Mentally thanking the Cannes Film Festival award without which Fahrenheit 9/11 would never have opened in theatres like the Oriental in Milwaukee, I took my seat at 7:15pm in one of two halls where the film was showing. Each theater was only half-filled. I wondered what the 20-40 year-olds were doing this evening, because everyone at this show seemed older. An abberation, surely. Seduced by bread and circuses? Maybe all of them have turned Republican? "Directed by Michael Moore" on the marquee would be enough to stop any self-confessed Republican from showing up at the ticket counter.
No matter. The clapping in the hall at several points during the movie said Moore had found his audience.
I expected an activist film, one in which subtlety and nuance are sacrificed for a larger political points, and wasn't disappointed. Moore offers up visual metaphors and zippy juxtapositions, with the footage exhibiting his argument. As indictment after indictment piled up, someone began to weep. Moments of macabre satire, such as when "Santa Claus is coming to Town" played during the Christmas bombing of Baghdad, were followed by a feeling that I was plummeting into a thick swamp of shame and grieving -- an Iraqi grandmother wails for a civilian, then an American mother grieves for her soldier son.
About 60% of Fahrenheit 9/11 seemed to be images of Bush II, as Moore holds him directly responsible for each event he has set in motion under the excuse of 9/11/01. I felt obligated to be angry, but my stock of moral outrage has fallen lower than any Republican's compassion. And at moments of horrific humor I found myself unable to laugh. A diet of daily newsfeeds from the New York Times, the CBC, the Globe and Mail, and the Guardian UK, and Google News Alerts of articles related to Guantanamo Bay prisoners have made most of Moore's revelations old hat. Over the last three years, Moveon.org, The Nation, the ACLU and the Center for American Progress have made the same charges with greater finesse, and when the Bush cabal began quibbling over the definition of torture my anger turned to depression.
But even if Moore added little to the public record and in a few cases inferred from slender connections or found deep significance in public handshakes between representatives of allied countries, the cumulative effect is damning. Republicans who haven't been to see the movie tell me it's all in the editing, Forrest Gump style. But the images match the print news -- unless you've been watching Fox News or listening to Limbaugh.
Moore drew my sympathy when he focussed on an American mother who has lost her son. But I would have appreciated some mention of the number of Iraqis we have killed -- 11,000 and counting. That the reason there are reconstruction projects for Halliburton to rebuild Iraq is because our dashing air warriors bombed it like Bomber Harris and his RAF bombed Dresden. The human and civil rights violations in the US were shown without showing one of the 2400 Muslim men deported from the U.S.A. after their voluntary "Special Registration" or a single Muslim immigrant "detainee" in INS custody. Without such images, Moore's message is the same as that of the Kerry campaign -- the war profiteers are immoral, not merely because Iraq War II was fought on false pretences, but because middle America and the lower socio-economic groups are being left out of the profit-making and paying the cost in lives and taxes.
An appeal to our individual self-interest, not to our morality nor our humanity.
But Moore didn't make this movie for cosmopolitans. Fahrenheit 9/11 is for parochial Americans. Those who need images with voice over commentary to explain America's path since 9/11/01 in words of one syllable because they were on Mars for almost three years and haven't read the reams of data, analysis and counter-Bush articles and books that have proliferated for our consumption. It's tailor-made for viewers who can feel pain when a single American soldier loses his life, but can feel less empathy when others, mainly civilians, mainly Muslims in far-away Iraq, lose theirs.
So this movie might sway a closet liberal, but are there any left? Or is Moore addressing the converted? Bush's statement taken from Mussolini's nine points has come true -- "if you're not with us" (meaning Bush = the USA), "you're against us" (meaning Bush = the USA). Now that being against Bush also means being against war crimes, war profiteering, torture and secret prisons, there is no center, no middle ground. People such as myself left the center long ago to hand-wringers arguing inevitability, arguing that Bush had "no choice" and loyalists like Britney Spears whom Moore shows spouting a ditzy "my country right or wrong" act. Anyone with a shred of humanity should by now have distanced themselves from Bush II and his ilk.
What if Orwell's words are true, "It is not necessary for the war to be won, it is only necessary that war be continuous." What if we can't distance ourselves from Bush because he has done precisely what we pay him to do, look after US interests. U.S.-only, and the world be damned. Moore raises the question. who is "we" -- and does that pronoun include you and me? Come November, each of us must decide.
Shauna Singh Baldwin
Milwaukee, Wisconsin U.S.A.
(Originally published on BlueEar.com)
SHAUNA SINGH BALDWIN's first novel What the Body Remembers, the story of two women in a polygamous marriage in Occupied India, received the Commonwealth Prize -- Canada-Carribbean region. English Lessons and Other Stories -- windows into the lives of women of Indian origin -- received the Friends of American Writers prize. Her second novel, The Tiger Claw, the story of a Sufi Muslim secret agent searching for her beloved through Occupied France, (Knopf Canada 2004) was a finalist for the Giller Prize.