My 75 yr old Father-in-laws review of F 9/11 (he's a retired Professor....

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Tue Jul-20-04 05:19 PM
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My 75 yr old Father-in-laws review of F 9/11 (he's a retired Professor....

...from a PAC 10 University)/ This is an excerpt he sent me from a letter he sent to friends on the East Coast...I thought it was interesting to hear his analysis given his education, age and experience...the last time he had gone to the "movies" was about 20+ years ago....

Dear Ann:

We saw Fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday, for you! Well, almost only for you. In fact, so many of our circle of friends and family have seen it and wondered what we thought about it or told us what they thought of it; and I'd read William Raspberry's opinions in the newspaper. All this led me to conclude that it's actually of historical interest. So, we'd better see it for ourselves. Here are my impressions:

In a way, it's a masterpiece of social history. He paints a picture of people in our society and what they are doing to themselves and to strangers far away. It's like Shakespearian drama. Strange and dark forces are at work in minds and in society at large. People are Moore's actors. Sometimes he himself interviews or tries to engage them . Other times others have captured them on cameras, or he has found them on TV screens. Modern technology has given him a mass of images from which to select for his theater. He portrays the rich and powerful, many many of them - for instance, almost all of the Bushes and their circle: the Saud royal family with its enormous fortune and thus monetary power; the Bushes and their financial holdings and grubbings; Cheney; business people of Halliburton and other corporations, greedy for their share of the loot of government contracts; the inner circle of the Whitehouse and administration (Powell, and all the others who are having the sweat daubed from their upper lips or cheeks powdered or hair slicked down) - all vanity and power-thirsty; congresspeople: blacks pleading for a single senator to allow them to present their grievances; Jim McDermott of Washington State; representatives who vote for war but of whose sons and daughters only one serves in the war - these representatives picked off on the street corner by Moore, but avoiding him like he has the plague. Then there are the kids. They are the down-and-outs of Flint - picked off by the Marine recruiters. They serve, they play with and joke about the genitalia of Iraqian corpses. They come home in caskets or with legs and hands blasted off. Then there are the patriots, such as the proud mother who has always backed her government blindly in whatever it did and who encouraged her son to sign up not just out of zeal but for financial reward (G.I. bill etc.). She wails as out of a Greek tragedy and stands before the fence that protects the rich and powerful president at a great distance from the Whitehouse. I also was treated to an image of a slickly made up young white lady. She told me of her approval of the government's policy to make war. Her name was Britney Speers (spelling?). I'd never have seen her had I not seen this movie. And so forth. Indeed, the movie had too much in it to comprehend at one sitting - just like a great Shakespearian tragedy.

One friend said that the film should have been edited. Well, I don't think so. It was painful in its length and details about a very sordid story. The film made me sick. I felt sick about our society, our country. I felt sick for the injured and aggrieved Iraqis and Americans, as I was sickened by the horrible graphic images of shattered bodies, most especially by the infrared images of human figures being destroyed by American rockets fired from airplanes. These were a masterful tribute to Donald Rumsfeld and his absurd notion that you can win a war of invasion by arms alone and a metaphor for his ruthlessness, arrogance and sense of invincibility.
You see, you have set off a great flood of thoughts, which come out on the page like a crazy quilt.

Most comment about the film has been directed at its direct or implied political commentary and significance. Most of us know that the Republican establishment did all it could through Disney to keep it off the screens. And it's obvious to all that it portrays George Bush as a blend of childishness, spoiled brattishness, cowardliness, ignorance, brashness, and so forth. But, this was secondary to me to the way the film represented the ugly underbelly of our society and how, bit by bit, we are being morally and financially impoverished. I am more worried than ever about the advance of fascism amongst us.

Many of my friends have fretted that they don't know what they can do to get the society on a healthier course. Michael Moore was able to find something to do. His work of art can be described as propagandistic. That doesn't bother me. It was documentary to the extent that real people were involved, real time, real words and wounds. I would call it counter-propaganda. In an age of mass culture and mass media, you have to fight fire with fire. The population is swamped by the administration with lies, distortions and propaganda. I need only cite the President's landing on the aircraft carrier, his strutting out in military fashion (like dictators we know of from our earlier selves) and boastfully claiming victory to an audience captive to their Commander-in-chief. I was enraged when I first saw the speech as it was delivered, and I was enraged again yesterday when Moore replayed parts of it for us.

Well. Basta! I regret that we can't be together with you and anyone else who could tolerate our rant. Perhaps we'd have greatly different opinions about the tragedy of the Bush administration. But I'm sure that we'd turn the air blue with our words about it and Moore's drama about it.