| Saturday, December 14, 2002 |
20:50 - Earning my karma points
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Boy oh boy, is it ever pouring out there.
It looks like the weather forecasts were right; it's been coming down torrentially all day, along with high winds, enough so as to push down trees and knock out power and flood freeway offramps. And it looks like the worst is yet to come.
So what better way to spend the day, after finishing up some Christmas shopping, than to go to a theater on the edge of the power-outage zone in Saratoga and watch Bowling for Columbine?
After all, a newspaper I found in Taco Bell said it was still playing at the local AMC googolplex, and it had a quote from some critic who said that it should win not only the Best Documentary Oscar, but Best Picture-- "and possibly a Nobel Peace Prize." So I knew that this was something I'd have to see for myself, as I'd undoubtedly find myself having to defend my viewpoints against it. Best to know thy enemy and all that, right? That's why I listen to NPR whenever I'm in the car (well, among other reasons), and hang around with friends who think it's cute to refer sneeringly to the President as "Shrub" (y'know, 'cause he's a little Bush).
So-- well, at least now I know what all the fuss is about, I guess. And the thing was funny, sporadically-- though not always, I think, for the reasons Moore intended. For instance, it seems that his thesis (if one can be distilled from the confused, rambling series of anecdotal diatribes) is that Americans are a) irrationally terrified of everything, especially black people; and b) heavily armed-- and that's the reason why 11,000 of us kill each other with guns every year, to every other country's couple hundred. And Moore goes to great length to show that the reason why we're so irrationally terrified is because of the news media and shows like COPS, which pipe a neverending stream of feel-bad vibes into our households every day, using every subliminal advertising-science trick in the book to keep us in a perpetual state of fear, which fuels our need to buy-buy-buy. (Marilyn Manson was the one who put this point into words, oddly enough.)
And yet, a good 80% of the film itself is made using these very same dirty tricks-- ironic music, tasteless juxtaposition of unrelated sound bites with incendiary visuals, and interview clips and factoids taken thoroughly out of context. Others have already pointed out his blatant factual errors, flawed assumptions, and deliberately obscured truths, though even fans of the movie have admitted that not all of it rang true. (As "proof" that Americans harbor mass suspicion of blacks and consider them all to be potential killers, he cites the so-called "Africanized" killer bees-- a name given them by the Big Bad Media-- and the massive threat they posed to the Southwest, even though "they never came". He implies that this was all just a big distraction, invented by the news media and peppered with maps of Africa with big yellow arrows pointing from there to the USA, and given sly innuendo-filled terminology to play off our fear of African humans so we could worry about bees while the gummint went about its evil business.) The sequence that made my gorge rise the highest was his montage of all the US government's foreign policy crimes, from the installation of the Shah in Iran to the assassination of Allende to the Vietnam war to our arming of Saddam and Osama bin Laden to the reinstatement of the "dictator" of Kuwait after the Gulf war, all with numbers of civilian dead in the respective countries-- killed, we're led to believe, by US troops or weapons or dollars or ideas, because they're all the same anyway-- all in the tens of thousands. It ended, of course, with a video of the second WTC crash on 9/11, and a fade-to-black, over a subtitle mentioning Osama bin Laden using his CIA training to murder 3,000 people. "A paltry 3,000 people," it said between the lines. "A small blow by the victimized world against the evil oppressor of the past five decades." And the music behind this whole cavalcade of bile? What a Wonderful World, naturally.
I guess this must have just seemed to Moore to be the right time to make this kind of film. There are just so many exploitable memes out there these days, it was apparently inevitable. But I think his real motivation would have to have been his unexpected success, apparently sometime last year, in crusading against K-Mart with a couple of the survivors of the Columbine shooting, which resulted-- on camera, on national TV-- in getting K-Mart to stop selling ammunition. This was more than he or the kids were hoping for (apparently all they wanted was to confront the K-Mart higher-ups and make them admit to being the cause of all America's gun-related woes, and maybe to kiss the bullet wounds and make them better). But at the risk of sounding callous, I think that all this incident proved was that if you bring kids in wheelchairs up the steps of a giant corporate headquarters on national TV in order to plead on the behalf of the beleaguered and underrepresented non-killing-people and non-death and non-evil lobbies, you can bet your fat ass you're going to get some concessions from the PR people. You could sit on the steps of a convent and hold up pictures of doe-eyed puppies and kids in wheelchairs, and the public's going to side with you against the nuns. It's the awww instinct, as was so clearly demonstrated throughout the film as every time he talked to some guy who keeps a gun under his pillow, or mentioned some group that favors gun ownership, or noted that a celebrity-branded theme restaurant had dared to apply for tax breaks because it employed welfare workers, or held up a photo of the cute little girl shot by a six-year-old as Charlton Heston shuffled angrily off into his house, you could hear a rush of tongues clucking and voices muttering "That's terrible" or making that angry, frustrated EeeehhhHHH sigh. This was a heavily audience-participation sort of movie.
That said, I do think he raised a few points worth considering. Even if you discount the internecine gang warfare ("trash killing trash" as some put it) that accounts for such a huge proportion of gun violence in the US, I daresay we still have a good amount more of it in this country than the similarly-well-armed Canada would have if it had ten times the population it does, in which case it would match ours. I think his claim that we live in an environment of pop-cultural fearmongering does hold some merit, though I have strong reservations about the blanket nature of that claim (you can find that it's a common thread in much of his work, and is seldom something you can back up with facts, as Rachel Lucas so effectively showed a couple of months ago). The centerpiece of the film, a South Park-like animated "Brief History of the USA" short, masterfully oversimplified the whole terrified-rich-white-Americans-abusing-and-fearing-Blacks issue, while at least managing to encompass a kernel of truth here and there, and pointing out the fact that our past isn't exactly roses and rainbows. And the fact that he's an NRA member and brought up in a gun culture does raise Moore's credibility above the simple "anti-gun ranter" status that he would otherwise have had (though he loses points for using his NRA membership to trick Charlton Heston into letting him in in good faith for an interview in which he intended to antagonize the man's core beliefs). And I do wish Heston had had a better answer for his questions about why the NRA thought it necessary to go and hold rallies in Littleton right after Columbine, and in Flint right after the 6-year-old's death. I'd have liked to see some explanation given in good faith from a well-prepared spokesman (whether the one extreme interpretation of there being hundreds of such rallies in suburban cities every day, led by hundreds of Heston lookalikes, and these just being unfortunate coincidences; or the other extreme interpretation of the NRA descending vulture-like upon scenes of carnage and waving guns as a show of invincibility-- or somewhere in between), rather than from an enfeebled, Alzheimer's-disease-suffering old icon whose mouth is more likely to betray a white-supremacist leaning than an inability to explain the NRA's policies anyway. (Heston really could have done better than to speak wistfully of the "old dead white men who invented this country" and blame the country's gun issues on our being multi-ethnic, then rapidly backpedaling.) Any "I don't have an answer to that question" from an interviewee is a victory for the interviewer, and Heston didn't acquit himself very well, even for a Beverly Hills shut-in nearing the end of his mental faculties.
If Moore is looking for an honest answer to why the US is full of people who seem so much more keen on killing each other with guns than other countries with similar amounts of firearm ownership and similarly bloody pasts, I think he's looking in the wrong places, asking the people who are patently wrong to give those answers. Myself, I'd say it's that Americans are a passionate lot; we have the hybrid vigor that comes from a pioneering, explorationist past, one in which individual people made individual choices to push westward, to build entrepreneurial businesses, or to come to this country in the first place. People say of California, "Nobody's actually from here"-- and that's both a cause and an effect of California's vibrancy. People who choose to come to a place like this are by their nature "doers", people who are going to make things happen. And those things they make happen turn the state into a destination for more people attracted to such things. ...And when a people is passionate for positive achievement, they're going to be passionate about the negative things too; they're going to form their own allegiances to their own organizational structures, like gangs, and they're going to apply their passions toward fighting to the death for their own causes. We might not all agree on whether those causes are legitimate; but the people who kill and die for it do, and when that happens, the numbers rack up towards that big 11,000 on the screen.
Self-determination is a double-edged sword; not everybody uses it in a positive way. But you've got to take the bad with the good. And I hate to put it in these terms, but a country with no crime is a country with no individualistic spirit, no dynamism, no energy.
Moore naturally props up Canada as the big goal we should all be striving towards. Canadians don't show murders on the TV news; they show stories about new speedbumps. Canadian teenagers interviewed in Taco Bell parking lots don't shoot each other for revenge; they make fun of each other. Canadians don't overreact to every little slight, reaching for a gun as the first and last and only appropriate reaction to anything, on an individual or global scale; they have free health care. Canadians don't even lock their doors at night. Moore spent a long time on this one; to prove that Canadians are free of the fear promulgated by American mass media, he interviews a dozen random people and is told by each that because they see door locks as a way to imprison themselves inside rather than shut out the world, they don't lock their doors-- though one or two of them said that they'd in fact had their homes broken into, robbed, and vandalized while they slept or were away; yet they still felt no need to lock their doors. To me, that makes a person stupid, not welcoming and fear-free. But then I'm an American; what do I know.
And in any case, Moore doesn't exactly show the darker side of the Canadian system-- in which the prime minister won't even use the much-vaunted public health care system, and the national gun-registration system there has run to 43,000% over-budget, while the crime rate there is at an all-time high. And CapLion, who has plenty of experience living north of the border, says that the thing about Canadians not locking their doors at night is a crock. Canadian gun owners aren't allowed to use their guns for home defense; rather, they must wait for the police to arrive, which is bound to be a longer wait in the case of burglaries than, say, violent crime. I sure wouldn't leave my door unlocked.
(Except in the middle of the day, when I'm right there in the living room, as the people were when Moore decided to go from door to door to test this theory. I don't lock my goddamned door during the day either. Idiot.)
Ultimately, though, the main complaints I've heard about this movie seem to be borne out: like so many do-gooding liberals, Moore wants to take on the Big Issues that affect the whole world and all people, the things that nobody in their right mind would argue against tackling-- but he never really proposes any solutions. He spends a good twenty minutes railing against the Dick Clark's theme restaurant in a posh mall, where the mother of the six-year-old killer worked under a welfare-to-work program; Moore tracked down Dick Clark in his driveway and tried to get him to say how he felt about how "his" restaurant was forcing poor single mothers to work for $8.50 an hour to pay rent and support a child. I mean, what the hell did he expect Dick Clark to do? Make the woman an executive? Pay all workers $15 an hour, including non-work-to-welfare ones who otherwise get minimum wage and tips? Shut down the restaurant? Dismantle himself and donate his robot parts to an orphanage? Ultimately, Moore was simply harassing the man-- he didn't expect anything constructive to come of the confrontation more than an opportunity for him to plaintively whine into his microphone, as though Clark could still hear him, pleading for answers to his meager questions as his minivan drove away. And only the hardest-hearted would question the purity of his motives. Please, sir, it's for the children! Won't you think of the children?
The closest he comes to doing anything substantive is the K-Mart thing, though his obvious surprise that it worked is proof positive that he really didn't intend for the stunt to do anything but get the wheelchairs on TV under the big K-Mart sign and make people grumble and cluck their tongues about evil big corporations and the poor victimized little guy. Rather than facing any of the specific problems we're being forced to deal with in the post-9/11 age, he'd rather we spend our time flagellating ourselves over past transgressions real and imagined-- to spend our days in navel contemplation instead of naval engagement, I guess. Isn't it terrible that people are poor? War is so awful, isn't it? Boy, LA sure has a lot of smog! Yeah, you can install these home-security bars on your front door, but what if the guy has a spear? Doesn't it suck to be a teenager in public school? Isn't the nightly news gruesome and fatalistic? Guns are central to freedom, but people get shot-- isn't that horrible? Big, troublesome problems. We all agree-- we all do. But how do we solve them, Mr. Moore? You don't have an answer either? Didn't think so.
When all's said and done, I'd rather fight the battles I can fight, while striving to be a good person-- and hope that if we all follow that kind of example, our society can heal itself. The data suggests that that's already happening-- crime is going down, pollution is going down, environmental issues are tackled unanimously, racial integration goes on apace. Post-9/11, this country showed its true nature not by converting overnight into the police state that so many feared, but by going about our normal lives, accepting a little bit of inconvenience at the airport, but hardened to the idea that any one of us could be on the next Flight 93, and prepared to act accordingly. M-16s don't rule the streets; instead, we go to Ben & Jerry's and T.G.I. Friday's before heading to the 28-screen theater to watch documentaries about what horrible people we are for being rich and white.
Life's tough, especially in a nation of passionate people who value their individuality and freedom. More Nerf on all the sharp corners of life won't solve anything. Education and responsibility and example will go a long way.
But if you'll excuse me, there are pressing specific issues to tackle, and the poor and oppressed and smog-bound will have to wait. Namely, I have Christmas presents to wrap.
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