And yes, Fahrenheit 9/11 does have major strengths, a fact you'll rarely hear in the press corps. For starters, Michael Moore is actually funny, a rare condition among modern humorists. He understands his comic persona, and uses it in this film as he has done since Roger & Me-juxtaposing himself, the shambling Everyman, with varied collections of fakers and phonies found at high levels of society. Repeatedly, Fahrenheit 9/11 juxtaposes the faces and manners of empty elites with images drawn from other parts of the world-for example, when Moore asks a blatantly phony member of Congress to sign up his children for service in Iraq, or when he shows us a gum-popping, post-human Britney Spears urging faith in America's president. ("Honestly, I think we should just trust our President in every decision that he makes and we should just support that. You know? And, um, be faithful in what happens.") And Moore has another Major Strength beyond that; Michael Moore has a strong class perspective. The strongest parts of his film are found near its end, when he delivers two short speeches about the way America's classes interact. "Evil begets evil," he says in one speech, showing footage of American soldiers mistreating the body of a dead Iraqi-and he says that "this is what you get" when you send "otherwise decent kids" off to fight an unnecessary and poorly-planned war. The other short speech makes Moore's largest point about the way our elites use the poor. He has shown unflattering footage of Marine recruiters trolling an underclass mall near Flint. And omigod! He has spoken to the young people being trolled, recording their thoughts about their life situations. One of them says he wishes he could go to college without risking his life in a war zone first. "They serve so we don't have to," Moore says of the children of the underclass who have signed up to fight in this war. Moore brings a powerful class perspective to Fahrenheit 9/11-a perspective rarely seen, and often punished, in our celebrity press corps. It is rarely expressed for an obvious reason. Our modern press is itself a high elite; despite pious tales about Buffalo boyhoods, its opinion leaders are all multimillionaires, and even hard-charging young elite scribes know they're on the millionaire track-and they're careful not to blow it by getting outside the narrow confines of their elders' world view. Most of these upscale scribes have little class perspective to suppress in the first place. But beyond that, they have no incentive to challenge their group's perspectives, and that helps explain the nasty treatment Moore's film has received in the press. After all, is there any elite more phony and fake than the one that is currently trashing Moore's film? And make no mistake-these overpaid and pampered poodles tend to identify, not with Moore, but with the powdered phonies he mocks. Indeed, try to believe that the following happened! Try to believe that, when Moore showed the vacuity of pop idol Spears, Noy Thrupkaew-writing in the American Prospect!-spoke up in anguished protest:
THRUPKAEW: At times it seems as if others' suffering becomes just a convenient peg from which to hang his argument. He shows an Iraqi woman at the very extremity of rage and grief. Her uncle's house has just been bombed; it will be her fifth funeral. "I can only count on you, God," she screams, "Where are you, God?" Moore then cuts to Britney Spears, chewing gum and saying, "We should just trust our president." I know the point Moore's trying to make-here some of us are, bovine, plastic, blindly following our president, while others feel abandoned by their God. But goddamnit, Michael, do you have to be so callous to show us our own lack of feeling? My notes at this point in the film accelerated into illegible profanity. Yes, that's the way the film was received in one of America's "progressive" publications! Michael, Thrupkaew vainly implores. Please don't show us how empty we are! But then, other progressives (and many mainstreamers) have complained that Moore's interviews with those congressmen were somehow "unfair"-the latest "cheap shot" directed at Washington. Incredible, isn't it? It's now "unfair" to let us see the fake/phony face of our political elites. It's now "unfair" to mock politicians! For the record, those interviews were something beyond "unfair"-those interviews were actually funny! Did these troubled pundits fail to hear the laughter around them in the theater? As noted, we've seen Moore's film three times, and the double-take by an unnamed congressmen got the biggest laugh every time. Normal Americans seeing this film think these congressmen's conduct is funny. But all around your press elite, even "progressives" raise their hands to complain that it's all so unfair! So yes, dear readers, you might as well know why Moore's film is so strangely trashed. Why do you read accounts of its failings that are wildly ginned up? Why do you read few accounts of its strengths? You are reading these oddball accounts because the Washington press corps is now made up of men and women of the president's class-men and women who instinctively side with Bush, not with an underclass shambler.
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DP
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