Fahrenheit 9/11: Like Father, Like Son

Fahrenheit 9/11: Like Father, Like Son
by Oliver Butterick

Thanks to Michael Moore’s new documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, the younger President Bush should expect to spend this Christmas the same way his father did in 1992--waiting out his remaining days as a lame duck, one-term president.

Moore takes his audience on an emotional roller coaster ride. In fact, watching the film reminded me of a day I spent at Disneyland a few years ago. I laughed at the antics of the costumed characters playing in the streets. I was surprised when the Indiana Jones ride suddenly jerked backward to avert imminent doom. I was outraged at the long lines and closed rides. I felt pity for the mother of three who was too exhausted to keep up with her children. Upon leaving, I had a sick feeling in my stomach from all the fried food and felt somewhat depressed at the thought of the world that awaited me outside the gates of the Magic Kingdom. My experience with Fahrenheit 9/11 was strikingly similar.

Moore constructs three arguments with the images and commentary in his film:

George W. Bush is an idiot.
In addition to being an idiot, Bush is a political puppet controlled by corruption.
The 2003 US invasion of Iraq was an unjust use of executive authority.

Bush is portrayed as a happy-go-lucky Southerner who seems to know more about hunting dogs than running the country (and his knowledge of canines isn't all that great either). Not since the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz have we seen a character so lacking in cerebral activity.

Moore traces Bush’s life as a military deserter, a failed businessman, and a president who makes Dan Quayle look like a Rhodes Scholar. Most shocking of the footage from Bush’s presidency was from the morning of September 11, 2001. Upon learning that an apparent terrorist attack had occurred at one of the World Trade Center buildings, Bush decided to attend his scheduled photo-op at a Florida elementary school, without giving any orders as to how the situation should be handled. Furthermore, when he was notified that a second plane had crashed into the WTC complex, he remained in the classroom, listening to the reading of a children’s story for seven full minutes. Any respectable president would have stood up and said something like, “Children. A terrible thing has just happened. I must leave so I can do what I can to keep this country safe for you and your families.” However, without the puppeteers to pull his strings, he remained motionless, with a vacant expression on his face.

Moore recounts one journalist’s impression of Osama Bin Laden as being "quiet and unimpressive," using this description to draw a parallel between the terrorist and President Bush. He then constructs a conspiracy theory regarding the war in Iraq, linking key players in the Bush administration to members of the Bin Laden family. As the film progresses, it becomes apparent that Bush's tangled network of connections all played important roles in both his controversial election and his even more controversial foreign policy. And, not surprisingly, they all seem to have benefited financially from the War on Terrorism.

Only the most astute observers remember when the Bush administration shifted the focus from hunting for Osama Bin Laden to liberating Iraq, a war designed to vindicate his father and provide the opportunity for lucrative reconstruction contracts for his friends. Bush used the fear created by the events of September 11, 2001 to instill a sense of patriotism and nationalism in an otherwise apathetic population. This patriotic movement even caused skate-punk band Pennywise to temporarily pull their single “F**k Authority” from radio stations shortly after 9/11. That doesn’t sound very punk rock to me, especially since Pennywise’s album, “Land of the Free,” released in June of 2001, was recorded to assert their dissent with the current political situation and motivate their listeners to take action to create change. And I thought that propaganda campaigns like this only happened in Cuba, where school children play a beanbag-toss game with a board that looks remarkably like an American paratrooper.

Moore has been criticized by the right wing for presenting a one-sided, biased account of Bush’s presidency. They claim that he has used footage out of context and ignored contradictory facts in creating his conspiracy theory. I think this concern should be acknowledged--in one scene, there are happy Iraqi schoolchildren and families enjoying simple pleasures during the time before the US invasion. I doubt any of these people belonged to the religious minority who were persecuted and killed by Saddam Hussein over the past several decades. Clearly, we only get one side of the story from Fahrenheit 9/11, but I think that is partially the point of the film. Over the past few years, the citizens of the United States have only been given the other side of the story. Bush and his administration are equally guilty of presenting a biased, one-sided account of the events leading up to and since September 11, 2001. Moore's film merely sheds light on the other side of the story.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is the must-see film of 2004. If you haven’t seen it yet, go see it today…before the Bush administration finds a way to ban it from the theaters.

Oliver Butterick can be reached at oliver@babblog.com.