June 24-30, 2004

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MY PET GOAT, OR WHAT WAS HE THINKING?: George W. Bush sits tight on Sept. 11, 2001.

Michael Moore sets his sights on George W. Bush, but only wings the real target.

Fahrenheit 9/11

by Sam Adams

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and with John Kerry unable to seize the lead no matter how many lies our feckless leader gets caught in, it's come to this: Michael Moore for President.

Not the office, of course. Moore relishes his outsider persona too much to abandon it, and besides, he's proven himself almost the commander in chief's equal when it comes to his impatience with difficult questions. But if Moore isn't out for the top job, he certainly wants his say on who gets it. As he told the Inquirer, his primary goal for Fahrenheit 9/11 (after making "a good movie") is "the complete and entire removal of the Bush family and their associates from Washington come November."

How strongly does Moore feel? Strongly enough to abandon his patented ambush techniques, at times taking himself out of the picture entirely (though not often enough). That's not to say he doesn't make his presence felt. As the theme to The Greatest American Hero plays over footage of George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" appearance on the USS Lincoln, you can practically feel Moore's finger in your ribs, his breath in your ear whispering, "Get it?"

Moore knows better than to subscribe to the "great man" theory of history, but he sticks to his guns, framing every political issue as a contest of wills. Though the president, whom Moore pointedly calls "Mr. Bush," never sits for an interview — in their one face-to-face encounter, Bush tells Moore to "go find real work" — Moore frames the film as a head-to-head confrontation, played out in the nation's movie theaters instead of a conference room. By Moore's own terms, Fahrenheit 9/11 will be the first movie to be judged a failure if the sitting president is re-elected.

Given the fuss over the movie's potential fact-fudging, it's surprising that most of Fahrenheit 9/11's claims have already been widely reported, if sometimes with inconclusive results. Even more surprisingly, the film's reliance on the public record turns out to be one of its greatest strengths; Moore doesn't need to uncover new facts, because the most damning are already in plain sight. If you read the papers — and Moore clearly wants to reach an audience who doesn't — there's not much in Fahrenheit you haven't heard before. But Moore assembles his material with the skill of a born demagogue. Its opening minutes bring back not just the horror of Sept. 11, 2001, evoked with a black screen and the upturned faces of horror-stricken New Yorkers, but the outrage of the 2000 election, when CBS, CNN and NBC called the election for Gore before Bush's first cousin at Fox News reversed the trend.

Moore mocks Bush's cowboy persona, prefacing the bombing of Afghanistan with a Bonanza-style credit sequence, complete with burning map. But he also makes hay out of Bush's initial reaction to the World Trade Center attacks. For seven minutes after the plane hit the second tower, Bush remained in a Florida elementary school classroom, ostensibly reading a book called My Pet Goat. Left-wing conspiracists have seized these few minutes as proof of everything from Bush's incompetence to his purported foreknowledge of the attacks (though why Bush didn't plan a more plausible response if he knew the attacks were coming is left unexplained). For Moore, Bush's stunned inaction is a smoking gun, but Moore can't seem to decide on the crime. "What was he thinking?" Moore wonders aloud. ""I should've shown up to work more often? I've been hanging out with the wrong crowd?'" Which is it? Moore's weakness for kicking up clouds of rhetoric is close to a fatal flaw, allowable in a free-form essay like Bowling for Columbine but unacceptable, even counterproductive, here. The most ardent conspiracist could hardly fail to register the pain in Bush's face, and Moore lingers on it so long that he does the unthinkable: He humanizes George W. Bush.

Would Sept. 11 have been different if Bush had leapt from his chair and swung into action? Moore may sneer at Bush's riding-the-range persona, but he exploits the desire for hero figures as much as he mocks it. He attacks the FBI for letting 142 Saudis, including 26 members of the Bin Laden family, fly out of the country shortly after Sept. 11, contrasting their supposedly slipshod police work with a clip of Jack Webb in Dragnet. But isn't the tough-as-nails approach exactly what the Bush administration has been peddling? Or perhaps the FBI's Jack Webbs — hallmark of those glorious, pre-Miranda days — should only be dispatched to deal with likely suspects, like anyone with a Saudi passport. Moore implies, but does not say, that the Saudis were let go with no more than a cursory glance, but that implication is belied even by his purported source, the 9/11 commission, which concluded that 22 of the 26 bin Ladens were interviewed by the FBI, and the other Saudis were duly screened and cleared. Of course, Moore never says that they weren't, as he never says that all of the Saudis were wealthy oil merchants. But I'd be surprised if most viewers don't come away with the impression that the FBI let a bunch of George W. Bush's old oil cronies fly the coop two days after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.

Reined in by his team of lawyers — who, Moore promised The New York Times, will meet any attempt to libel him "with force" — Moore has become a master of such innuendo. During interviews for Bowling for Columbine, Moore baited journalists with the allegation that a major American theater chain had refused to book the film, but he offered only hints as to which chain he meant. It should, he said, be simple for any reporter to track down the company's name, but by that time Moore would be long gone. The facts of Fahrenheit 9/11 speak for themselves, but Moore can't keep his mouth shut. Moore can't resist stepping on interviewees even when they favor his cause: the slightest hesitation, and Moore jumps in to complete their thought.

Despite its election-year politicking, Fahrenheit 9/11 has the same fundamental subject as all of Moore's documentaries: rich people getting away with it. The Dragnet clip is a dead giveaway. It's not some street punk Webb's putting the screws to, but a well-heeled gentleman, who curtly reminds Webb, "I pay your salary." Without a blink, Webb shoots back, "Then let me do my job." In this case, though, the tough guys are on the wrong team; much as Moore hints at secret handshakes and backroom deals, the Bush administration has been most notable for its unprecedented brazenness with regard to its corporate coziness. As the author of The Halliburton Agenda tells Moore, "This company's about money. It's not conspiracy."

Moore shies away from saying that you don't have to conspire when the house is rigged. Replaying the March speech where he called Bush "a deserter," Moore compares the service records released by the Bush administration in 2004 with those Moore obtained during the 2000 election, and finds one critical difference: in 2004, the name of James R. Bath, who was cited along with Bush for failing to take his National Guard physical in 1972, has been blacked out. Moore calls Bath "the Texas money manager for the bin Laden family," and shows documents indicating that Bath invested in Bush's ill-fated Arbusto, hinting that Bath might have laundered the bin Ladens' investment in a doomed corporation to curry favor with the Bush family. But as Moore well knows, such palm-greasing is commonplace in political and corporate spheres. Bush's corruption is reprehensible, but hardly exceptional.

Moore knows that the Bush family didn't invent war profiteering: He closes the film with a quote from 1984 about the role of "eternal war" in maintaining the class system. But even for armchair politicians, "class warfare" is a no-no. (Why not call it self-defense?) As much as he wants to unseat Bush, Moore knows that would only be the beginning. As the movie's opening sequence points out, not one Senator put a signature to the House Black Caucus' petition to debate the 2000 election results. And he dramatizes the fact that only one member of Congress has a child in the armed forces by visiting the Capitol and asking Congresspeople to sign their children up for military service. Overtly, the sequence is nonsense, since parents can't enlist their children in the military any more than they can force them to have grandchildren. But its underlying tone of class privilege hits home, especially since Moore is accompanied by a black Marine Corporal who says he refuses to return to Iraq to "kill other poor people."

Moore's heart is in the heartland, with Lila Lipscomb of his native Flint, Mich., whose son died in Iraq months after penning a letter that reads, in part, "What in the world is wrong with George? He got us out here for nothing." Fahrenheit 9/11's most searing images, those which transform it from a sometimes-galvanizing argument to essential viewing, demonstrate the war's toll on both sides: not just dead Americans and Iraqis, as well as the charred corpses in Falluja that American media were too skittish to show, but the psychological scars left on American troops and Iraqi civilians. The fear and confusion on a young Iraqi girl's face as American troops search her house by flashlight establishes the horror of occupation in an instant. Underlying the scene is the realization that these troops have traveled halfway around the world to find a nation of people poorer and more powerless than themselves.

Fahrenheit 9/11 Written and directed by Michael Moore A Lions Gate release Opens Friday at East

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