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 Ice
Cube 
 "If
you don't think of Cubans or Iraqis as actual human beings, if you don't
see them or hear their voices, then it's easier to be against them.
They're faceless. It's a tried-and-true way of dealing with people or
nations that the ruling elite finds troublesome or inconvenient -- whoever
gets in our way. They're simply lumped into the enemy pile. "
 "Bush's
lame response to North Korea has made it quite clear that all he wants
is to invade Iraq again. North Korea may be more dangerous in fact,
but there's no oil there, and it simply doesn't figure in the grand
eschatological design of Bush's theocratic circle. Pyongyang isn't even
in the Bible!"  "There's
some thing in our psyche, this kind of right or privilege to resolve
our conflicts with violence. There's an arrogance to that concept. To
actually have to sit down and talk, to listen, to compromise, that's
hard work. To go for the gun, that's the cowardly act."
 "Word
comes that brother Cat Stevens refuses to lend his support to our virtuous
jihad. May this turncoat's Peace Train be laden with explosives and
rammed into the Mountain of Mohammed, peace be upon him."
 "You
need gas money and a car that works. Of course, my preference is to
do it in the middle of the night! Leave them little presents, you know
what I'm saying? Like the Easter bunny."
 "There's
a scene in Richard Link-later's Waking Life where the protagonist
crouches down to read a note in the street that says, 'Look to your
right,' which he does, only to come face to face with a speeding car
aiming right for his head. That's what it's like to listen to Mars Volta's
De-loused in the Comatorium for the first time."
 "The
surreal-ists wouldn't know what to do with Harvey Birdman. Its ingenious brand of adult animation owes as much to absurdists like Ionesco and Duchamp as it does to Bugs Bunny."  "There
is no one thing to know in Lord of the Rings more important than
the fact that everything is disappearing, and disappearing fast."
 "it's
also directly because of 2000 that people are more active. Everyone
that was pushed to the brink of sanity is going, "What the fuck? We
can't let this happen again."
 "It's
a sad ending, to be sure, but it may be just what the doctor ordered.
If this whole experience -- the rape accusations, the internal squabbling,
the ego explosions, the Zen hypocrisy -- doesn't teach Los Angeles
that it takes a team to make it happen in the end, then nothing
ever will."
 "Gregory
La Cava is probably the greatest classic Hollywood director still
in need of rediscovery. The man W. C. Fields called the best comedy
mind in Hollywood is virtually forgotten today."
 "North
Korea will conduct its first test of a nuclear bomb, and the
Bush Administration will respond by putting Kim Jong Il on the
Federal Do Not Call list."
 "Carbs
are the new terror-ists. Bread is the new Bin Laden. I can't
wait to order a low-carb veggie Whopper. People are pathetic."
 "The
film might be a pomo wank fest that name-drops J.G. Ballard,
Frederic Jameson, William Burroughs, Raymond Chandler, extended
nervous systems, posthuman environments and virtual reality,
but that's only because the rest of the world hasn't, amazingly,
yet caught up to Gibson." |
by Ross Levine I remember when Orwell's 1984, quoted at length in Michael Moore's new movie Fahrenheit 9/11, was simply a book. A book that indicted, in a thinly veiled manner, another empire -- the one the Soviets had concocted for engaging in such spurious activities as rewriting history and creating a state of perpetual war. In the real world, that was the Cold War, which, in retrospect, was actually a rather hot one, considering how much radiation was created to wage it. Nevertheless, 1984 was a book, and as a book, it had the power to briefly scare us, but not truly detach us from our complacency. Why would it have? We were not living in Oceania but America. 1984 was not Uncle Tom's Cabin but Uncle Alexei's. In the 1960s, some weird things happened here in America. We were the same democracy we'd always been, but people felt compelled to take to the streets and the quads of college campuses in order to be heard. And they were heard, sort of, in a convoluted way. As a backlash to the supposed chaos they represented, the electorate put in power one Richard M. Nixon, a law and order man who nevertheless managed to pacify a portion of the country by ending the carnage -- at least our share of it -- in an S-shaped piece of beachfront property in Indochina. In the 1980s, a wall went up in Washington, D.C., etched with some 58,000 names, and it was all rather sad but life went on. And then things got dicey again. No, I don't mean Reagan and Star Wars or Bush 41 and Operation Kuwaiti Freedom. I'm talking Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky, or, more specifically, Kenneth Starr's massive epic of accusations that, in the hands of a Congress hostile to the sitting President, became the impotence -- err, impetus -- for initiating an impeachment. "The President," we were informed, "inserted a cigar into [Monica's] vagina to stimulate her." Impeachment. We'd heard the word before. After the Civil War, when Lincoln was assassinated and the heir to the White House, Andrew Johnson, had tried to follow in his predecessor's non-vindictive footprints by repatriating the South. This didn't fly with the less forgiving Radical Republicans (them again) and so they tried to impeach the dude. And then there was Nixon, of course, who resigned first, but whose litany of dirty tricks and unconstitutional maneuverings, many caught on tape, would have surely justified his removal from the throne.
But Clinton and the cigar? It seemed something was out of balance. It seemed we were not so much a nation of laws but of manipulation. Or more to the point, that the Republican leadership in the House and Senate was trying to pull off what in less civilized countries is known as a coup d'etat. Their coup fizzled, of course, after Clinton survived the proceedings and many of those most determined to destroy him were outed as shameless philanderers themselves. For a while there, sessions of Congress seemed more like AA meetings, if there is such a thing as Adulterers Anonymous. And then came the election of 2000, which is where Michael Moore chooses to begin his movie. The Republicans finally succeed with the coup they had hoped for in 1999. In some rather eye-opening footage, we see Al Gore himself, as Vice President and therefore gavel-banger of the Senate, putting the kibbosh on black members of the House who are objecting to the impending presidency of George W. Not one member of the Senate, however, is willing to rise to their support and legitimize their protest. Perhaps there was no conspiracy between Bush and his brother to put Florida in "the red," perhaps the Supreme Court was justified in ending all debate so the country could get on with its business, but the fact is that the 2000 election demonstrated that even in the world's greatest and freest democracy, there's more to achieving political power than simply prevailing at the ballot box. Yes, 'twas a wake-up call. And when we heard that it had happened before, in past elections -- 1800, 1824, 1876, 1888 -- well, that was then and this was now. A fraction more than half of America's voters felt disenfranchised, while a fraction less than half felt like they'd been dealt a royal flush. George W. Bush ascended to power right on Constitutional schedule, fittingly sworn in by the Chief Justice who helped appoint him.
George W. Bush, the imbecilic schmoozer and scion of a powerful family who's never been ashamed to use his background and its influence to his advantage (during war and political campaigns), had his victory. He must have had something going for him to prosper so in this dog-eat-dog country of ours. It takes more than brains, obviously -- we can see that for ourselves. Moore shows footage of Bush on September 11, at a photo op with schoolchildren, receiving the news that the World Trade Center is under attack. He seems paralyzed. Mr. President, please, do something. Make us believe that your Presidency is serendipitous, not calamitous. Don't sit there waiting for someone to tug a string. But no, he looks like a high school goof-off who's been asked to step in front of the class and describe a homework assignment he hasn't done. Certainly Moore colors the moment with his own commentary, but the image is there for us to see. The rest of us in America, unless we had the misfortune of not living through 9/11, entered a state of ultra-alertness that morning. "What the hell is going on?" we wondered. Why would our President not be compelled to immediately excuse himself, get up, and ask the same question? How can a man go so far in politics without even this common denominator of common sense? The film wonders what was on George's mind that morning, and we have a theory: The party's over, this presidency thing is serious stuff. But wait, there's "Moore." Eventually, Bush did get a handle on September 11; his handlers made sure of that. Like the Lost in Space robot that required its power pack to spring into action, somebody stuck something into George Bush that activated not his presidential demeanor, but his ambitions. And not his presidential ambitions, which were activated well prior to 9/11, but his desire to prove that this C student is really a great world leader in cowboy clothing, or should we say, in cowboy clothing worn over the fine suit he inherited from Daddy. The nation -- the United States -- went into shock after 9/11. Sure, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, but that was thousands of miles out to sea. Now an enemy had struck in the heart of New York City and Washington, D.C., and with such ferocity that thousands of Americans were dead. The nation was traumatized and Bush and his men saw an opportunity. An opportunity to bring us to war.
You might be thinking, wasn't it Osama who brought us to war? Indeed -- he brought us into war with himself and his band of not so merry men, the minions of Al Qaeda. Moore makes the point that our foray into Afghanistan was too little too late, that bin Laden had already had plenty of time to escape. Whether or not that's true, was it advisable to declare war on terror instead of war on Al Qaeda? By enlarging the conflict to encompass a worldwide axis of evil -- by recreating a Soviet-style enemy that is bent upon taking over the entire world -- by feeding into the national hysteria instead of seeking to balance it against the reality of September 11, that it was a vicious terrorist assault on America's own soil but not necessarily a global conspiracy -- well, does an irrational attack necessarily call for an irrational response? Perhaps, if those responding are prone to hallucinations. Which is to give them credit for hallucinating as opposed to simply . . ."halliburtonating." Do we need Michael Moore to tell us that the baloney about weapons of mass destruction was not based on credible evidence but credulous officials whose minds were fixed on either 1) a utopian vision of a reformed Middle East or 2) a glorious windfall for the United States in terms of an "arsenal of democracy" revitalization of the economy, and a guarantee that the black crude we're addicted to would continue flowing our way well into the future? That is, once we tamed the bubbling crucible that produces it by removing not necessarily its worst dictator, but simply its most uncooperative one? Moore builds his case for No. 2, of course, upon the collusion that exists between the United States and the despotic rulers of Saudi Arabia, who indeed have billions upon billions of their wealth invested here. You don't have to believe in conspiracy theories to see that what's good for Saudi Arabia -- as it is governed today -- is good for us. And I'm not going to let "US" off the hook -- we're still buying the cars that need lots of the gas that comes from the oil that's shipped over the sea from the house that Saud built. A major part of our industrial infrastructure depends on the free-flow of that very oil. Yes, Ford just came out with an SUV hybrid but are they simply appeasing us, and are we simply winking back at them, or are the United States and its leaders -- political and corporate -- really ready to wean themselves off the Saudi nipple? Not to sound overly Michael Moorish, but perhaps the whole arctic drilling scheme is a smokescreen to fool us into believing that the Republicans are attempting to take some action to liberate us from the OPEC monkeys on our back. Why make fuel-efficient vehicles when you can just desecrate the last unspoiled wilderness we have?
So whether it was triggered by democracy or dependency, the decision to wage war in Iraq was like a two-stage rocket fired directly from the White House. The first stage was full of tales of weapons of mass destruction, and was shed after the invasion turned up no such horrors. That's when the second stage took over, with highfalutin' pronouncements about bringing Iraqis their freedom. These pronouncements have continued ad nauseam, an attempt to drum into the public's head that we are not a nation of self-interest at all but an altruistic non-profit with no other intention than to spread happiness across the planet. But is war the best way to do that? You might have thought so, once we had swept into Baghdad and sent the statue of Saddam a'tumblin' down. But that was more than a year ago, and the creation of a new Iraqi "government" notwithstanding, now even the most diehard Bush supporters are having problems believing that the end justified the means. We've seen insurgents killing our troops, civilians burnt and beheaded, Americans grinning over cadavers and tortured prisoners, bodies piling up at Dover Air Force Base. More accurately, we haven't seen quite enough of these things, since they tend to shake our belief in the principle that war is the most direct path to democracy. No matter how rosy its intentions, war has nasty consequences. Moore shows us some -- on the streets of Iraq, within the walls of Walter Reed Army Hospital -- the thousand not-so-natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Undoubtedly, the American military has taken pains to avoid collateral damage, but unfortunately, damage is war's collateral -- without it, you can't call it war, nor reap its benefits. Which are? Well, we hate to bring up Halliburton again, lest the Vice President send an expletive our way. We hate to bring up Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop, Lockheed, the Carlyle Group -- but Michael Moore, of course, doesn't mind bringing them up. War means W.A.R.-- Widgets And Rivets -- and brings gainful employment to Rosie the Riveter, Wally the Widgeter, and the coffers of our mega-corporations. But what does it say for the arrogance of the individuals currently in power when they hand a zillion-dollar no-bid contract to the VP's alma motherlode without even worrying about the slightest appearance of impropriety, let alone the hydra itself? And when that company is found to be ripping off the American taxpayers big time, who are then paid off with apologies, then have we the people lost all power to control our own government? Is that government no longer beholden to us at all? Is it time to start quoting Tommy Jefferson to our present King George? That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…
But even if we don't have the stomachs for revolution, we must at least start upping our level of vigilance. That is the true message of Michael Moore's film-diatribe-documentary-propaganda piece, whatever you want to call it. Never assume that your leaders have your own best interest in mind. You may consider yourself a patriot, but you may still end up on the rotten end of the Patriot Act. You may consider yourself a loyal American, but may still wonder why your kids are in college and someone else's are getting blown up in Falluja. You may be relieved to pay a nickel less per gallon at the pump, but have you thought about what behind-the-scenes deal with the Saudis made it possible? You may choose to stay out of politics, and perhaps get yourself to the polls on Election Day, or not even bother, but there can be no excuse for a faith-based approach to being an American citizen. Everybody has a different threshold for exercising their freedom of thought, but there will probably come a time when we all have to think out loud about something. When that time comes, even if you hate Michael Moore now, you may be glad that he and others like him pushed the envelope open enough so that there's still room to exercise your American right to challenge the actions and justifications of your leaders. And that is the real significance of Fahrenheit 9/11. Nothing -- no image -- is as it seems. No lie is too big. And no form of government is immune to the murderous excesses of power. 08 July 04 Ross M. Levine is an author, Marcel Proust marathoner and manatee-hugger who feels safer on the edge; i.e., in New York or California. He agrees with the King of Brobdingnag that we're "the most pernicious race of odious vermin to crawl the surface of the Earth." He thinks Americans have too much freedom -- fries, that is. 
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Copyright Morphizm.com. All Rights Reserved. |
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Working class
hero. "That is the real significance of Fahrenheit 9/11.
Nothing -- no image -- is as it seems. No lie is too big. And
no form of government is immune to the murderous excesses of power."
(Photo: AFP/Getty Images)
The Republicans'
public enemy number one. "It seemed we were not so much a nation
of laws but of manipulation. Or more to the point, that the Republican
leadership in the House and Senate was trying to pull off what
in less civilized countries is known as a coup d'etat." (Photo:
Reuters/Mike Segar)
The do-nothing
president hard at work. "Mr. President, please, do something.
Make us believe that your Presidency is serendipitous, not calamitous."
(Photo: 
How soon we
forget. "Moore makes the point that our foray into Afghanistan
was too little too late, that bin Laden had already had plenty
of time to escape. Whether or not that's true, was it advisable
to declare war on terror instead of war on Al Qaeda? Does an irrational
attack necessarily call for an irrational response?" (Photo: AP)
Crying Wolf.
"These pronouncements have continued ad nauseam, an attempt
to drum into the public's head that we are not a nation of self-interest
at all but an altruistic non-profit with no other intention than
to spread happiness across the planet." (Photo: Reuters/Stefan
Zaklin)
Sending a
clear message. "The American military has taken pains to avoid
collateral damage, but unfortunately, damage is war's collateral
-- without it, you can't call it war, nor reap its benefits."
(Photo: AP/Ron Edmonds)
