Apart from creating box-office records, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is making people gasp for more
WORKING class demagoguery is in full swing as Michael Moore’s Bush-bashing, elite-trashing “Fahrenheit 9/11” is creating history by breaking all box-office records, leaving audiences clapping, crying, stunned and gasping for more are the “Red” states that are traditionally Republican. Sweating and swearing and wanting to wring the filmmaker’s fat neck are the Bush men, who fear the approaching cataclysm in November presidential polls.
Go on, say it ...
Okay, here’s the questionnaire. If writer, director and producer Michael Moore was a Pakistani, imagine the price on his audacious head? Would he ever live to see his film screened? If Fahrenheit 9/11 was made in Pakistan, would the craven Censor Board ever pass it, and if by chance it escaped their guillotine, wouldn’t the cheeky cinema houses screening it be torched into a black hole?
Without exaggeration, our intelligence agents, always more zealous than the king, would go into an overdrive, botching up what in their blinkered view is divisive, inflammatory, cavillous. And thereby hangs our hellish tale of a dark tunnel running across Pakistan that will never see the light of liberty ever; of freedom of speech that exposes, for once, our leaders exploiting forever the disenfranchized living- zombies.
Three cheers, then, for America and its President Bush, hip, hip, horray! Pluralism of views thrive in this nation whose founding fathers left behind a priceless legacy, the First Amendment, that guarantees freedom from government interference; freedom of religion; and freedom of expression ie speech, press, assembly and association.
George W. Bush with muscle to arm-twist any leader in the world, has been reduced to a pygmy by Michael Moore, who has the chutzpah to document his president as a jackass (cross-eyed and buffoonish seconds before going on air to announce America’s attack on Iraq), while his dad, president Herbert Walker Bush, 80, is shown as the Machiavellian oil magnate, a greedy, grabby powerhouse, caught in bed snuggling up to the Saudis on the day the twin towers fell, never mind if 15 out of 19 hijackers were Saudis.
Michael Moore, 50, managed to procure priceless footage — never seen before — smuggled out to him by foreign journalists, broadcasters (like Britain’s Channel Four), freelancers and sympathetic American TV workers who slipped him this illicit red-hot stuff, with President Bush secretly caught on camera with literally his pants down.
The result: an explosively woven thriller, smartly written and slyly delivered by Michael Moore himself, the propagandist par excellence, taking the audience on a tour de force of the dark underbelly of contemporary White House and the slimy war horses — Rumsfeld, Powell, Cheney & Wolfowitz who took America to war in Iraq. Wolfy is shown spitting and then combing the hair with his own sleaze. Icky!
The 121-minute documentary opens with a grinning Bush winning the 2000 elections ordained by Supreme Court justices appointed by ‘Daddy Bush’, but the most bizarre scene is inside the Congress where not a single senator, yes, not one, stands up to demand a recount of the election, while we watch breathlessly an impassioned line-up of African American lawmakers in the House of Representatives speak out for Al Gore, robbed of his right to lead their country.
Now, hear this, the US Senate — shamelessly shorn of Blacks — had even one senator asked for a recount, Al Gore today would be in the White House.
In the next shot, a preening Bush with feet up is shown driving around by Daddy Bush on the golf course, perpetually on vacation in the summer of 2001, not bothered with connecting the dots that his security czars provide him on Al Qaeda’s plans to attack America.
Then descends darkness and pin drop silence as the World Trade Centre crashes. The mood of the audience undergoes a seismic shift — from laughing at their president to silent outrage and sober reflection.
The Bush administration, bowing to the Saudi demand, allows the Bin Laden fat cats settled in America to escape a day after 9/11 when all flights in America are grounded. The loaded Bin Ladens are material witnesses, yet the CIA and FBI dare not touch them, intones Moore in his stunning piece of investigative journalism, blackening simultaneously the face of mainstream media for their cowardly reportage.
Two days after 9/11, the portly Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, nicknamed ‘Bandar Bush’, is invited to the upstairs private chambers and after a boozy evening, Bush and Bandar step out on the White House balcony to smoke cigars. Moore reminds us that the Bush family has personally pocketed around one billion dollars in oil subsidies from the Saudis who to date have invested $850 billion in the US and thus “own seven per cent of America”.
Afghanistan is attacked and innocent people bombed, killed and maimed by American daisy cutters, because Bush wants the oil pipeline from Caspian Sea to run through the Taliban-ruled area, reaching the Arabian Sea via Pakistan. Bush’s hand-picked Hamid Karzai, a former consultant to Unocal, the US oil company commissioned to lay the pipeline, is shown signing the agreement as is our prime minister Jamali — remember him?
Iraq comes on the heels of Afghanistan and this segment, by Jove, is the saddest to watch. We see boys flying kites, women enjoying street chats, wedding ceremonies in action ...and then comes the bombing blitz, death, destruction, shrieks ...
Heart-stopping is the curse of an old Iraqi woman, invoking “Allah’s wrath” on the Americans responsible for killing her kith and kin and rendering her homeless.
Raising her fleshy hands towards heaven, her voice heavy with emotion, she prays to Allah in Arabic, “bring ruin on the homes of Americans, ya Allah, just as they have wrought ruin on our homes, ya Allah.”
On the other side of the world, in Flint, Michigan, (where Michael Moore grew up) we see a confidently patriotic mother declaring her allegiance to Bush and the American flag. Her son is in Iraq, “he’s fighting for his country.”
Minutes later, the same woman, we watch crumble into a heap, sobbing like a child when news arrives that the Black Hawk that her son is flying is downed and he’s dead.
Devastated, yet with her eloquence intact, she journeys to the White House, clasping tight to the railings, calling out to President Bush, holding him personally responsible for sending America’s young into “harm’s way”, only to return home in body bags.
Sitting in the darkness of the movie theatre, the woman on my left, I notice sniffle, and the man on my right, I hear a sigh escape him. Sure, ordinary Americans feel the pain. When the film ends, we all burst into a thunderous applause, the lights come on and the first thing to hit me is the throng of young among the crowd.
“I am really scared”, I hear a youth say as we walk out. Another voice calls Moore a “traitor,” yet another declares the movie a “brilliant piece of propaganda, entertaining and funny, and it skewers the president deliciously, yet he totally avoids the question of Israel — is Moore blind or a coward?”
Moore’s chilling message to mainstream America is: “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the revolution, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win.”
Next to civil libertarian Chomsky, Moore is the most respected American in Europe. The populist has no qualms about trashing his own tribe before ecstatic crowds. It’s music to their ears when he tells them, “We Americans are possibly the dumbest people on the planet ...in thrall to conniving, thieving, we suffer from an enforced ignorance. We don’t know about anything that’s happening outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing. That’s why we’re smiling all the time, you can see us coming down the street. You know, ‘Hey! Hi! How’s it going?’ We’ve got that big [expletive] grin on our face all the time because our brains aren’t loaded down.”
Moore blames his country for being “culpable in committing so many acts of terror and bloodshed that we had better get a clue about the culture of violence in which we have been active participants.”
“Don’t be like us,” he urges, “you’ve got to stand up, right? You’ve got to be brave ... should such an ignorant people (Americans) lead the world?
“Don’t go the American way when it comes to economics, jobs and services for the poor and immigrants. It is the wrong way.”
Moore’s a “credit to the Republic” endorses the New York Times.
Apart from creating box-office records, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is making people gasp for more 
