One Michael Moore is worth a hundred cult-crit professors by John Lacny
David Leonard's article in ColorLines on "white populists" in the mass media left me wondering whether he actually reads or watches the very people he attempts to critique. Say what you want about Michael Moore, but he's a genuine progressive who doesn't deserve to be lumped with not-as-smart-as-he-thinks-he-is libertarian Bill Maher or conventional Clinton liberal Al Franken.
Professor Leonard didn't see the same Bowling for Columbine that I did. Moore's tone in that film may have been flippant and lighthearted -- he always is -- but I did notice that he located the origins of US gun culture in the slave patrols of the Old South and in the white-settler roots of the country as a whole. That's no "passing reference" to racism, that's a fundamental critique of white supremacy as the central fact of US political culture. Maybe it wasn't done to the precise scholarly standards of Washington State University -- God save us from any agitprop movie that is -- but it was there. Leonard further laments that the people of color featured in the film were there as "man on the street" figures, and wonders about the absence of "experts on the relationship between gun violence and racism." Has Professor Leonard ever considered that the "man [or woman] [of color] on the street" may just have a lot of the expertise one really needs to understand this problem? It's true that Moore likes to use ordinary people and random third-string celebrities with no discernible political credentials to make his points -- but the fact is that he features almost no credentialed experts, black or white, in any of his films, and that's what gives them their edge and character. When a white sheriff says bluntly that welfare "reform" is a disaster that leads to bloody violence, by my rough calculation it is about 754 times more powerful than if it comes from the mouth of Professor Leonard, and that's true whether we like it or not. . . .
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People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!