Recent months have brought big names in politics to town: Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, former Vermont governor Howard Dean and vice presidential nominee John Edwards. On Monday, Eugene will play host to another political guest: Michael Moore.
Moore — the lugubrious, self-indulgent court jester of the American left — will discuss his inflammatory documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11,” and no doubt fling intermittently deserved barbs at the Bush administration’s intermittently effective policies.
In light of Moore’s visit, I’d like to offer an inoculation against his litany of oversimplified innuendoes and misleading non sequiturs, and, in the interest of fairness, give credit in some of those places where it’s due.
In “Fahrenheit,” Moore paints himself as a plucky and patriotic muckraker, a cinematographic sage illuminating the incestuous catacombs of corporate self-interest and blundered foreign policy and the blood rites
sacrificing hapless American soldiers and Iraqi civilians for fossil fuel. (These profanities are all, of course,
orchestrated by a cabal of Republican policy-makers and defense contractor
executives.)
This story is, of course, largely ridiculous: Moore’s absurd criticisms begin as early as the film’s opening scene.
“Everything seemed to be going as planned,” Moore explains, launching into a montage of clips of networks projecting Democratic nominee Al Gore as the winner of Florida’s electoral votes in the 2000 election. But then he screens a clip of the Fox News Channel projecting now-President Bush as the state’s winner.
“All of a sudden,” Moore explains, “the other networks said, ‘Hey, if Fox said it, it must be true.’”
The man at Fox’s “decision desk” on election night, it turns out, was John Ellis, a Bush first cousin. The
sequence spirals into incoherence from there, eventually implicating the Supreme Court in a procedural coup d’état: “(Independent recounts don’t) matter, as long as all of your daddy’s friends on the Supreme Court vote the right way.”
This sequence’s innuendo is largely spurious: The media, even if (or when) they behaved in the monolithic follow-the-leader scheme that Moore implies, had little say over the final vote count. Ellis’ assignment to the “decision desk” was thus unwise for a channel that prides itself on “fairness and balance,” but also irrelevant to the wider discussion. Worse, Moore reduces the sober legal attention of the land’s highest court to an unrealistic exercise in third-grade playground politics. (Absent, too, is the thornier notion that if court’s 5-4 ruling implies that the more conservative justices let their politics interfere with their judicial sense in Bush v. Gore, then it suggests the more liberal ones yielded to the same temptation.)
Worse, this nonsense overshadows Moore’s too-brief discussion of the most legally and ethically dubious problems with Florida’s election: Katherine Harris’ double-duty as both vote-count chief and Bush’s campaign chair for the state, and the
overzealous purging of state voter rolls that left probably thousands
disenfranchised.
Moore’s self-portrait fails in other ways, too. The best muckrakers present the facts and help to resolve them cogently. Moore does neither. And such is his central failing in “Fahrenheit.” While Moore has honed his prodding and instigating to near-perfection, he lacks an ability to provide coherent, logical conclusions.
One of Moore’s slick but problematic assessments is his take on Saudi influence on American policy. While Saudi Arabia enjoys evident favoritism from the United States (despite the former’s marginal-to-poor human rights record), differences in aims strain relations between the countries. If Saudi interests were as potent here as Moore suggests, American policy in both Afghanistan and Israel would be starkly different. At the least, Saudi Arabia wouldn’t have forced the United States to move its regional military headquarters out of the country.
These and countless other devices of equal intellectual frivolity make Moore less a respectable critic of national policy gone awry and more a partisan gadfly with a flair for “gotchas” and parlor tricks. This excess leaves “Fahrenheit 9/11” far from the critical and emotional tour de force Moore wanted it to be — and from, to Moore’s credit, the one it could have been.
Moore’s most remarkable failing in “Fahrenheit,” though, is also the most ironic. He tenders a half-true narrative: Bush is a leader certain in his mission to protect his interests, but suffers from a misplaced sense of patriotism and is shamefully willing to deceive the American public when convenient for his ideologically motivated agenda.
In succumbing to the excesses of paranoia and style that dominate the movie, Moore renders himself not as a person certain in his mission to discredit Bush, but as a filmmaker that suffers from a misplaced sense of patriotism and who is shamefully willing to deceive his audience when convenient for his own ideologically motivated agenda.

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