Todd Gitlin on Michael Moore

Todd Gitlin—New Left icon from the 1960s-1970s—offers an evenhanded review of Michael Moore's attack on W. If this is (fair & balanced) New Leftism, so be it.

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Michael Moore, Alas
by
Todd Gitlin

America’s corroded politics, benighted democracy, scandalous history and pliant media, have created a monster. Todd Gitlin on Fahrenheit 9/11 and Michael Moore, “the master demagogue an age of demagoguery made.”

André Gide, when asked in 1905 whom he considered the greatest French poet of the 19th century, is said to have replied: “Victor Hugo, hélas!”

But now a pause for a moment of conscience. Let intellect have its due. Moore cuts plenty of corners, so how good can that be? Compelling? Useful? Moore specializes in hodgepodge. He jokes his way past the rough edges. He’s neither journalist nor documentarian, for he doesn’t set out to discover what he doesn’t already know. To patronize Michael Moore by calling him useful is to give him a pass for shoddy work, sloppy insinuations, emotional blackmail and all–around demagoguery.

He’s an entertainer (when it suits him) whose brush is so broad, at times, as to coat all evidence and logic with bursts of sensational color. His chief method is the insinuating juxtaposition. Presto, proof by association. Fahrenheit 9/11, his election year release, is like a beer commercial. When you see the gorgeous women drinking the beer, the subterranean layer of your cortex is supposed to think: if I drink, I get. This deep layer is protected by the more deliberate thought: hey, it’s all in good fun. Bush–haters can say, I knew it! Moore can say, I don’t do proofs, I do provocations.

I could go on and on in this vein – some have – with examples. Here are four:

• Moore implies that a reason why Bush invaded Afghanistan was to boost UNOCAL’s prospects for building a pipeline there, for Zalmay Khalilzad once consulted for UNOCAL, supporting the Taliban then, and so did Hamid Karzai, and anyway, the Taliban visited the U. S. in March 2001 and Bush made nice, while the Taliban representative made a sexist remark. Stipulated: UNOCAL wanted a pipeline. Say it still does. Does that make UNOCAL a cause of the war? Or the cause? Might there be any others? Moore doesn’t say. “You can see where this is leading,” he says, but he doesn’t have to say it out loud. It’s Conspiracy Lite. He doesn’t attempt to reconcile his sneer at that war with his disdain for the Taliban or with former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke’s sound–bite that the intervention was “slow and small.” He doesn’t have to. Argument isn’t his franchise.




• Moore shows shoddy airport security in action and implies (mainly the cute way, with questions) that shaky airport security was intended to amp up American fear in order to sell the Iraq war. So do we want more intrusive security, or less; or is security all shuck–and–jive, a John Ashcroft ploy?




• Moore shows Saddam’s pre–war Iraq as a land of cheer, kite–flying and Ferris wheels. Iraq is “a nation that has never attacked us.” (He can’t say the same of Afghanistan, so he doesn’t.) Saddam Hussein – sans WMD, sans al–Qaida collaboration, sans imminent threat, but very much avec torture and tyranny – might just as well have been some mustachio’d clown.




• Moore shows Bush and his honchos being made up for television. Can you beat these phonies? But when Moore was boosting Ralph Nader in the 2000 campaign and assuring his public that Tweedlegore = Tweedlebush, was he not made up for the cameras? Was Nader not powdered? If Paul Wolfowitz uses saliva to caress his pompadour into shape, ugh, but what does gross conduct have to do with the neocon view of the world?

And then again –

Sorry, but before this vein goes one more inch, conscience must interrupt. Isn’t all the indignation about Michael Moore unseemly, to say the least, from those who’ve been rather restrained about Bush’s long list of deceptions? Then again, Moore makes thunderous propaganda, all right, but it’s our propaganda, at last, and much of it is right. He’s got more in his arsenal than cheap shots. He’s a not–so–secret weapon against the bully propaganda machine called the White House, which sold a war – a war – on delusional grounds. With jokes, outtakes, hissable villains, the mother of a dead American soldier from Flint, Michigan – a woman who could make Donald Rumsfeld weep – and rhetorical questions, and insinuating music, and bomb damage footage, and whatever else it takes, Moore gets people who don’t follow antiwar websites to see Iraqi casualties, usually invisible and countless, not to mention a bereaved mother, at length. Don’t some means justify some ends – specifically, the end of impelling people to wonder about Bush, the Saudis, the facts of the Iraqi expedition, and the class structure of the armed forces?

Look at some of the evidence of Bush’s insularity, cluelessness, and illegitimacy that Moore puts on display:

• Bush was catapulted into the White House thanks to the family gift of Florida and the intervention of his party’s favorites on the Supreme Court. You’ve probably heard this before. Still, given the momentousness of those events and the power of the memory hole, the point can’t be made too often.




• Moore revels in slapstick shots of Bush, especially on vacation much of 2001, down through September 10, including August 6, when the CIA briefed him that bin Laden wanted to attack inside the United States. On another occasion, Bush intones against terror, then whips out his golf club and crows to the supine press (which would never let the rest of us in on the banter): “Now watch this drive.”




• Bush in Florida on 11 September, after hearing about the second plane attack on the World Trade Towers, reads a kids’ story aloud (Moore says it’s a book called “My Pet Goat” but there’s some doubt whether it’s a whole book, if you care) and stares into space for seven minutes. To say the least, it shows Bush is “in over his head,” said the talk show idol–demon Howard Stern. Some things are right even if Howard Stern says so.




• Moore brandishes Craig Unger’s argument in House of Bush, House of Saud about Bush I and II ties to the Saudi chiefs (more intimate by far than Saddam’s “ties” to al–Qaida & Co.) Why the special flights for the bin Ladens after 11 September when airspace was closed? Why is the Secret Service protecting the Saudi Embassy (from Michael Moore, yet)? Moore doesn’t have the answers but the questions are well worth asking now that the national journalists have moved on. Moore is not quite cogent on the significance of the Saudi–Bush buddy system – why didn’t Carlyle Group crony James Baker love the Taliban and argue against the Afghanistan war? – but he tells the hitherto clueless or clue–impaired that Bush lived in an oil–soaked bubble of (at best) gullibility most of his life. That’s worth knowing. (But better without Moore’s leading question, “Was [Bush] thinking he needed to think about business relations?”)




• Moore shows Bush opposing an independent 9/11 investigating commission – and there’s a fact that’s been shoved down the memory hole.




• And Colin Powell said in February 2001 that Saddam was unable to build WMD. There’s another clip worth recycling. (American news organizations haven’t gotten around to it.)




• And Bush jokes to a fancy fundraiser: “Some people call you the elite, I call you my base.”




• And Moore shows that state authorities in Oregon are short–handed when it comes to antiterrorist staff.




• Moore ambushes Congressmen to make the point that their kids aren’t the ones fighting Bush’s war.

Moore argues with splices – bang, bang, and another bang. But his best moments are something quite different. As several reviewers have noted, he breaks new ground by hanging around with Lila Lipscomb, the mother of a Flint soldier killed in Iraq, and with wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital. You can say it’s war, any war, but when the war’s being antisepticised, exposing some raw flesh and hurt souls can’t be a bad thing. It’s necessary. So give Moore a cheer for this.

And because, in the thick of a rolling political emergency, he’s packing in blue–state crowds and blue–niche–of–red–state crowds and who–knows–what–color–in–purple–state crowds. Fahrenheit 9/11 opened as the highest–grossing nonfiction (some would quarrel with the label, but never mind) film of all time. Its average box office take per theatre beat out – good God – Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. According to Fox Sports (!), the auto racer Dale Earnhardt., Jr. – son of the eponymous lionized father – told his pit crew to see Fahrenheit 9/11, saying, hey, it'll be a good bonding experience no matter what your political belief.

Benighted democracy needs the contention that Moore provokes because the newspapers don’t provoke it, television doesn’t, the Democrats didn’t, Congress didn’t, judicious folks didn’t. No one who didn’t get worked up about the administration’s distortions re WMD, al–Qaida, and mushroom clouds has the right to pure rage against Michael Moore. He’s not running for president, after all. (More good news.) It was Moore who put the issue of Bush’s evasion of military service back in play a few months ago, when he called Bush a deserter on a platform with General Wesley Clark. That was overkill – and it filled an enormous hole.

Moore is the master demagogue an age of demagoguery made. He’s an impresario of spectacle and he corrals people who don’t pay attention to news to pay attention to him and his facts, his footage, his badinage, his sarcasm, his factoid detonations, all of it, indiscriminately, smashing up the complacency that watched George Bush seize power in the most powerful nation in history. That’s how America goes now. Still, Moore could be a better version of Moore and still be Moore. He could show us that war kills and Bush is appalling, and yet be more scrupulous. But Moore is the only Moore we have – alas. Moore is the anti–Bush, and damn if we didn’t need one.

Todd Gitlin was a leader of the peace movement in the 1960s. He is a former president of Students for a Democratic Society, and author of a number of books including The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, and Media Unlimited. Gitlin is also a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University.

Copyright © Todd Gitlin 2004.