Moore Questions
I just started reading Michael Moore’s new book, “Dude, Where’s My Country?” Moore has been called a liar and irrelevant, and the media has skewered him–so why is he #1 on the NYT Bestseller list for five weeks? Same reason why the Dixie Chicks are selling music like hotcakes–the “liberal media” made it clear that celebrities who speak out against Bush are losers, but they somehow manage, despite this pervasive media image, to become more popular than ever before.
The book begins with seven questions for George W. Bush (rhetorical, we must assume–as if Bush would ever address them), and the first of those is highly relevant to the theme of Moore’s upcoming movie, Farenheit 911 (reported subtitle: “The Temperature at Which Freedom Burns”). The question pertains to the ties between the Bush and bin Laden families. Essentially, how bin Laden’s family was deeply involved in W. Bush’s early, heavily subsidized (and ultimately failed) business career, as well as Bush Sr.’s Carlyle Group; how neither Bush ever voiced disapproval of the bin Ladens’ association with their brother Osama, nor acknowledgment that the bin Laden family still supports and finances Osama, despite conservative claims to the contrary.
Which brings us to today’s news. So many people are so excited that we caught Saddam… but, if you recall, he was never really the center show in this particular circus. Osama bin Laden is, and was. Or, more precisely, al Qaeda. Which bin Laden has been running, with help from his family, which has been in bed with Bush… and since Osama is not easy to catch, Saddam made a much better target.
The problem is, Saddam was never actually a threat to us. No WMD, no army capable of doing much harm–he was contained. So, we caught him–great. Problem is, it was never that relevant, and now we have spent hundreds of billions, alienated half the world or more, lost hundreds of our own soldiers and killed thousands of Iraqi civilians, and are still sinking in the quagmire–and in the meantime, the Taliban is gaining ground in Afghanistan, Osama is still on the loose, and al Qaeda is still out there, just as ready to strike….
Are we really in better shape than we were a year ago?
That answer, at least, is clear: hell, no.
Capturing one old man cost far too much and was not even relevant to the danger we wanted to fight. In a few days or weeks, even those presently enamored will wake up to this fact. And as we rub our eyes and refocus on what should have been the main point, Moore’s questions will have even more relevance. Why did Bush have all those ties to bin Laden? The answers will lead to a better understanding of why we’re in our present mess. Hint: it beings with “O” and ends with “L”. Three letters.
Take your time.
(I misspelled my name in the last post)
I love your blog! Very insightful and a joy to read =)
With regard to Americans being inured to political outrages, you’ve pinpointed it. It’s been this way since before Bush, it’s just that it’s gotten to the point with this regime that the country is now in a constant siege mentality, and is willing to accept just about anything. Also, I’ve noticed among people I talk to that they believe the government is so powerful that there is no turning back, and there’s nothing we can do to change it.
And of course, Saddam was never a threat. Iraq also had nothing to do with 9-11, but it should come as no surprise that reactionaries were able to capitalize on the situation and direct people’s petty desires for revenge towards advancing their goals.
Justin:
Thanks for the comment, and the compliment! And you put it very well about the seige mentality, the feeling of inevitability and powerlessness. We’re becoming quite the herd.
I think it’s the media … and a long-standing American reverence for ignorance.
I’ve been told that in Europe it’s cool to be ‘in the know’ – to be able to ellucidate for any particular topic what’s REALLY going on.
But we here are pointedly, determinedly ‘ugly Americans’. It’s considered deep wisdom to say “I don’t know much about art” (or politics, science, history etc) “but I know what I like” (or, I know what is right, I know what happened). We equate ignorance with clarity, rudeness with plain speaking.
And then there’s the US media. It would a VAST improvment if they would merely go into their OWN ARCHIVES and report background on the topic du jour. But that simple task is not being performed, and the media clearly has no interest in doing anything beyond parrotting the official US government line, no matter how many reversals, lies, and logical failings it contains.
I absolutely agree. I recall when Bush said that it wasn’t necessary for him to be knowledgable on the issues, but just that he could choose the right people. As if it wasn’t important to have both. As if a dolt could lead by choosing good people, or that someone without the wit to be president were even qualified to choose the people who could do the job. And on top of that, he was telling us that we would not really be electing him to be running the country, rather an unidentified group of people that he would effectively vault into power (and so it has become).
As for the media, I have always thought that it is necessary and perhaps inevitable to take advantage of the storage, cross-referencing and searching advantages of the Internet and applying it to a kind of super-media more suited to the new medium.
Think about it: we still have short, limited stories on any given topic. From a few pages down to just a few paragraphs, often on topics of major importance. Why? The Internet can allow far more than that, and the reporters without doubt can produce WAY more material than that. But we still see stories limited because of limitations in time and space for the old, analog media–not enough room in the magazine, not enough time on TV or radio, no interactive, hypertext ability in any of those media. The Internet is a different animal, but the press is still producing cookie-cutter information suited for the last century.
What we need is, first, the reporter to be given the opportunity to unload ALL the information they gather, in the form of sub-pages or a searchable matrix, with links to databases on past stories and data on every relevant aspect of the story. Right now, the best we see is the laughably lame (search) tag to proper nouns in Fox News stories, which simply presents the results of a generic engine search for the name in the story–not an actual link to relevant stories.
There is a wealth of information that could easily be provided would the press simply grow up and embrace the new technology and not be scared sissies about presenting news to the public in any form aside from the current, pre-chewed, pre-digested pap they spew out today. Or maybe that’s a format they want to preserve, lest we start actually thinking for ourselves….
Rant finished. For now.