Sorry...this is long, and it is a bit off-topic. Skip it if you aren't into political posts!

Shocker, I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 this past weekend. I'd read a few of the "why this movie sucks" reviews beforehand (like this one from Slate by Christopher Hitchens, and this one on Salon (who ran a pro and a con review).

Because of this, my knee wasn't jerked as much as it might have been...I was prepared for the "propaganda" (or what a Salon letter writer more aptly calls counter-propaganda):

Is Moore's work propaganda? Almost. It's counter-propaganda. The Bushies, aided and abetted by almost every organ of the "So-Called Liberal Media," have been propagandizing since 1999; really, since the election of 1992. Even now, Bush and Cheney continue to pretend that Saddam and al-Qaida were in bed together, confident that there will be no loud and sustained resistance to the Big Lie.

How to resist such mendacity? When Hitler heard that France had surrendered, he was filmed happily stamping his foot, once. Somebody looped the film to make Hitler look like he was doing a silly jig. Later he said something like, "You don't worry about ethics when you're trying to undo a son of a bitch." That guy had the right idea.

The hardest part for me was seeing the woman whose was calling on Allah to avenge her losses (her uncle's home had been bombed and they'd had five funerals because of it). I live in DC, and am just a bit concerned with whether the Bush administration policies will in fact create more terrorism than prevent it. (I was driving to work the other day and wondered when DC would adopt London policies and get rid of its on-street mailboxes and trash cans.)

It didn't exactly help to read an interview with Mark Federman of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology (you know, the medium is the message people) who theorizes that the US will see a Spain-like episode in terrorism meant to affect our elections. What's more shocking is one of his scenarios for responding to this:

Here is a hypothetical. What does the world do, never mind what America does, if they say we are postponing the election to even January from November. What does the world do in response? Well, what does the United States do to a rogue nation? It cuts off trade. It embargoes trade. It freezes currency. What would happen if the world said, 'you have become a rogue nation'? Look at the definition of a rogue nation: democratic rights are suspended. If that happensand man, I'm painting this doomsday scenario, and its pains me that the idea even comes forwardbut if the democratic rights are suspended... We know the constitutional Bill of Rights has been suspended. There is lots of evidence of that. That has already been done. The biggest stocks of weapons of mass destruction exist in the United States. They have used them in the past.

If this happens, then a dramatic world response may be to freeze foreign currency reserves in banks around the world, to seize U.S. property on foreign soil, to embargo all trade with the United States. This, of course, would likely precipitate a world war. ... Despite its problems, the Weimar Republic was an enlightened, well-integrated and assimilated society, with culture, with education, with art, the leading thinkers, the leading philosophers. It was an enlightened society, a democratic society. It was originally a relatively affluent society. It became Nazi Germany.

Yikes. All it all, it's not really about whether Michael Moore is a crappy filmmaker, is it?

Anyways, I was both relieved and distressed to read this article about dirty bombs from MIT's Technology Review. It's nice to know that the radiation won't kill you, but the whole evacuation/decontamination scenarios are pretty damned depressing in themselves. (As an aside, it took me over an hour to get out of my parking garage in downtown DC when we were evacuated on 9/11. It sounds like hanging out in the office next time makes a lot more sense.)

Anyways, I'm not adding Michael Moore to my list of "fair and balanced" reporting sources any more than I'd add Bill O'Reilly. But I was glad to find Media Matters for America. That and FactCheck.org are going to be on the regular bookmark list from now 'til November.

Update, 6/29: Doc is right. Tony Pierce gives good "whupping".

08:23 PM | linkme | home