I don't like Mike

I haven't seen Michael Moore's controversial new movie Fahrenheit 9/11 and I don't intend to. Not for any political reasons, but for the simple fact that Michael Moore has never interested me. Given that and all reviews I've read, professional and amateur, I have no reason to believe I'm going to learn anything from the movie or enjoy it particularly. It's very rare that I consider something worth parting with $8.50 of my money in an overpriced cinema (excluding popcorn or soda) so my standards are pretty high. For $8.50, I could get a baseball ticket AND hot dog AND a soda AND a 50-50 ticket. So a glorified rant isn't likely to blow me away.


As most people who read my essays know, I could be described as a progressive. Some use slightly more colorful descriptions but I think most would agree that I'm left of center, politically. Given that, many people are surprised that I don't genuflect to Moore in the same way the far right act like Bush is Jesus Christ risen. People seem to assume that I would bow and kiss Moore's feet if he were in the same room just because we both think the president should join the unemployment rolls.

Michael Moore is a screechy, whiny, loudmouth. He has a knack for playing the oppressed martyr for the purposes of self-promotion. Fundamentally, he's no different than Bill O'Reilly or Ann Coulter, except they've come in contact with a comb in the last three years. They don't impress me and neither does Moore.

The director was lauded at the Cannes Film Festival simply because Fahrenheit 9/11 was anti-Bush, Moore is vociferously anti-Bush and most Europeans are anti-Bush. Giving Moore the Palme d'or was a political statement, not a cinematographic statement. Now I'm all in favor of opposing the president, but the actual film was almost incidental to the whole proceedings.

I'll give Moore credit. He, like O'Reilly and Coulter, is brilliant at self-promotion. I mean, he was right to embarass Disney for not releasing Fahrenheit 9/11 after they led him to believe they would. He did what he had to do, as a businessman. Though when he agreed to work with Disney, he should've known better than anyone that big corporations are allergic to anything vaguely resembling risk. I was just a little insulted by his insinuation that their refusal to do so was somehow on the same level as Robert Mugabe's thugs bombing the printing presses of Zimbabwe's only independent daily newspaper.

The far right's demonization of Moore is predictable. They demonize ALL criticism of Bush/the war/the troops/the country (which they conveniently morph into one thing). One critic, for example, said that Moore is "damn lucky we aren't allowed to hang people like him," which pretty much encapsulates the mentality of a certain segment of the American population and how much they value dissent's role in democracy. (If dissent were unpatriotic, we'd still all be singing God Save the Queen). This is the model these folks want America to set for Iraqis and Afghanis. Still, people like Moore do a disservice to the progressive cause because he gives moderates the image that everyone on the left is as incoherent as he.

Simply put, I find Moore tiresome and uninteresting. He doesn't challenge me. Well, I mean he does in a way. It's challenging to suffer through one of his screeds from start to finish without flipping the channel or surfing to another website. But he doesn't persuade anyone who's undecided. He doesn't tell me anything that I didn't already know. He doesn't give me anything that I can't get in a far more rational form from a dozen other places. Moore's political rants don't engage anyone's brain so they're pretty much a waste of my time.

And that's pretty much the left's fatal flaw. They think they need to counter Coulter and her ilk by being as rabid and irrational as her. They think they need to pander to the lowest common denominator as much as the far right. Simply put, the far right are much better at that stuff. The left ought to go back to having both a backbone and a brain, not just a mouth.