There are lessons we can draw from this.A tale of national
leaders gone amok in a control frenzy.We can certainly relate to
this, especially from the fact that our "truths" are information
fed to us for the last few decades, only till the present have we
greater access to news from other POVs and are more able to
formulate our own thoughts and opinions on issues that matter to
us.However, when we become more enlightened, the starker the image
we see of the reality...Pathetic.Who's to shoulder the blame?Go
figure.
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July 2, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Moore's Public Service
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Since it opened, "Fahrenheit 9/11" has been a hit in both blue and
red America, even at theaters close to military bases. Last
Saturday, Dale Earnhardt Jr. took his Nascar crew to see it. The
film's appeal to working-class Americans, who are the true victims
of George Bush's policies, should give pause to its critics,
especially the nervous liberals rushing to disassociate themselves
from Michael Moore.
There has been much tut-tutting by pundits who complain that the
movie, though it has yet to be caught in any major factual errors,
uses association and innuendo to create false impressions. Many of
these same pundits consider it bad form to make a big fuss about
the Bush administration's use of association and innuendo to link
the Iraq war to 9/11. Why hold a self-proclaimed polemicist to a
higher standard than you hold the president of the United
States?
And for all its flaws, "Fahrenheit 9/11" performs an essential
service. It would be a better movie if it didn't promote a few
unproven conspiracy theories, but those theories aren't the reason
why millions of people who aren't die-hard Bush-haters are flocking
to see it. These people see the film to learn true stories they
should have heard elsewhere, but didn't. Mr. Moore may not be
considered respectable, but his film is a hit because the
respectable media haven't been doing their job.
For example, audiences are shocked by the now-famous seven minutes,
when George Bush knew the nation was under attack but continued
reading "My Pet Goat" with a group of children. Nobody had told
them that the tales of Mr. Bush's decisiveness and bravery on that
day were pure fiction.
Or consider the Bush family's ties to the Saudis. The film suggests
that Mr. Bush and his good friend Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the
ambassador known to the family as Bandar Bush, have tried to cover
up the extent of Saudi involvement in terrorism. This may or may
not be true. But what shocks people, I think, is the fact that
nobody told them about this side of Mr. Bush's life.
Mr. Bush's carefully constructed persona is that of an all-American
regular guy not like his suspiciously cosmopolitan opponent, with
his patrician air. The news media have cheerfully gone along with
the pretense. How many stories have you seen contrasting John
Kerry's upper-crusty vacation on Nantucket with Mr. Bush's
down-home time at the ranch?
But the reality, revealed by Mr. Moore, is that Mr. Bush has always
lived in a bubble of privilege. And his family, far from consisting
of regular folks with deep roots in the heartland, is deeply
enmeshed, financially and personally, with foreign elites with
the Saudis in particular.
Mr. Moore's greatest strength is a real empathy with working-class
Americans that most journalists lack. Having stripped away Mr.
Bush's common-man mask, he uses his film to make the case, in a way
statistics never could, that Mr. Bush's policies favor a narrow
elite at the expense of less fortunate Americans sometimes,
indeed, at the cost of their lives.
In a nation where the affluent rarely serve in the military, Mr.
Moore follows Marine recruiters as they trawl the malls of
depressed communities, where enlistment is the only way for young
men and women to escape poverty. He shows corporate executives at a
lavish conference on Iraq, nibbling on canapés and exulting over
the profit opportunities, then shows the terrible price paid by the
soldiers creating those opportunities.
The movie's moral core is a harrowing portrait of a grieving mother
who encouraged her children to join the military because it was the
only way they could pay for their education, and who lost her son
in a war whose justification she no longer understands.
Viewers may come away from Mr. Moore's movie believing some things
that probably aren't true. For example, the film talks a lot about
Unocal's plans for a pipeline across Afghanistan, which I doubt had
much impact on the course of the Afghan war. Someday, when the
crisis of American democracy is over, I'll probably find myself
berating Mr. Moore, who supported Ralph Nader in 2000, for his
simplistic antiglobalization views.
But not now. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a tendentious, flawed movie, but
it tells essential truths about leaders who exploited a national
tragedy for political gain, and the ordinary Americans who paid the
price.