Tis excellent, it is.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/arts/23RICH.html?pagewanted=1"But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths,
and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many
this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's
not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind
on something like that? And watch him suffer."
— Barbara Bush on "Good Morning America,"
March 18, 2003
SHE needn't have worried. Her son wasn't suffering. In
one of the several pieces of startling video exhibited
for the first time in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit
9/11," we catch a candid glimpse of President Bush
some 36 hours after his mother's breakfast TV
interview — minutes before he makes his own prime-time
TV address to take the nation to war in Iraq. He is
sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. A makeup woman
is doing his face. And Mr. Bush is having a high old
time. He darts his eyes about and grins, as if he were
playing a peek-a-boo game with someone just
off-camera. He could be a teenager goofing with his
buds to relieve the passing tedium of a haircut.
"In your wildest dreams you couldn't imagine Franklin
Roosevelt behaving this way 30 seconds before
declaring war, with grave decisions and their
consequences at stake," said Mr. Moore in an interview
before his new documentary's premiere at Cannes last
Monday. "But that may be giving him credit for
thinking that the decisions were grave." As we spoke,
the consequences of those decisions kept coming. The
premiere of "Fahrenheit 9/11" took place as news
spread of the assassination of a widely admired
post-Saddam Iraqi leader, Ezzedine Salim, blown up by
a suicide bomber just a hundred yards from the
entrance to America's "safe" headquarters, the Green
Zone, in Baghdad.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" will arrive soon enough at your
local cineplex — there's lots of money to be made — so
discount much of the squabbling en route. Disney
hasn't succeeded in censoring Mr. Moore so much as in
enhancing his stature as a master provocateur and
self-promoter. And the White House, which likewise
hasn't a prayer of stopping this film, may yet fan the
p.r. flames. "It's so outrageously false, it's not
even worth comment," was last week's blustery opening
salvo by Dan Bartlett, the White House communications
director. New York's Daily News reported that
Republican officials might even try to use the Federal
Election Commission to shut the film down. That would
be the best thing to happen to Michael Moore since
Charlton Heston granted him an interview.
Whatever you think of Mr. Moore, there's no question
he's detonating dynamite here. From a variety of
sources — foreign journalists and broadcasters (like
Britain's Channel Four), freelancers and sympathetic
American TV workers who slipped him illicit video — he
supplies war-time pictures that have been largely
shielded from our view. Instead of recycling images of
the planes hitting the World Trade Center on 9/11 once
again, Mr. Moore can revel in extended new close-ups
of the president continuing to read "My Pet Goat" to
elementary school students in Florida for nearly seven
long minutes after learning of the attack. Just when
Abu Ghraib and the savage beheading of Nicholas Berg
make us think we've seen it all, here is yet another
major escalation in the nation-jolting images that
have become the battleground for the war about the
war.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" is not the movie Moore watchers,
fans or foes, were expecting. (If it were, the foes
would find it easier to ignore.) When he first
announced this project last year after his boorish
Oscar-night diatribe against Mr. Bush, he described it
as an exposé of the connections between the Bush and
bin Laden dynasties. But that story has been so
strenuously told elsewhere — most notably in Craig
Unger's best seller, "House of Bush, House of Saud" —
that it's no longer news. Mr. Moore settles for a
brisk recap in the first of his film's two hours. And,
predictably, he stirs it into an over-the-top, at
times tendentious replay of a Bush hater's greatest
hits: Katherine Harris, the Supreme Court, Harken
Energy, AWOL in Alabama, the Carlyle Group,
Halliburton, the lazy Crawford vacation of August
2001, the Patriot Act. But then the movie veers off in
another direction entirely. Mr. Moore takes the same
hairpin turn the country has over the past 14 months
and crash-lands into the gripping story that is
unfolding in real time right now.
Wasn't it just weeks ago that we were debating whether
we should see the coffins of the American dead and
whether Ted Koppel should read their names on
"Nightline"? In "Fahrenheit 9/11," we see the actual
dying, of American troops and Iraqi civilians alike,
with all the ripped flesh and spilled guts that the
violence of war entails. (If Steven Spielberg can
simulate World War II carnage in "Saving Private
Ryan," it's hard to argue that Mr. Moore should shy
away from the reality in a present-day war.) We also
see some of the 4,000-plus American casualties: those
troops hidden away in clinics at Walter Reed and at
Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in Fort Campbell,
Ky., where they try to cope with nerve damage and
multiple severed limbs. They are not silent. They talk
about their pain and their morphine, and they talk
about betrayal. "I was a Republican for quite a few
years," one soldier says with an almost innocent air
of bafflement, "and for some reason they conduct
business in a very dishonest way."
Of course, Mr. Moore is being selective in what he
chooses to include in his movie; he's a polemicist,
not a journalist. But he implicitly raises the issue
that much of what we've seen elsewhere during this
war, often under the label of "news," has been just as
subjectively edited. Perhaps the most damning sequence
in "Fahrenheit 9/11" is the one showing American
troops as they ridicule hooded detainees in a holding
pen near Samara, Iraq, in December 2003. A male
soldier touches the erection of a prisoner lying on a
stretcher underneath a blanket, an intimation of the
sexual humiliations that were happening at Abu Ghraib
at that same time. Besides adding further
corroboration to Seymour Hersh's report that the top
command has sanctioned a culture of abuse not confined
to a single prison or a single company or seven
guards, this video raises another question: why didn't
we see any of this on American TV before "60 Minutes
II"?
Don Van Natta Jr. of The New York Times reported in
March 2003 that we were using hooding and other
inhumane techniques at C.I.A. interrogation centers in
Afghanistan and elsewhere. CNN reported on Jan. 20,
after the Army quietly announced its criminal
investigation into prison abuses, that "U.S. soldiers
reportedly posed for photographs with partially
unclothed Iraqi prisoners." And there the matter stood
for months, even though, as we know now, soldiers'
relatives with knowledge of these incidents were
repeatedly trying to alert Congress and news
organizations to the full panorama of the story.
Mr. Moore says he obtained his video from an
independent foreign journalist embedded with the
Americans. "We've had this footage in our possession
for two months," he says. "I saw it before any of the
Abu Ghraib news broke. I think it's pretty
embarrassing that a guy like me with a high school
education and with no training in journalism can do
this. What the hell is going on here? It's pathetic."
We already know that politicians in denial will
dismiss the abuse sequence in Mr. Moore's film as mere
partisanship. Someone will surely echo Senator James
Inhofe's Abu Ghraib complaint that "humanitarian
do-gooders" looking for human rights violations are
maligning "our troops, our heroes" as they continue to
fight and die. But Senator Inhofe and his colleagues
might ask how much they are honoring soldiers who are
overextended, undermanned and bereft of a coherent
plan in Iraq. Last weekend The Los Angeles Times
reported that for the first time three Army divisions,
more than a third of its combat troops, are so
depleted of equipment and skills that they are
classified "unfit to fight." In contrast to
Washington's neglect, much of "Fahrenheit 9/11" turns
out to be a patriotic celebration of the heroic
American troops who have been fighting and dying under
these and other deplorable conditions since President
Bush's declaration of war.
In particular, the movie's second hour is carried by
the wrenching story of Lila Lipscomb, a flag-waving,
self-described "conservative Democrat" from Mr.
Moore's hometown of Flint, Mich., whose son, Sgt.
Michael Pedersen, was killed in Iraq. We watch Mrs.
Lipscomb, who by her own account "always hated"
antiwar protesters, come undone with grief and rage.
As her extended family gathers around her in the
living room, she clutches her son's last letter home
and reads it aloud, her shaking voice and hand
contrasting with his precise handwriting on lined
notebook paper. A good son, Sergeant Pedersen thanks
his mother for sending "the bible and books and
candy," but not before writing of the president: "He
got us out here for nothing whatsoever. I am so
furious right now, Mama."
By this point, Mr. Moore's jokes, some of them sub-par
retreads of Jon Stewart's riffs about the coalition of
the willing, have vanished from "Fahrenheit 9/11." So,
pretty much, has Michael Moore himself. He told me
that Harvey Weinstein of Miramax had wanted him to
insert more of himself into the film — "you're the
star they're coming to see" — but for once he
exercised self-control, getting out of the way of a
story that is bigger than he is. "It doesn't need me
running around with my exclamation points," he said.
He can't resist underlining one moral at the end, but
by then the audience, crushed by the needlessness of
Mrs. Lipscomb's loss, is ready to listen. Speaking of
America's volunteer army, Mr. Moore concludes: "They
serve so that we don't have to. They offer to give up
their lives so that we can be free. It is, remarkably,
their gift to us. And all they ask for in return is
that we never send them into harm's way unless it is
absolutely necessary. Will they ever trust us again?"
"Fahrenheit 9/11" doesn't push any Vietnam analogies,
but you may find one in a montage at the start, in
which a number of administration luminaries (Cheney,
Rice, Ashcroft, Powell) in addition to the president
are seen being made up for TV appearances. It's
reminiscent of Richard Avedon's photographic portrait
of the Mission Council, the American diplomats and
military figures running the war in Saigon in 1971.
But at least those subjects were dignified. In Mr.
Moore's candid-camera portraits, a particularly
unappetizing spectacle is provided by Paul Wolfowitz,
the architect of both the administration's Iraqi
fixation and its doctrine of "preventive" war. We
watch him stick his comb in his mouth until it is wet
with spit, after which he runs it through his hair.
This is not the image we usually see of the deputy
defense secretary, who has been ritualistically
presented in the press as the most refined of
intellectuals — a guy with, as Barbara Bush would have
it, a beautiful mind.
Like Mrs. Bush, Mr. Wolfowitz hasn't let that mind be
overly sullied by body bags and such — to the point
where he underestimated the number of American deaths
in Iraq by more than 200 in public last month. No one
would ever accuse Michael Moore of having a beautiful
mind. Subtleties and fine distinctions are not his
thing. That matters very little, it turns out, when
you have a story this ugly and this powerful to tell.
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