As promised
Jun. 25th, 2004 01:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernistEveryone, go play The Emo Bush game!
Last night![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
saintpeg, universaldonor & myself went to see Fahrenheit 9/11. (totalvirility had to be elsewhere and apparently saw it at midnight uptown). Oh, and by the way, Ray Bradbury? Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit called and he says you're an asshole.
So, I have a lot of things to say. Have a seat. There are going to be spoilers, but fuck, it's not like it's The Crying Game, if you don't want to read anything about the content, then skip this entry until after you see the film. Anyway, the specifics are
The film starts out with the Florida election. Weirdly, it was the only part of the film that made me cry. Gore's victory that was somehow simultaneously preemtive, erstwhile, real and unreal, like some meta-Schrodinger mindfuck.
I had never seen footage of the ratification of Bush's election before, over which Al Gore presided as the chairman of the joint congressional session.. 10 representatives rise to challenge it; to succesfully debate it they would have needed the signature of one senator; not a single senator signed. Moore shows the challengers in order; one by one they are asked by Gore if they have the necessary signature, one by one, with bitterness and rage they say "a senator is missing." They are eight African-American women, two of whom explicitly address the purging of the black voters from the rolls in their districts. The other two are an Asian woman and an African-American man. I was reminded of
this
astute Nacirema-style piece that was making internet rounds in November 2000.
After the credits the film tackles 9/11 and Bush's response (Moore put a timer in the corner of the screen to show that Bush just sat there in the Booker School classroom for 7 minutes after he learned about the second plane, reading My Pet Goat, a book that seems impossible to find on Amazon or any other book search engine).
Then follows a fairly comprehensive historical overview of the Bush/Saudi ties, including Arbusto, classified details from Bush's National Guard records, Saudi investment in the Carlyle group (although he does not cover the recent rift between Carlyle and Halliburton that went down right around the Yukos fiasco and is pretty important as far as New World Order squabbles go), the Saudi flights out of the country on 9/13, etc.
I find it interesting that most reviewers go on about the grief of the Flynt, MI woman, who goes from being a protester-hating war supporter to a grieving mother whose son is killed in Iraq, being the emotional center of the film; not one review mentioned the wailing Iraqi woman whose house was destroyed and whose family members were killed in the bombing campaign; she is crying and screaming to God to avenge them and to protect them from the Americans. That being said, the powerful emotional arc of the mother is the metaphor for the kind of awakening the film aims to provoke vicariously, offering itself its sharpness an ice-breaker. Not a polite cocktail party ice-breaker, but a ledokol, an ice-breaker ship, pardon my atavistically channeled Soviet-era metaphor.
Moore makes really good points about how it's the poor, the American disenfrachized class that is recruited for slaughter in the "liberation" campaigns.
However, the very economic structure that he critiques is logically consistent in any incarnation. In case of a draft, the rich/priveleged people would still find/buy their/their kids' way out of it, and it would still be the poor who would be used as cannon fodder, although perhaps without what little ensilstment financial benefits they currently receive. The Shrub's own shameful sketchathon of a military record and the classic belligerent-Michael-Moore sequence where he tries to get Congressmen to enlist their children in the Armed Forces slam that obvious sina qua non of any US military paradigm on the table. Not dainty, not pretty, not exactly how some self-righteous people who wank about how a draft "would be more fair" while sitting on their asses in ther armchairs envision it, and where they get the idea that a instituted draft would somehow equalize or redistribute the make up of the army I don't know, especially in light of their totalizing indictments of the entire US military-industrial complex and moral distaste for "the lesser of the two evils" option in other scenarios, I don't know, but anyways.
I feel a little queasy about how Moore tackles the abuse of the prisoners. He shows misconduct by the GIs abusing Iraqi prisoners and frames it in terms of "immoral actions breed immoral actions"; the film on the whole is sympathetic to soldiers and gives many of them a forum to voice their disgust or at least ambivalence. Such reasoning sounds suspiciously like some sort of a Kantian metaphysical counterpart to the sociological indulgency, if not absolution of "they were just following orders." But again, I understand it in terms of Moore's identity as a populist media activist. The Average Viewer is supposed to be led out of his gemütlich by the Michigan Mom, and for that the film essentially has to be sympathetic to the soldiers with a "tsk-tsk-tsk" roadstop on the way of pinning the blame on the Administration (where it does rightfully belong, the problem is it belongs in other places too, but this is not an arena ). So yes, there's a fair amount of whitewashing and dodging the issue of torture, but for all intents and puproses this film is a political action, with a concrete agenda and I endorse its shrewd calculation of its target audience. As for what I perceive to be its target audience (and I mean the people I think Moore hopes to affect with it, rather than the people who camped out on the opening night to see their own rage take shape on the screen, those people would be the likely demographic, in this instance a group different from the target audience), allow me to, um, quote myself, because I went on about this extensively onconstintina's journal a few days ago:
The "real Americans" en masse, [i.e. the people who would never read, agree, or care about some fringe article that constructs some completely vague, tautological, MIM-notes-type-logic driven argument about Michael Moore being a White Supremacist, of all things] I meant as the Americans who believe that Saddam is responsible for 9/11, and who derive their positions from the synchronic offerings of the mass media on a given day, rather than any sort of continous logic or diachronic evidence. And no, these are not people who feel so alienated or disenfranchised that they do not care to vote or participate in politics. These people actually consider it their patriotic duty to vote, and they want to vote for Bush. They don't feel disenfranchised at all. They feel patriotic. And here is where I think Michael Moore's project is subversively succesful (or I hope it will be with F9/11): their alliance to their American, patriotic, love-it-or-leave-it identity is to the institution of the American Dream/Empire/Whatever, not to Bush, Bush has just run a succesful PR campaign conflating the two. I think Moore's film can deconstruct that particular administration's hijacking of what these people percieve as Their America for PNAC purposes. And he will do it in a medium they are geared to respond to. The "real americans" I was referring to believe what they see on the screen and are curious about scandal, and Moore is savvy and has created a contraversial film that will be as must-see as Survivor. Now, I understand that this is still not subversive of the larger framework of American capitalist empire. But it is revolutionary, and what I meant by "revolutionary" was being able to actually induce a change of course in public consciosness, which I am sorry to say articles like [the above referenced in previous brackets] will never do. Because the "average American" will never read it, will never care to read it, and does not have the critical skills to engage with it [I am being generous to the article here, personally I don't think it has any critical skills either, but it uses buzzwords like "racialized/sexualized subject" that will mean little except the small overdetermined audience, who provide mutual validation for each other, and who have a shared assumption about their meaning. To everyone else this is just didactic rhetoric. ] I think Moore has an ingenious revolutionary project of education; yes, at the moment the best result of this education wlll be picking the better of two lame options, and Kerry sucks, even though I am totally voting for him, but it's the first step, it's deuterolearning, a.k.a. learning how to learn. If this idol, the Bush Puppet will fall, that's one step towards a critical discourse ("I believed this and I was lied to...what else do I believe? What does that mean?") and I think the same American mentality that produces this wasteland can be channeled into a framework of being able to engage in meta-critique; no wonder we have so many paranoid conspiracy theorists, paranoia is the flip side of the coin of consumption. The brilliance of the film is in its "fighting fire with fire" approach; with precise shots it undoes three years of sloppy metonymic ersatz journalism, using the visual format that the American people have been Pavlovian-trained to respond to.
On a final note, the footage of John Ashcroft singing "Let the Eagle Soar," a John Ashcroft original composition (music and lyrics by John Ashcroft) is something to make you doubt your eyesight. Like, how can it be for real? But it is.
Last night
saintpeg, universaldonor & myself went to see Fahrenheit 9/11. (totalvirility had to be elsewhere and apparently saw it at midnight uptown). Oh, and by the way, Ray Bradbury? Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit called and he says you're an asshole.So, I have a lot of things to say. Have a seat. There are going to be spoilers, but fuck, it's not like it's The Crying Game, if you don't want to read anything about the content, then skip this entry until after you see the film. Anyway, the specifics are
The film starts out with the Florida election. Weirdly, it was the only part of the film that made me cry. Gore's victory that was somehow simultaneously preemtive, erstwhile, real and unreal, like some meta-Schrodinger mindfuck.
I had never seen footage of the ratification of Bush's election before, over which Al Gore presided as the chairman of the joint congressional session.. 10 representatives rise to challenge it; to succesfully debate it they would have needed the signature of one senator; not a single senator signed. Moore shows the challengers in order; one by one they are asked by Gore if they have the necessary signature, one by one, with bitterness and rage they say "a senator is missing." They are eight African-American women, two of whom explicitly address the purging of the black voters from the rolls in their districts. The other two are an Asian woman and an African-American man. I was reminded of
this
astute Nacirema-style piece that was making internet rounds in November 2000.
After the credits the film tackles 9/11 and Bush's response (Moore put a timer in the corner of the screen to show that Bush just sat there in the Booker School classroom for 7 minutes after he learned about the second plane, reading My Pet Goat, a book that seems impossible to find on Amazon or any other book search engine).
Then follows a fairly comprehensive historical overview of the Bush/Saudi ties, including Arbusto, classified details from Bush's National Guard records, Saudi investment in the Carlyle group (although he does not cover the recent rift between Carlyle and Halliburton that went down right around the Yukos fiasco and is pretty important as far as New World Order squabbles go), the Saudi flights out of the country on 9/13, etc.
I find it interesting that most reviewers go on about the grief of the Flynt, MI woman, who goes from being a protester-hating war supporter to a grieving mother whose son is killed in Iraq, being the emotional center of the film; not one review mentioned the wailing Iraqi woman whose house was destroyed and whose family members were killed in the bombing campaign; she is crying and screaming to God to avenge them and to protect them from the Americans. That being said, the powerful emotional arc of the mother is the metaphor for the kind of awakening the film aims to provoke vicariously, offering itself its sharpness an ice-breaker. Not a polite cocktail party ice-breaker, but a ledokol, an ice-breaker ship, pardon my atavistically channeled Soviet-era metaphor.
Moore makes really good points about how it's the poor, the American disenfrachized class that is recruited for slaughter in the "liberation" campaigns.
However, the very economic structure that he critiques is logically consistent in any incarnation. In case of a draft, the rich/priveleged people would still find/buy their/their kids' way out of it, and it would still be the poor who would be used as cannon fodder, although perhaps without what little ensilstment financial benefits they currently receive. The Shrub's own shameful sketchathon of a military record and the classic belligerent-Michael-Moore sequence where he tries to get Congressmen to enlist their children in the Armed Forces slam that obvious sina qua non of any US military paradigm on the table. Not dainty, not pretty, not exactly how some self-righteous people who wank about how a draft "would be more fair" while sitting on their asses in ther armchairs envision it, and where they get the idea that a instituted draft would somehow equalize or redistribute the make up of the army I don't know, especially in light of their totalizing indictments of the entire US military-industrial complex and moral distaste for "the lesser of the two evils" option in other scenarios, I don't know, but anyways.
I feel a little queasy about how Moore tackles the abuse of the prisoners. He shows misconduct by the GIs abusing Iraqi prisoners and frames it in terms of "immoral actions breed immoral actions"; the film on the whole is sympathetic to soldiers and gives many of them a forum to voice their disgust or at least ambivalence. Such reasoning sounds suspiciously like some sort of a Kantian metaphysical counterpart to the sociological indulgency, if not absolution of "they were just following orders." But again, I understand it in terms of Moore's identity as a populist media activist. The Average Viewer is supposed to be led out of his gemütlich by the Michigan Mom, and for that the film essentially has to be sympathetic to the soldiers with a "tsk-tsk-tsk" roadstop on the way of pinning the blame on the Administration (where it does rightfully belong, the problem is it belongs in other places too, but this is not an arena ). So yes, there's a fair amount of whitewashing and dodging the issue of torture, but for all intents and puproses this film is a political action, with a concrete agenda and I endorse its shrewd calculation of its target audience. As for what I perceive to be its target audience (and I mean the people I think Moore hopes to affect with it, rather than the people who camped out on the opening night to see their own rage take shape on the screen, those people would be the likely demographic, in this instance a group different from the target audience), allow me to, um, quote myself, because I went on about this extensively on
constintina's journal a few days ago:The "real Americans" en masse, [i.e. the people who would never read, agree, or care about some fringe article that constructs some completely vague, tautological, MIM-notes-type-logic driven argument about Michael Moore being a White Supremacist, of all things] I meant as the Americans who believe that Saddam is responsible for 9/11, and who derive their positions from the synchronic offerings of the mass media on a given day, rather than any sort of continous logic or diachronic evidence. And no, these are not people who feel so alienated or disenfranchised that they do not care to vote or participate in politics. These people actually consider it their patriotic duty to vote, and they want to vote for Bush. They don't feel disenfranchised at all. They feel patriotic. And here is where I think Michael Moore's project is subversively succesful (or I hope it will be with F9/11): their alliance to their American, patriotic, love-it-or-leave-it identity is to the institution of the American Dream/Empire/Whatever, not to Bush, Bush has just run a succesful PR campaign conflating the two. I think Moore's film can deconstruct that particular administration's hijacking of what these people percieve as Their America for PNAC purposes. And he will do it in a medium they are geared to respond to. The "real americans" I was referring to believe what they see on the screen and are curious about scandal, and Moore is savvy and has created a contraversial film that will be as must-see as Survivor. Now, I understand that this is still not subversive of the larger framework of American capitalist empire. But it is revolutionary, and what I meant by "revolutionary" was being able to actually induce a change of course in public consciosness, which I am sorry to say articles like [the above referenced in previous brackets] will never do. Because the "average American" will never read it, will never care to read it, and does not have the critical skills to engage with it [I am being generous to the article here, personally I don't think it has any critical skills either, but it uses buzzwords like "racialized/sexualized subject" that will mean little except the small overdetermined audience, who provide mutual validation for each other, and who have a shared assumption about their meaning. To everyone else this is just didactic rhetoric. ] I think Moore has an ingenious revolutionary project of education; yes, at the moment the best result of this education wlll be picking the better of two lame options, and Kerry sucks, even though I am totally voting for him, but it's the first step, it's deuterolearning, a.k.a. learning how to learn. If this idol, the Bush Puppet will fall, that's one step towards a critical discourse ("I believed this and I was lied to...what else do I believe? What does that mean?") and I think the same American mentality that produces this wasteland can be channeled into a framework of being able to engage in meta-critique; no wonder we have so many paranoid conspiracy theorists, paranoia is the flip side of the coin of consumption. The brilliance of the film is in its "fighting fire with fire" approach; with precise shots it undoes three years of sloppy metonymic ersatz journalism, using the visual format that the American people have been Pavlovian-trained to respond to.
On a final note, the footage of John Ashcroft singing "Let the Eagle Soar," a John Ashcroft original composition (music and lyrics by John Ashcroft) is something to make you doubt your eyesight. Like, how can it be for real? But it is.
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no subject
Date: 2004-06-24 11:58 pm (UTC)Yeah, you know what, I noticed this too when I had the idea that My Pet Goat would make a zany Christmas gift for friends and family.
It's a little weird that it seems to be impossible to find any information about it. My personal theory is that while Flight 77 was flown to a secret Air Force base, a drone loaded with explosives and all extant copies of My Pet Goat was crashed into the pentagon in its place.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-25 12:13 am (UTC)information about "the pet goat"
Date: 2004-07-03 12:30 pm (UTC)-mjm
Re: information about "the pet goat"
Date: 2004-07-08 11:04 pm (UTC)“A girl got a pet goat. She liked to go running with her pet goat. She played with her goat in her house. She played with her goat in her yard. But the goat did some things that made the girl's dad mad. The goat ate things. He ate cans and he ate canes. He ate pans and he ate panes. He even ate capes and caps. One day her dad said, "that goat must go. He ate too many things." The girl said, "dad if you let the goat stay with us, I will see that he stops eating all those things." Her dad said he will try it. So the goat stayed and the girl made him stop eating cans and capes and caps and capes. But one day a car robber came to the girls house. He saw a big red car near the house and said, "I will steal that car." He ran to the car and started to open the door. The girl and the goat were playing in the back yard. They did not see the car robber.
Thanks, mjm!