of Suburbia - and, um, you're in it! I just want to know, why doesn't it have theatrical distribution yet? Like The Corporation, it needs a wider audience and a higher profile.

An interesting, and I think more accurate, view of F9/11 is that it is not so much an exposé of conspiracies or criminal activity as it is a piece about class warfare.

Thomas Frank, the editor of the Baffler, explores some of the background for that in his new book "What's the Matter with Kansas?" -- essentially underlining that as Democrats moved to the right on economic (class) issues, the only thing left to differentiate the Republicans were the so-called "value" issues - gun control, abortion, school prayer, and a host of other red herrings. It was a brilliant strategy, and it worked.

It leads us to the paradoxical situation people that should be 'natural Democrats' - i.e. poor rural folk in Kansas - voting against their own interests because they are told that "latte-sipping, Volvo-driving Vermont yuppies" don't understand them.

So in reality, F9/11 is about how the largely Republican "haves and have-mores" use the poor -- who as a class, turned to the Republicans on the basis of values, not economic policy -- as cannon fodder while their contractor pals have conferences to gloat over how much money they're going to make from it all.

The Lila Lipscomb scenes, viewed in that context, make more sense, as she is someone who is technically "working poor" and encouraged her kids to go into the military to pursue their dreams. But moore exposes the fact that the military *are* the working poor as well - as a class, their pay, benefits, etc. fall well short of what the private contractors make, as the interview with the soldier commenting on the truck driver's pay noted. And now there is the sense that their lives are completely unvalued by the ruling class.

[Dan Webster]

ATTENTION PROLES! HEED YOUR BETTERS!

FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL CAUSE US TO DECONSTRUCT AND PSYCHOANALYZE YOU INTO IRRELEVANCE!

SUCK IN YOUR GUT AND STEP SMART! DITCH YOUR IDIOTIC JEANS AND FLANNEL SHIRTS!

YOUR PROTESTS ARE MISGUIDED AND LAUGHABLE!

[Allan Graf]

Mr. Kunstler,

As a frequent reader and admirer of your writing I become concerned with your growing world outlook. Your last 2 articles have to me seemed heavy handed, judgmental, and above all pessimistic to a degree that could only be matched by someone with advance stage leukemia. I know you're a learned man, check your facts, and choose your words carefully. It's just that you've gone on two rants that say less about the state of our country and more about your distain for it.

Michael Moore is a propagandist, not a reporter. I doubt that any thinking member of the left or right would disagree. But instead of holding him to the standards of a reporter, you choose to slam him for his background and appearance. The man is a filmmaker with a objective voice that deserves to be heard. Yes, he stages antics, and yes he edits footage to achieve his own desired results, but he still created a great film, one that may go down in history for toppling the modern neoconservative agenda. (which for my money is one hair shy from Fascism) You and Moore share many of the same overlapping goals, but for the life of me I can't understand why you would go out on "attack mode" on him for what he's created.

Did you completely ignore the subtext during the Marine recruiter segment? Yes, you are a white male so it may take time for you to feel outrage, but sending the poor minorities of your country to die for oil that doesn't belong to us is wrong. No congressman in his or her right mind would want their children in Iraq or Afghanistan to prove this point, despite giving "W" a free pass to invade whenever he saw fit.

My second point returns to your pessimism. Of all things this country does an exceptional job of wiggling out of tight spots (either economically or socially) and restoring our sense of order. So what?... industries rise and fall, so does the economy. It's our inventiveness that gives a reason to survive. I'm beginning to fear that your only solution to our impending global energy crisis is simply mass suicide, for everyone except you. Then, finally you can be left alone.

Face it Jim, we live in a wonderful country that has wobbly legs. What's the sense of throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

[michael]

i thought f9/11 was a terrific movie... the fair-minded perspectiveless product that people seem to have been hoping for would not have been nearly as entertaining. plus, moore voices a lot of things wh the mainstream media (for whatever reason) has found itself unable to see, eg, the unanimously idiotic jingoism of the press preceding the attack on iraq; the laughable nature of bush's public persona; the cowardly behavior of the democratic party.

it's noble to call attention to this country's current and imminent failures, but it's probably no fun to be cassandra in the meantime. i constantly think of alan abelson in barron's magazine, how he started calling the internet stock crash of 2001 way back in 1998 -- anyone who listened to him had three miserable years of missing out on the greatest bull run in history. that's how i see your alarm over the collapse of our cheap energy suburban way of life... you're calling it correctly, but it's anybody's guess how long you'll be wrong in the meantime.

[Justin Henderson]

"It leads us to the paradoxical situation people that should be 'natural Democrats' - i.e. poor rural folk in Kansas - voting against their own interests because they are told that 'latte-sipping, Volvo-driving Vermont yuppies' don't understand them."

Umm... Democrats don't understand them. "Them," being anybody who lives between the Cascades and the Appalachians. This rather inelegant point is proved ad nauseum by people like Frank and the commenters here.

"Them" likes goodies, cheap. A serious, civic-minded political party would present a stark choice to "them": you can have crass goodie-hunting or you can work to build austere, noble communities of scale. The GOP (inadvertantly) presents the choice, and they win. The Dems (also inadvertantly) does not, and does not.

The only Democrats to enjoy any sort of widesprad appeal in the last quarter-century have been the political couple that enjoys the goodie-hunt as much as any Kansan. And so, landslide elections, book deals, and houses all over.

If AJ or Allan or Michael--and I use them as proxy for the great mass of right-thinking left-leaners--wanted to make a difference, they'd get off JHK's case, abandon Michael Moore (the most shameful, lying goodie-hunter of all), and demand a political movement focused on creating worthwhile communities. As it is, we get Wal-Mart or... Wal-Mart-with-guilt.

[aj]

Justin, first -- great web site. Second, just wondering, why do you see us as being on Jim's case? We are allowed to agree to disagree...Third, I'm proud to say that up here in Canada, we did have a party with a very strong environmental and city-oriented platform, and I voted for them in our recent election. On the local level, I am involved with people like Chris deWolf (of Urbanphoto.net) to put together resources, events and the like in the goal of articulating a vision for our city. And I'm proud to say Jim's work has inspired us to some extent.

[Justin Henderson]

Ouch. A Canadian. I should've known.

That would explain your: (a) literacy; (b) ostensible understanding of American class dynamics; and (c) taking seriously the Democratic party.

[aj]

I take the Democratic Party as seriously as I can throw it, which isn't that far. They are a preferable alternative at the moment, but far from ideal. That being said, Hope VI was started under Clinton, and Kerry has made some gestures towards a sustainable urban policy. Not as much as Howard Dean, but not bad.

Canada has a lot of open space but 90% of us live in cities proper - that's why we take urban issues a little more seriously, I like to think. There seems to be an eternal fight between progressives who want to convert disused urban brownfields into low-cost housing and make the suburban beltlands pay their fair share, and the suburban Wal-Mart NIMBYists living their 'i got mine' existence. We have Wal-Mart here too, sad to say.

[Steven M. Smith]

To Allan Graf.
Michael Moore "is a filmmaker with [an]objective voice that deserves to be heard"...ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!...oh man that's good.

[Perry de Havilland]

"Your last 2 articles have to me seemed heavy handed, judgmental, and above all pessimistic to a degree that could only be matched by someone with advance stage leukemia"

So let me get this right...being judgmental is...bad? Analysing something and then expressing an opinion, as in "judging it" is *not* a good thing? And if that analysis and judgement is that "this sucks", would you prefer an few paragraphs of insane optimism rather than saying it the way you see it?

I suspect someone here does not quite 'get' the whole blogging thing. Un-opinionated blogging is like sex without genitals: not very satisfying.