THE HEIGHT OF HYPE

This land is your land, this land is my land.

-Woody Guthrie

This is an examination of two films, both nominally documentaries: Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and the right-wing "response" (more of a shrill hatchet job, but then I'm biased and admit it), FahrenHYPE 9/11. With a world economy brought to its knees by unchecked greed, a president heckled loudly by a boorish, petty congressman, the gulf between class, race, creed only continue to grow. Were I religious, I'd say it's about time to start praying. Had I any real faith in our political system, I'd say it's way past time to mobilize and vote some idiots into office that can actually change things. We can only judge our government according to how our daily lives are going. So take stock and start asking: in the greatest country on the planet, how is there room for rampant despair?

America was built on propaganda. Before Thomas Paine published his pamphlet Common Sense, many of the original American colonists were either ambivalent toward the Revolution or in favor of their staid, familiar existence as British subjects. Paine combines his formidable reasoning skills (even drawing on bits of scripture which condemn the rule of kings in general) with a passion for his cause, and helped influence perhaps the first court of public opinion in American history. Common Sense contains an exhaustive, detailed defense of the Revolution and argument for independence, and while by today's standards most of the language is dense to the point of gibberish, there are some passages which could have come straight from a hyper-extreme web blogger or, say, a book by Michael Moore. For instance:

Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then are you not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name of husband, father, friend or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.

In Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore provokes similar reactions to his harsh indictment of the presidency of George W. Bush. Using a mixture of facts, footage both originally shot and (as it turns out) found, as well as a comedian's natural timing, Michael Moore paints a portrait of an ineffectual American President. Through inexperience and a myopic sense of bravado, Moore's version of Bush squandered a rare moment of national unity in the aftermath of the single worst attack on American soil and re-awakened the American War Beast, which wholly consumed at least two Presidents (LBJ and Nixon) and sharply divided this country for more than a decade.

Moore lets the images and numbers speak for themselves in his film, and rather wisely keeps himself behind the camera most of the time. The harsh truth is that Michael Moore is not really an attractive man, and he knows it. His Everyman aura, heightened by the omnipresent baseball cap and sweatshirt, lends his stunts and inflammatory accusations a common, easily approachable feel. Then there's the comedy involved.

Sigmund Freud wrote that "Wit is the denial of suffering;" while everyone to some degree suffers in their lives, the witty jokesters among us deny that suffering a major influence over them. As Tom Robbins writes, in his novel Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates:

Certainly, a comic sensibility is essential if one is to outmaneuver ubiquitous exploitation and to savor life in a society that seeks to control (and fleece) its members by insisting they take its symbols, institutions, and consumer goods seriously, very seriously, indeed.

This is the major difference between the two films, and in my opinion a major, hidden reason for a lot of the right-wing bile in the slap-back at Moore, FahrenHYPE 9/11. The fact that people like Moore can still find a lot to laugh at in this post-9/11 world is seen as shameless, exploitive and sometimes even as "treason."

Moore's film is no documentary...on his website he indeed backs up his assertions with a lot of references, but even former President Clinton, in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine prior to the 2004 presidential election, stated that while every American really ought to see it, Moore "connects the dots a little too closely." That he does. Is this whole mess about keeping the oil lobby smiling, rolling in petroleum and counting their revenues? We can all theorize. Still, Michael Moore - and the left-wing's polemic in general - has a better grasp on humor than the right.

Compare the bitterly funny scene of Moore hiring an ice cream truck and reading the sections of the Patriot Act (an Orwellian title if there ever was one) to the angry ranting by Ann Coulter (whom actor Richard Belzer has called a "fascist party doll" on HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher)-both films are pretty blunt, but Moore's wit owns a deft, poignant edge the other one cannot quite find. The only comedy relief is unintentional: the old Dixiecrat Senator Zell Miller - who once angrily denounced integration as a betrayal to the "Party ideals" - yammering on like a weird old Southern Muppet. Moore knows instinctively that people are loosened up by humor, and constricted by the kind of self-righteous bleating so prominent in FahrenHYPE.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is not a documentary, and about as balanced as an episode of The O'Reilly Factor. And indeed Moore hits some sour notes-such as claiming, in that too-obvious phony solemn tone, that Iraq had "never murdered a single American." I was in high school when the Gulf War started up, and while it had a thin premise and was not a really good movie, it happened, and Americans died there. Moore should have behaved himself a little more.

The right-wing's bitch-fest did not exactly play it straight, either. What was not given prominence in FahrenHYPE was the writing credit of the narration: it was written by Dick Morris, the former Clinton Administration advisor who went on to become a harsh critic of the Clintonistas, even stating that he'd leave the United States is Hilary Clinton were elected president in 2008. A conflict of interest, to say the least. All the somber music and American flags rippling in the wind, the almost palpable sneer as the right-wing pundits defend their current champion, none can excuse the one statement in Moore's film that only reinforced my own spite in general regard to our blessedly-former President of these United States: Bush mobilizing his "base."

It was a charity dinner. And Democrats were there. Fine. Yet seeing the President of this country calling the elite - and the "elite" refers to filthy rich Democrats and filthy rich Republicans equally - his "base," saying between the lines that the interests of the rich will always be his first priorirty, was a sad moment for this so-called democracy of ours.

Propaganda built this country. It goes unnoticed most of the time, fed to us from the radio, the TV, the Internet, the movies, and even each other: most people are walking billboards without realizing it. Still, we know it when we see it, and respond on some instinctive level. The truth is that both films succeed in cancelling each other out. That is the "easy" truth.

The harder truth, for me anyway, is that Michael Moore's film may have cost John Kerry the 2004 election without meaning to. The three million people who gave Bush the edge (and for all the GOP's crowing, that was hardly a landslide in the Reagan Vs. Mondale tradition) may have voted in sharp response to the criticism of their hero. Record voting turnouts don't mean everything.

If Americans could learn to think critically of themselves and their place in the world, neither film would have been necessary. This only underscores a deep pulse of resentment growing under the surface here in America, a frustration at the unchecked divisions that are only multiplying. In the end, neither film could really coerce anyone into stepping in line with the filmmakers' ideals. Both Michael Moore and Dick Morris are too inflexible...if someone is unwilling to explore a different opinion, they are not equipped to handle a rational debate. Instead, they rely on pathos and propaganda to influence people. This is as American as it gets: taking the easy way out. The two films are dark reflections of each other, and in the howling rage either side can conjure up only expands the divisions between us all.