New Mikey Moore Film

Salon.com's Charles Taylor recently described Moore as the Rush Limbaugh of the radical left: "fat, stupid and dishonest." I'm not sure how I feel about this. Moore certainly has Limbaugh's pomposity, and his jihad against Dubya has striking parallels to Rush's unceasing barrage against a certain Bill Clinton. So why do I still like Mike, and hate Rush? Maybe because Moore's propaganda (and that's what his films are) is 1) funny as hell, and 2) willing to acknowledge at least some ambiguities in the world. The Romantic poets, were they not all dead of venereal disease, would say that Moore has a greater negative capability. Plus he wears cool baseball caps.

Ya, its seems like Moore makes fun of quirks and things in American culture, and maybe Rush just makes fun of people? I can't figure out either why I like one and not the other, maybe its just that I've never seen Rush attempt to be a nice guy like Moore. Maybe if in my youth I had started out listening to Moore instead of Rush, Rush would now be funny and Moore annoying. Heck, I dunno.

I've never heard Rush so couldn't comment on similarities b/w him and Moore. However, I have a hard time having any sympathy or appreciation for Moore beyond the merely technical - i.e. that he does have a fine comic sense and a considerable amount of talent as a filmmaker. The thing that disturbs me about Moore is the very fact that while he is unquestionably both fat and dishonest, he isn't stupid. This makes his falsehoods and misrepresentations of fact - www.101-280.com has links to an extensive catalogue of grave innaccuracies in Bowling for Columbine - entirely inexcusable. While according to leftist criticisms Rush may simply be too ignorant to know better, Moore aggressively, consciously, deliberately deceives. Re: his supposed efforts toward niceness, I find them far more offensive than a straightforward callousness because they're so often patently self-interested, exploitative, and insincere - cf. the affected pathos of him shuffling away from the photo of the shooting victim at Charleton Heston's mansion. Carting the Columbine victims to the K-Mart heardquarters, when the logic of his own comparisons between Canada and the U.S. would suggest that availability of ammunition makes no difference in violent crimes, was another especially distasteful scene. There's something about using the suffering of people like these as props in a covert self-promotion campaign that I find morally disgusting in a way that a more overt cruelty could never approach. Various commentators have observed that Moore's career is fundamentally not about causes but about himself. This seems to me a reasonable interpretation. An article I read a while ago about Moore's Oscar acceptance harangue observed that the speech couldn't concievably have been intended to win anyone over to the antiwar view - in fact it probably alienated potential allies. Moore is smart enough to know this. But the loudmouth anarchist act was a necessary exercise in brand promotion; the need to market himself was greater than any ostensible desire to end an unjust war. Rush may have as many flaws as Moore, but on all counts there is no question that Moore at least is smart enough to know better - and this intelligence is damning.

I was once a Moore fan. I've even had e-mail correspondence with him. He has taken a terrible turn, however, and I don't think that rush is 1% as dishonest as Moore is. Moore has a maniacal arrogance irregardless of truth. Rush has a maniacal arrogance because of truth. Moore is also not as funny as he once was...

>>Rush has a maniacal arrogance because of truth.

Nope.

Care to elaborate on "nope," Bill?

I should have mentioned that I was kidding about the Rush Limbaugh part. Maybe the "maniacals" in my post were missed. Heck, it was late when I wrote it. In actuality, Rush often bores me. Which is dangerous, because I live on a mountain, and could fall to my death one day because I've fallen asleep to the words: "Tom Daschle..."

I wrote "nope" cuz my boss was coming in the room, and that's all I had time to write. I will say this, though, Michael Moore seems to have found all the weight that Rush Limbaugh lost...Posting is a lot of work...

Rush at least backs up his words with facts. Facts don't lie - when you realize that you just might come to your senses.

"Facts don't lie" is an interesting premise which I personally don't trust. A "fact" is rather independent of truth. Let's take the Nazi movie, "Our Leader Builds the Jews a City," which I have only seen parts of. (That might not be precisely its name.) The fact was that the Jews were in a city that was specified more or less by Hitler, and in the movie, we can see the Jewish children playing and doing whatever, which they certainly did, at least for that moment for the camera, but we know (unless we deny it) that later they were led to unspeakable horror after many months or years of starvation and strife.

I admit: The above isn't a great example. There are better examples to be found in less provocative circumstances. Unfortunately, I can't think right now of any ordinary situations in which a fact is offered in order to deceive, but we have run into them, all of us, numerous times at every level -- in conversation; in arguments with parents and teachers; in advertisements; in focus groups; etc. We could take the bombing of Laos. I'm sure Nixon referred to it, if he ever did, in a way that would sound good to those who aren't un-American, while the documentary that seems to center around Hitchens' book on Kissinger obviously portrayed the bombing as a terrible thing to do. Incidentally, I think that both points of view are irrelevant to the system of thought that presented the idea and decided to bomb Laos. The sad thing is, the system to which I allude is probably easy to get used to, especially after a good education.

I haven't listened to Limbaugh; I've seen a lot of Moore's work. These people are entertainers working in the American scene, which is none too subtle and worried that somebody might spot some humanity in it. Both of them seem to shout at the audience, to rouse the rabble, because these are the methods by which most of us have been indoctrinated. If we were to look into the history of entertainment, we might find that it has no purpose but to mislead, to cajole, to yell, to con. Everybody likes Bob Hope, has a certain fondness for him, but can anyone sit through many of his movies and any of his TV specials and laugh? Somebody has probably already written about the messages he "sold," so I won't attempt to repeat that. How much difference, generally, is there between the grifting of the nineteenth century and afterwards that occurred within circuses, and the likes of any stars that have ever existed and the systems which fostered them? One difference might be that the cons of the early years knew what they were doing, while most of the present stars don't know what purpose they serve. Just watch the recent footage of Britney Spears on tour (or any film of her between takes on a music video). I think that most people believe Buster Keaton is truly funny. Many of the early comedians were hilarious, by all accounts. The ones we remember had considerable control of their characters, as the grifters working the small towns had of their "rooms," tents that frequently collapsed abruptly around the ears of the yokels at the end of a girl show, for instance. But then changes in the power structure of Hollywood, perhaps, robbed the unlucky, such as Keaton, of their control over their characters. These changes were probably the first steps toward the problems we have now. Moore, for instance, controls his "character," no doubt. No one is eager to steal it from him. But on another level, he doesn't control his character, and he is not alone. Actors of the older generations, such as Kirk Douglas, knew that a character should be present as long as it had to appear on the stage or before a camera. What do we hear about, say, Michael Myers of "Austin Powers" fame? That he stays in character long after the shooting is over. For various reasons, I think we live in an age in which psychosis is rampant. There are thousands of people who think they are in a movie or on TV; occasionally, a Mike Myers springs up from among them, but this isn't much of a cause to rejoice, because we live in a world dominated, saturated by entertainment, and those who entertain are just as feeble in some sense as those who watch. Most of the people of the world (as much of which is "mediated") can get away with this slight bit of psychopathology, so we can consider it normal. Then there are the Michael Moores of the world. I don't think he knew what effect his harangue at the Oscars had; he is under the influence of a compulsion. I don't think that Moore is "smart enough to know" that his compulsion will "alienate potential allies," because not only Hollywood but the world is "irrational." (I use that word only for lack of a better one; one should remember that the people who used it often, the early psychoanalysts, were (and perhaps their intellectual progeny are) hardly "rational" themselves.)

So I don't believe "facts don't lie," although it would be nice to rely on them, rather than to depend on the innumerable liars in the spotlight and in the crowd.