Liberal philistinism and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11
By David Walsh 9 July 2004
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Through July 7 nearly ten million people in the US had viewed Michael Moore's documentary film, Fahrenheit 9/11. That is to say, millions understand better now than they did prior to June 25 that the American government is run by a gang of crooks with ambitions to plunder and dominate the globe.
Moore's film has its weaknesses, but it argues persuasively that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz and the rest are liars and war criminals, with intimate connections to big business in general and the oil industry in particular. About these facts there simply is no longer any debate within an increasingly wide layer of the population.
The success of Fahrenheit 9/11 is deeply disturbing to the leading figures in the US media, all of whom, in one way or another, helped conceal certain truths about the Hussein regime in Iraq-that it possessed no weapons of mass destruction, that it had no connection to Al-Qaeda, that it bore no responsibility whatsoever for the September 11 attacks-from the American people.
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There is an even deeper reason for the violence of the attacks on Moore's film. To the complacent liberal journalist there is something frightening about both Fahrenheit 9/11 and the powerful response of the population to its charges. To acknowledge that the Iraq war was a criminal enterprise, that the US government lies unrelentingly, that millions despise the Bush administration and the entire establishment with a visceral hatred, all this is devastating to the Cohens and Kristofs and Goodmans.
It cannot be true that crimes of this dimension were taking place, because that would indicate something horribly wrong about America. And the popular outpouring must be dismissed because its implication, that the US is a powder keg, is also terrifying. Each column these people write is a soporific, delivering the message, 'everything is well and good,' 'everything is under control.'
The war may be terrible, but it will pass. The Bush administration may be vile, but it too will pass. Dangers exist, but they are always somewhere else, they always emerge from some external source, some "bad guy" far away.
If, on the other hand, what Moore asserts about the US ruling elite in Fahrenheit 9/11 is true and if the reaction to his film is an accurate reflection of the volatile state of mass consciousness, then this is a very different and disturbing picture. Then things have been done that cannot be undone; the course of American history has been irrevocably altered. Such a thought cannot be allowed! What follows from it is far too shattering for the liberal philistine. He or she responds with bewilderment and venom.
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