Deirdre Griswold
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 has become a huge box office hit, even though the Disney Corporation did everything it could to torpedo the documentary. This alone makes it important to evaluate the film and try to understand why it has penetrated what is commonly called "popular culture" — which 99% of the time is in a politically conservative mold shaped by giant corporate institutions.
Across the US — and, indeed, in much of the world — this film seems to have fallen like rain on a cultural landscape thirsting for the unvarnished truth. People are clamouring to see it across the world.
Reviews from hundreds of small-town newspapers across the US report standing ovations and cheers when the film ends. Audiences laugh and cry, and few are unmoved.
The last time a cultural work evoked this much interest and passion from the "silent majority" in the US was the 1850s, when Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was published and soon began outselling the Bible. In 1856, 2 million copies of this anti-slavery novel were sold. Families gathered at the end of the day on farms and in cities in the US north, reading it aloud and weeping. The book was banned in the south — just to have a copy was illegal. It was soon translated into 13 languages. Its impact on the people of Britain is said to have helped deter London from entering the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy.
As with Moore's film, one can be highly critical of Uncle Tom's Cabin, especially today, when its stereotypes of African Americans and women, as well as its religiosity and sentimentality, are so jarring. But Africaonline.com makes this summary of the book: "The cry that Stowe had hoped to sound about African Americans was indeed heard, and while Uncle Tom's Cabin did perpetuate cultural stereotypes of African Americans, it also turned the tide of public opinion against slavery in the United States."
Fahrenheit 9/11 is also stamped with many of the prejudices and misconceptions of the present day. Like Stowe's book, it too seems to address itself primarily to whites and be most interested in their consciousness. We can safely assume that Michael Moore, also author of the highly successful book Stupid White Men knowingly panders to prejudices to get his message across to this audience. In a July 4 opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, he urged the anti-war movement to wrap itself in the US flag: "For too long now we have abandoned our flag to those who see it as a symbol of war and dominance, as a way to crush dissent at home."
But the flag IS the symbol of the US state. And the US IS an imperialist country that has run roughshod over much of the world. That's why burning the US flag has become commonplace. Nothing short of a revolution to overturn capitalist exploitation and oppression will change this — and the revolution will have its own flag.
Perhaps the film's biggest flaw is in how it treats the relationship between the Bushes and the Saudi rulers. The implication is that the Saudis, with their oil wealth, run US foreign policy. Of course, this is very popular among millions of people who are hearing of the Bush-Saudi connection for the first time. They have been manipulated to see Iraqis as the "evil " responsible for 9/11, the Iraq war and lots more. Now, absolutely shocked to hear that Iraqis weren't responsible for all the deaths and suffering, they can angrily blame other Arabs.
This explanation may help Democrat John Kerry get elected as president in November, but it doesn't enlighten people about the wiles of the imperialists. The US population has much to learn about how the super-rich right here — not in Saudi Arabia — are adept at creating governments and then pretending not to control them. Which, of course, is going on in Iraq right now. It's the immensely powerful and wealthy US ruling class, with some help from its British allies, that runs Saudi Arabia, and not vice versa.
But, these and other flaws aside, Moore's film has touched a nerve that had seemed to be dead. For, underneath all the details, isn't the real issue the fact that ordinary working people here and in other imperialist countries, who have for the most part gone along with imperialism's conquests, are growing ever more sick and horrified at its effects?
Back in Stowe's time, northern whites were finding they couldn't escape the horrors of chattel slavery. Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, African Americans who had managed to escape from the South were pursued and dragged back to a ghastly fate. Battles erupted in Northern cities as the abolitionists, some former slaves themselves, fought the bounty hunters in the streets.
At the same time, slavery was a potent threat to free workers trying to earn a living wage. In his famous trilogy Capital Karl Marx addressed these workers with the warning: "Labour with a white skin cannot emancipate itself where labour with a black skin is branded".
Today, workers in the developed imperialist countries find that, in this now thoroughly global economy, they have to compete with the starvation wages prevalent in countries caught in the coils of modern-day slavery: capitalist imperialism, the global rule of the huge banks and corporations.
At the same time, those here fighting hardest against sweatshops and poverty wages often come from countries where intolerable conditions created by these same corporations are forcing millions to emigrate. They are today's fugitive slaves, and they are now living all over this country.
All this is going on while imperialist wars are raging in Iraq and Afghanistan and young workers here have to choose between dead-end jobs, prison or the military.
At some point, there must be a sea-change in the attitude of the more conservatised workers here, a realization that their enemies are not abroad but are in the boardrooms and mansions at home. Moore's film may not draw out all the right lessons, but its immense popularity shows that anger and distrust of the rich and powerful, personified by the Bush-Cheney gang, are reaching boiling point.
The millionaires are starting to realise this, too, and are now throwing their money at Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. But since he'd be the richest president ever, and one pledged to continuing and even escalating the occupation of Iraq, his election would be unlikely to do more than delay the inevitable: an all-out revolt against the modern-day slavers.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, August 25, 2004.
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