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Comment: Incendiary Money Spinners-Fahrenheit 9/11 and President Bush Novel Assassination Plot
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We're in strange times when an advocate of peace uses a plot centring on extreme violence against a sitting president, as a stand against violence. July
05,
2004: Updated August 10, 2004--A
week after President Bush's visit to Ireland, newspapers are still Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 has arrived in Ireland. Both Moore and the author Nicholson Baker who has written a novella Checkpoint which centres on a plot to assassinate President George W. Bush, are in the business of making money. The Baker book is scheduled for publication days before the opening of the Republican National Convention. Peace and hate may seem strange bedfellows but they're much in evidence these days and there is no doubt that there is a market for material where hard facts can be difficult to find. The Clinton haters of the 1990's were a domestic phenomenon but Bush provides both a lucrative domestic and international market for vitriol. Most of us have grown up on music lamenting the downtrodden, by artists living lives of vulgar consumption. Some of us have not seen the inconsistency and it's not surprising that Moore and others can find an audience irrespective of their own records.
Michael Moore implies that President Bush launched the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan to help energy companies who planned to build a gas pipeline and he deliberately arranged to let Osama Bin Laden escape from the Tora Bora mountains in November 2001. This is blatant nonsense to some of us but others will believe it. I have met many Arabs who are convinced that President Bush's father had secretly agreed to let Saddam Hussein invade Kuwait only to betray him when the deed was done. The truth in 1990 was that the American Ambassador had told Saddam that the US did not wish to intervene in Arab border disputes- hardly a nod to invade and annex a neighbouring country.
This is what David Aaronovitch of the UK Guardian newspaper wrote last year about Michael Moore: and he sells despite the fact that much of what is in his latest book was in his previous book. Despite sentences like this, concerning the Maginot line: “The only problem was, they built the bunkers facing the wrong way and the Germans were deep into France before you could say, ‘Garçon, more stinky cheese please!’” That manages to be both factually wrong and unfunny. Yet it tops the charts. Why? Someone has described it as “political comfort food”, where you get served up your own opinions and prejudices in a way that makes you feel better about yourself. It’s fine to hate Bush, to loathe Tony Blair and to feel yourself to be - uncomplicatedly - vindicated. Moore routinely uses the word “lie” to cover real lies, genuine mistakes, wrong predictions and - worst of all - straightforward disagreements. No need for thought. The trouble is that Moore is as ripe for satire in many ways as are his targets. Stupid White Men, for instance, castigates Moore’s fellow Americans for their timidity and ignorance. Then it serves up this on Northern Ireland in 2001: “No one is left out of the political discourse in the United Kingdom. Except the Catholics of Northern Ireland. [They] are second-class citizens whose rights are continually violated, who are kept at the lowest tier economically and who live under the thumb of an occupational force of British soldiers.” Comic Strip, whose Hollywood version of Arthur Scargill and the miners’ strike was a genuine satire, couldn’t have done it better. When Moore does present anything like a thesis, it is confused and contradictory. In Bowling for Columbine, for which our under-fire hero won an Oscar, he seemed to be arguing that the essence of the gun problem was availability - hence the sequences about the bank that gave its customers free guns and the stunt of taking a shooting victim to confront a bullet retailer. But Moore also contrasted the US with Canada, which, per capita, has as many guns and many fewer slayings. It was the aggressive, paranoid culture itself - Moore suggested - that was the problem. But in that case the bank, the bullet seller and even the reviled National Rifle Association were innocent and irrelevant; no more culpable than their Canadian counterparts. Moore didn’t even nod at the contradiction. Arguably worse, Moore has been accused of serious inaccuracies of fact, which you can find detailed on a liberal website called Spinsanity. I won’t go into them here but I was interested in Moore’s response when he was tackled on CNN not so long ago about these errors. The presenter Lou Dobbs asked him about the accusations. Part of the transcript goes like this: Moore: I think they found some guy named Dan was named Dave, and there was another thing. But you know, look, this is a book of political humour. So, I mean, I don’t respond to that sort of stuff, you know. Dobbs: Glaring inaccuracies? Moore: No, I don’t. Why should I? How can there be inaccuracy in comedy? You know. Dobbs: That does give one licence. I think you may have given all of us a loophole. Moore: When Jonathan Swift said that what the Irish do is eat their young - in other words, that’s what the British were proposing during the famine - I think that, you know, you have to understand satire. The Guardian's sister paper The Observer wrote in relation to Moore's appearance at the Cannes Film Festival: The most annoying sound at this year's Cannes Film Festival was the incessant drone of Michael Moore telling everyone in town that he had been silenced. If only...Moore played the victim; the world's press acted outraged; and the Cannes Jury duly handed over the coveted Palme d'Or, insisting its decision had nothing to do with politics. "It was the best movie we saw," jury president Quentin Tarantino blubbed unconvincingly. Fast forward a month and, hey presto, Moore's documentary finds itself enjoying the kind of high-profile US opening usually reserved for star-studded blockbuster action movies. With censorship like that, who needs publicity? "When I gave that speech," Moore said later, "it wasn't embraced by majority opinion. I needed to clarify myself.' In fact, what Moore needed to do was to convince everyone that he wasn't a loud-mouthed winner (anyone clutching an Oscar sounds smug) but the loveable underdog of yore. It's a role he has played to the hilt, with winning results; the glittering likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Demi Moore and Sharon Stone have recently been snapped at screenings of Fahrenheit 9/11, while Madonna has urged her fans to see the film, insisting: "I don't think I ever cried so hard at a movie in my life!" (Clearly, she never saw her own stinker, Swept Away.) Amid this hectic round of celebrity back-slapping and public congratulation, Moore has still found time to remind us just how silenced and censored he is, most recently complaining about the 'R' rating awarded to Fahrenheit 9/11, which he insists will prevent teenagers from hearing his message - and presumably prevent him from pocketing their lucrative demographic dollars. "Come see my movie by any means necessary,' Moore told young punters, adding, 'If you need me to sneak you in, let me know." Gee, thanks Mike. All of which would be far more amusing if Fahrenheit 9/11 was genuinely something to get excited about. I'll be reviewing the film in full when it opens here in a couple of weeks, but suffice to say that it was neither the sharpest, the funniest nor the most politically potent documentary screened at Cannes this year. That award goes to Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, a stomach-churning attack on the fast-food industry which has all of the bite of Moore's work with none of the self-righteous sanctimony. Yet in the area of shameless self-publicity, Moore remains unsurpassed, finding a way to turn every situation to his egotistical advantage. If Bush loses the next election, Moore will doubtless claim credit for his downfall, thus making him an international superhero. If Bush stays, Moore can just go on blaming all those people who 'censored' his movie, from Disney, to the Ratings Board, to the dopes of the 'Move America Forward' organisation who tried to get theatres to boycott Fahrenheit 9/11. Haven't they heard that there's no such thing as bad publicity, particularly where our Mike is concerned? Whoever wins the election, you can be sure that Michael Moore won't be a loser. Nice campaign, Mike. Shame about the film. Moving on to Baker's novella Checkpoint which the publisher has helpfully made available extracts well in advance of publication, a man sits in a Washington hotel room with a friend and talks about assassinating President Bush. The 115 page book will retail for $18 and in this election year, there is going to be an avid market. The characters Ben and Jay eat a bag of bagel chips and order lunch from room service as they talk into a tape recorder. Ben: Obviously you have something on your mind. Jay: That's true. Ben: You could begin with that. Jay: Okay. Uh. I'm going to -- okay. I'll just say it. Um. Ben: What is it? Jay: I'm going to assassinate the president. While it's against the law to threaten the president in real life, a work of fiction is usually protected by the First Amendment. The book's main character Jay fulminates and rages against George W. Bush saying that he hasn't felt so much anger against any other president -- not Nixon, not Reagan. "He is beyond the beyond. What he's done with this war. The murder of the innocent. And now the prisons. It's too much. It makes me so angry. And it's a new kind of anger, too," Jay says. He is furious that the United States armed forces have used napalm-like bombs in Iraq. "It's improved fire jelly -- it's even harder to put out than the stuff they used in Vietnam. And Korea. And Germany. And Japan. It just has another official name. Now it's called Mark 77. I mean, have we learned nothing? Mark 77! I'm going to kill that bastard," he says. At one point he says in relation to Bush, "He's one dead armadillo." "You're going to squash the president?" Ben says to Jay. "If the FBI and the Secret Service . . . come after me because I've been hanging out with you in a hotel room before you make some crazy attempt on the life of the president, I'm totally cooked. Yes, you were talking a lot of delusional gobbledygook about homing bullets, but basically your intent was clear. I'll have to say that. I'm scared." Jay calls Bush an "unelected fucking drunken OILMAN" who is "squatting" in the White House and "muttering over his prayer book every morning." Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are "rusted hulks" and "zombies" who have "fought their way back up out of the peat bogs where they've been lying, and they're stumbling around with grubs scurrying in and out of their noses and they're going, 'We -- are -- your -- advisers.' " Jay says that Cheney is a "hunched, man, the corruption has completely hunched and gnarled him. His mouth is pulled totally over on one side of his face." The publisher Knopf's spokesman Paul Bogaards has been quoted in the Washington Post as saying that the book "is a portrait of an anguished protagonist pushed to extremes. Baker is using the framework and story structure as a narrative device to express the discontent many in America are feeling right now." Bogaards says: "It is not the first time a novelist has chosen fiction to express their point of view about American society or politics. Upton Sinclair did it. So did John Steinbeck. Nick Baker does it with more nerve and fewer pages." We're in strange times when an advocate of peace uses a plot centring on extreme violence against a sitting president, as a stand against violence. As the Michael Moore multi-million dollar bandwagon gathers speed, there are plenty others after their own lottery. Last year in the UK, Robin Cook, a member of Tony Blair's Cabinet resigned in protest against the UK's participation in the American led invasion of Iraq. Within months Cook had made almost a half a million pounds from a book deal centring on the months leading to war. Who said that it's an ill wind that does not blow somebody good!!
- Michael Hennigan Our Comment feature has been incorporated in the:
The
Finfacts Ireland News & Comment Service
from October 2004
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publishing readers' letters about it. The humanitarian disaster in
Darfur, West Sudan and Zimbabwe's President Mugabe's decision to use
starvation as a political tool by blocking foreign food aid can never be
a match for any story with an American angle. Besides, it's a rarity to
hear of protests against political inaction. Just a decade ago, as
European leaders floundered in their search for a solution to an orgy of
killings in the Balkans and Rwanda, there were no significant street
protests against leaders such as France's Mitterrand, Germany's Kohl and
Britain's Major. As the genocide was getting underway in Rwanda, the
United Nations peace mission under the control of Koffi Annan, had been
reduced to a skeletal operation.
HIS
scummy little book treats the question of whether the problems
that now beset our cherished and anxious country may be solved
by the shooting of its president. Nicholson Baker's novel does
not advocate the assassination of 