NP Michael Moore

[Otto]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tim Strzechowski" <Dedalus204 at comcast.net>
To: "Pynchon-L" <pynchon-l at waste.org>; "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
Sent: Sunday, July 11, 2004 5:24 AM
Subject: Re: NP Michael Moore
>
> Propagandist or not, his film has made a lot of people (Dems, Reps, and
> everything in between) discuss the Bush Administration's motives and
> actions.
>
> Better to discuss and evaluate, than to be what Robert Lowell called
> "cowed, compliant fish."
>
> >
> > He [...] is also a media
> > practitioner who resorts, routinely and fastidiously, to distortion,
> > omission and gutter innuendo with a viciousness and ideological
> > cartoonishness characteristic of all fundamentalists.
>
>
> Are you sure you're not talking about Fox News?
>
>
>

The Genuine Evil

Good question, Tim -- but as I can choose which news channel I want to
listen to, Fox, CNN, BBC or Sky,  I can choose not to give any of my money
to Moore by watching his movie. It's quite easy to ignore him, I can watch
Spiderman 2 instead. Are the conservatives so nervous that they could loose
the election because some of those who haven't decided yet could base their
decision on Moore's movie? If there are people who will register to vote
because of the movie that would be a good thing for the democracy, but I
doubt that.

The whole article is simply ridiculous. It's a slur, while Moore's film is a
polemic. This is much better:
Peter Bradshaw, Tuesday May 18, 2004, The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1219219,00.html

To demand that a movie-director has to be more precise and correct in the
information he's giving in his film than the government and the agencies
whose lies and distortions the film is about is laughable. Everybody should
know that Moore's films aren't documentaries but deadly serious satire. He
presents the big guys in underpants. Nobody takes the movie-poster showing
him and the President hand in hand for real, so how can anybody honestly
claim that he takes everything as truth as it's presented in the movie?
Michael Moore's spin is just spin that I can avoid easily if I want, the
Bush-spin affects the whole world and is killing people on a daily basis -- 
more then 1000 US-soldiers, estimated 10.000-13.000 killed Iraqis up to now.

"Problem: Moore is not from Flint. He is from Davison, Michigan. The two
places are not far apart, but the social distance between them is
considerable.
[...]
This self-serving distortion is a metaphor for the man."

Interesting point right at the beginning, but why does the author forget to
talk about Bush's military service, the Florida-election and the lies and
distortions that have led to the second Iraq-war? Isn't the US-president
much more important than a movie-director? The answer is that his article is
about Michael Moore and his new film, not George Bush, 9/11 or the Iraq-war,
right?

And therefore:
"Moore never talks about Islamic fundamentalism and training camps,
obsessive anti-Westernism, or suicide terrorists and the difficulty of
guarding against them;

--because his film isn't about those topics.

"he never asks how the American Government should
conduct itself in a war against religious totalitarians."

Why should he? He's no political adviser to tell those who are responsible
how to clean up the mess they've made. He opposes the US-politics that has
made the fundamentalist terrorism possible. He's an American citizen, so his
government is the government he's obliged to criticize first and foremost.
As long as the Islamic fundamentalists were on "our side" fighting the
Russians they've been good, the "monstrous repression, especially of women"
has been tolerable, now as they have begun to kill Americans they're bad!
The same goes for Saddam. What did Rumsfeld do in Baghdad in 1983? These are
questions the author doesn't talk about. Why isn't he doing what he expects
from Moore?

"Perhaps the most egregious factual error is the bald and
absurd claim that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked,
killed or even threatened any American."

So where is the evidence? If the author says such things like "bald and
absurd claim" he should at least present one example that proves one of
Moore's errors. The way he himself does his job is absurd.

"No sooner had Marxism collapsed as an organising force or a credible moral
universe than other orthodoxies filled the void left by the end of the Cold
War."

Right, globalism, neo-liberalism, the erosion of civil liberties and social
standards.

"Religious fundamentalism has flourished, and the leading chronicler of this
change, Professor Philip Jenkins, found that the clear winners have been the
most uncompromising, most conservative and most combative groups with "a
strongly apocalyptic mind-set"."

I agree, but who is Jenkins talking about -- sounds like a description of
Bush, Cheney and Wolfowitz, or, Bin Laden and Sarkawi.

Sentences like "he cannot bring himself to cast even a glance at the genuine
evil" only reveal that the author hasn't understood anything about what
Moore's point is. We all know what the genuine evil is since Mr. Bush told
us after 9/11, don't we? No need for Moore to repeat it.

And Moore isn't the morale instance the author asserts that the political
artist Moore claims. If Moore indeed would do so he'd be wrong, because with
a papal attitude he'd change nothing, then he really would be only preaching
to the already converted.

Otto