Wednesday, July 07, 2004
(9:52 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
My Visceral Reaction to Fahrenheit 9/11
[Anthony Smith has already addressed this topic; a post by Daniel of Crooked Timber was the last blog post I read about the movie before seeing it.]
It's not a conspiracy theory. The "conspiracy" is that the actions of the Bush administration have been focussed on the long-term interests of capital. That's it. That's not an implausible story. That's not something that you really have to "finesse" the facts to figure out or that you have to use "cunningness" to reveal.
I'm not nervous about this movie. I think that it is basically telling the truth, and I have been following the administration much, much more closely than the average US citizen throughout its entire tenure. If you want to focus on individual factual errors, then you're grossly missing the point. If you want to try your very best to make sure that George W. Bush -- George W. Fucking Bush, who can clearly take care of himself! -- is portrayed in the fairest possible light, then I frankly think that you are a disgusting person. That's because the movie is not finally about George W. Bush. The movie is about the people who are forced to live in squalor and who can find no way out except the military. The movie is about the innocent Iraqis who were living normal lives before our soldiers were ordered to level their towns.
I grew up in the Flint area. I went to the same high school Michael Moore went to. I worked in the grocery store across the street from the mall where the military recruiters were working. He got that stuff right. The stuff about how Flint is a hollowed-out shell of a town because after a certain point it no longer fit in with the long-term interests of capital -- that's pretty fucking accurate. The stuff about how they have the worst schools and the most dangerous neighborhoods -- yeah, he got that right. And if he got some nuance slightly wrong about exactly how well the Saudis are treated because they own 6% of American assets or exactly how entrenched the Bush family is in the upper echelons of the capitalist system, then frankly, I'm willing to live with that.
The movie was not finally about George W. Bush. The fact that so many people seem to think it was and can only focus on its potential political ramifications for George W. Bush reveals the sickness at the very heart of our national discourse. The movie may well render Kerry more inevitable -- and dear God, I hope it does. But if it doesn't contribute to a broader political awakening among the American people, then it will have failed. That is what Moore's entire career has been aiming at, and Fahrenheit 9/11 is only the latest part of that.
Moore has been asking, consistently, if we really want to be ruled by people whose final loyalty is to the long-term interests of capital and if we really want to live in a culture whose major media outlets feed us an unrelenting diet of fear and violence. He uses polemic and even exaggeration to put people face-to-face with those questions. He has never claimed to be writing a doctoral dissertation. He has never claimed that he was "fairly" laying out both sides of the issue. I live in a country where slavery was ended in large part because of a novel, and if Michael Moore can create a compelling narrative of the past four years that will convince people that change needs to occur, then I say that's great. That's absolutely necessary.
