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:
1.
George W. Bush is an idiot.
2. In addition to being an idiot, Bush is a political
puppet controlled by corruption.
3. 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.
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