> Moore's incompetent.
>
>He's an incompetent propagandist and liar.
General Motors public relations department put together a dossier on Michael Moore prior to the release of Roger and Me, and sent it to the press. Influential film critic Pauline Kael took from it in her review of his film, as did others - the culture managers transcribing directly from corporate press releases, as they so often do. It's no different than what GM did to Ralph Nader decades earlier. Or Brown and Williamson did to Jeffrey Wigand. Almost everything in the dossier was false, but that was unimportant as it's only purpose was to try to hurt the impact of his first motion picture. Once this line of attack started, anyone who felt challenged by him used it as one of their buckets of mud to throw at him.
Noam Chomsky wrote a book in the 1960's that quoted Truman as saying "The whole world should adopt the American (capitalist) system which could survive in America only if it became a world system." Actually, it is James Warburg paraphrasing Truman, and Chomsky corrected it for the second edition. He says people still talk about this, and apparently they still do ( http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=eee564bd.0308211944.107716f2%40posting.google.com ). Subsequently, Chomsky's scholarly political books have had appendixes filled with footnotes larger than the actual book. Understanding Power has so many footnotes they have to be downloaded from the web as they said they didn't have room to print them in the book. I've noticed Moore's books are becoming footnote-heavy, and he even comments about this in his last book.
Contrast this to typical bourgeois reporting. I was just reading this article but it is typical. It's the first paragraph of a Time magazine article on the peasant uprising in Nepal: ----------------------------------------------------------- http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501020513-235504,00.html
Nepal: Return to Year Zero
Nepal's Maoist rebels are murdering, beating, bombing and looting—all in the name of 'protecting the people'
BY ALEX PERRY KATHMANDU
Monday, May. 06, 2002 Even with knives as sharp as razors, it takes time to skin a man. After 35 minutes, flesh was hanging from Ram Mani Jnawali's shoulders and cuts crisscrossed his legs, ribs, arms, hands, ears and chin. His legs were shattered at the shins, broken stumps marking where the bones had been smashed across the steps of his house. But he was still breathing. And yet his teenage tormentors kept questioning him. "Why don't you leave the Congress party?" screamed one interrogator. "How much do you earn? Where are your daughters?" But the 54-year-old, whose only offense was that he belonged to the ruling Nepali Congress Party, was beyond speech. Eventually his torturers—a crowd of 60 girls and boys in Maoist uniforms and rebel-red bandannas—grew tired. Selecting a sharpened kukri (a small machete), one of them stepped forward and sliced halfway through Jnawali's neck in a single blow. And that's how his wife and son found him, cut to pieces, head partly severed, when they dared to venture
out into the yard the next morning. No one knew whether he had died of shock or bled to death, but the pool of blood around his body suggested the end had been slow. -----------------------------------------------------------
The article goes on like this, the last sentence is "As I climbed into my car, the man held onto my arm, eyes wide with fear, and hissed in my ear, 'Terror. Terror,' before running back to his house." Perhaps Chris Doss would be able to discern better, but I don't even think the hacks at Pravda ever sunk to this level of propaganda. And it's just a random piece I just read. Contrast to this Moore and Chomsky not ever being allowed to make a minor error. It is a double standard. Although scrutiny forces them to make sure all of their facts are straight so that is fine by me. So I do not mind so much that they are held to a higher standard.
Kelley said Moore was a bad propagandist and liar, but of course didn't give any examples, as mud is more effective when it is purely ad hominem, just keeping the drumbeat going that the corporate PR departments. Then someone asks for examples, and Kelley doesn't give any examples of lies, but gives examples of contradictions in the movie as how the movie had thematic contradictions. To me, there were no thematic contradictions, the theme was the quest for why American culture is so violent, and exploring contradictions that came up along the way. I don't think Moore gave an easy answer, which certainly would be bad propaganda.
I think the real problem with Moore is he is from working class roots and is repellant to a white collar sensibility, be they bourgeois liberal or bourgeois conservative. They are repelled by him just as they would be by angry peasants in Nepal. I know plenty of blue collar church-going, Republican-voting people who saw his first movie and liked it. I think it is just being repelled by someone with blue collar roots and sensibility. But of course, now that his movies and books have been successful he is not a broke schlub in Michigan any more is he? He has enough money to fund subsequent projects on something aside from a shoestring - gear bourgeois mud bucket #2, Moore has lost touch with his working class roots. It shows me where some peoples heads are here that they will swallow Disney press releases hook, line and sinker before believing what Moore says. Their campaign to try to discredit Moore among the white collar class, liberal or not, has been quite successful, the American public is strung along on yet another one.
____________________________________________________________ Find what you are looking for with the Lycos Yellow Pages http://r.lycos.com/r/yp_emailfooter/http://yellowpages.lycos.com/default.asp?SRC=lycos10