>The Left, on the other hand, would never be capable of accomplish the
>same mobilization level simply because the booboisie, the "masses"
>prefer right-wing bigotry to anything that the Left holds dear. That
>the tenor of the US politics is quite conservative and that anything
>smacking of the Left ideas is dead on arrival is due not to shrewd
>maneuvers of a few conservative politicians, or lack of organizational
>skills on the Left, but to bigotry and conservatism of a large share of
>the US population.
Hasn't the US left got any riff-raff of its own to counter with, if that's what Americans want?
Left wing bigots and "bubbas"? Here's one:
http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2004/05/24/1085389333854.html
Two-faced, this French kissing of a slob
Date: May 25 2004
By Padraic P. McGuinness
Who ever imagined that the big prizewinners in the international film industry would be fat, hairy slobs? First, the New Zealander director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson, and second the American director of Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore.
Of course, the great producers and directors in the past were never film star material themselves; it was always one of the defining features of Hollywood in the old days (and probably still is) that an essential element in the career path (a rung on the ladder to success, you might say) of any dewily innocent-looking ingenue was the casting couch, where she would be joined with a repulsive-looking gnome.
About the only alternative was to marry an already successful star, as Nicole Kidman did.
The Jackson awards were for a remarkable adaptation of one of the great fantasy stories of the 20th century; he deserves every award and every dollar it will earn. Not so for Moore.
His film, whatever its merits, was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival on purely political grounds, as a manifestation of French anti-Americanism and American leftist self-hatred.
The chairman of the award jury was Quentin Tarantino, who made his name in cinema through the portrayal of excessive and pointless violence and yet considers himself anti-war.
There is little doubt that the inspiration for the inexcusable treatment of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers came from filmmakers like Tarantino and their counterparts in the American pornography business.
But the award at Cannes really puts the final nail into the coffin of the French film industry, which paradoxically built its success on Hollywood's - what would French film be without the "film noir" elements stolen from America, the invention of the "auteur" theory of filmmaking by the new wave directors who could not understand English-language dialogue, or the imitation of American actors?
The purely French kind of cinema never had much international success, except among the tiny audiences of the art-house cinemas. But the more French culture declines in relative importance (especially relative to American culture) the more aggressively the French cinema industry demands bigger subsidies.
The latest Cannes festival was continually interrupted by demonstrations by actors and others demanding more unemployment benefits for not acting in or making films which no one would want to see anyway if they were made.
Now the Cannes jury has, along with the French Government, once again definitively sold the pass to American culture. For what is more central to American culture, and especially Hollywood film culture, than the portrayal of American power as that of an evil empire, inimical to world civilisation and peace?
Moore's title is a reference to a story, Fahrenheit 451, by a famous American science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury. It is about book-burning in a future American dystopia, and was made into a film by the great French new wave director, Francois Truffaut.
So the theme of French anti-Americanism, itself derivative from American self-hatred and from American creative sources, has a long history. Indeed, it can even be traced back to the participation of the French General Lafayette in the American Revolution, whence he imported new ideas to France.
For years, anyway, the Cannes film festival has been predominantly an American marketing event. Without American money, films and attendances it would simply collapse. The terrace of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes is always crowded with Americans, with French film industry beggars dancing attendance.
Even the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, owes his career in Hollywood to Cannes and its Americans - it was there that he came to public attention as the body-building star of Pumping Iron, the success story of the 1977 Cannes festival.
It is the central irony of European anti-Americanism that it has now, as the Anglo-American journalist Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, elevated to one of its great cultural awards an American who far from being an elegant, Euro-style intellectual sophisticate, is a fat, hairy, foul-mouthed slob - just like the Euro image of the typical American supporter of George Bush.
The fact that he is peddling propaganda of great crudeness and lack of care for the facts just makes him better in their eyes.
Moore is the hero also of those in Australia who would think themselves better educated and more cultured than the average footballer.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - if you tell these people what they want to hear, they will accept anything.