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Moore should attack Dems too
Posted by Roger Snyder | July 2, 2004
By Mike O’Connor, The Daily Texan
Michael Moore has stated that he hopes his new film, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” will affect the outcome of this year’s presidential election. It is certainly off to a healthy start; after only one weekend in national release, Moore’s movie is the most successful documentary of all time.
Opinions abound, though, on the virtues of the film itself. Roger Friedman of FoxNews.com heaped early praise on “Fahrenheit 9/11″ in calling it “a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail … [The film] is a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty - and at the same time a indictment of stupidity and avarice.”
Others found the film to be nothing more than an obsessive and biased rant against President Bush. Christopher Hitchens, who should know how to spot such a project after conducting one against Henry Kissinger, presented the strongest expression of this opinion in an essay on Slate.com.
“To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability,” Hitchens wrote. “‘Fahrenheit 9/11′ is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of ‘dissenting’ bravery.”
Both opinions are on target - Moore is undoubtedly unfair to Bush, but his skills in persuasive presentation are indisputable, and his facts are largely correct, even if his innuendoes are not. One aspect of the film that has attracted less attention, though, is its pervasive lack of Democrats. Though figures such as Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., do make brief appearances, they have only a few moments of screen time. The scarcity of donkeys is hardly surprising: A significant Democratic presence in the film would complicate Moore’s ability to blame the Iraq war on Bush. Moore’s scathing indictment of the president would make far less sense were he to present footage of, for example, Senate Democrats voting 29-21 in favor of the Iraq war resolution.
Most notable by his absence in Moore’s film is presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. “The movie poses a conundrum for John Kerry,” Moore has stated. “You can’t watch the last hour of this movie and leave the theater and not at least pose the question to him: How could you have voted for this war?”
But Moore is wrong. The “Fahrenheit 9/11″ viewer never thinks of Kerry at all, because the candidate is not in the film. The movie does prominently feature George W. Bush, whose incompetence, greed and favoritism have careened the nation toward an unjust and unnecessary war. Such a portrait should raise the question of what the “opposition” party was doing during such a debacle, but Moore would not relish giving the only possible answer: It was supporting the war. The only way to avoid the unpleasant answer was to skirt the question, and the only way to do that was to remove the Democrats from the narrative.
But Moore had another choice. He could have made an anti-war film, and not just an anti-Bush one. Such a version of “Fahrenheit 9/11″ would have indicted both political parties for their respective roles. Such a film might have held up the anti-war stances of octogenarian Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and then-marginal presidential candidate Howard Dean as exemplars, rather than ignored them as embarrassments. In turning away from the possibility of a more accurate, and possibly more thoughtful, film in favor of what is essentially a two-hour attack ad, Moore has made a deal with the partisan devil of electoral politics.
O’Connor is an American studies graduate student and a member of the Green Party.
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One Response to “Moore should attack Dems too”
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July 6th, 2004 at 1:56 am
Last lines of O’Connor’s comment:
“….film in favor of what is essentially a two-hour attack ad, Moore has made a deal with the partisan devil of electoral politics.”
Well yes, but so what? The issue here — and the obvious objective here — is not cinamtographic purity but getting that disaster Bush out of office, for god’s sake! It pains me to say this, for yours is a thoughful, well written, and accurate analysis, but you sound precisely like “an American studies graduate student and a member of the Green Party.” And that is not a compliment. Despite having been for too many years a graduate student — before you were born — and a founding member of the Green Party.
Nicholas Dykema
ndykema@aol.com
Cleveland, Ohio