On 9/24/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 11/9” Aims Not at Trump But at Those Who CreatedMiriam,
the Conditions That Led to His Rise
Glenn Greenwald
September 21 2018, 1:08 p.m.
2017 AP YEAR END PHOTOS - Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of
the United States by Chief Justice John Roberts, as Melania Trump and his
family looks on during the 58th Presidential Inauguration at the U.S.
Capitol in Washington, on Jan. 20, 2017. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Photo: Patrick Semansky/AP
“Fahrenheit 11/9,” the title of Michael Moore’s new film that opens today in
theaters, is an obvious play on the title of his wildly profitable Bush-era
“Fahrenheit 9/11,” but also a reference to the date of Donald J. Trump’s
2016 election victory. Despite that, Trump himself is a secondary figure in
Moore’s film, which is far more focused on the far more relevant and
interesting questions of what – and, critically, who – created the climate
in which someone like Trump could occupy the Oval Office.
For that reason alone, Moore’s film is highly worthwhile regardless of where
one falls on the political spectrum. The single most significant defect in
U.S. political discourse is the monomaniacal focus on Trump himself, as
though he is the cause – rather than the by-product and symptom – of
decades-old systemic American pathologies.
Personalizing and isolating Trump as the principal, even singular, source of
political evil is obfuscating and thus deceitful. By effect, if not design,
it distracts the population’s attention away from the actual architects of
their plight.
This now-dominant framework misleads people into the nationalistic myth – at
once both frightening and comforting – that prior to 2016’s “Fahrenheit
11/9,” the U.S., though quite imperfect and saddled with “flaws,” was
nonetheless a fundamentally kind, benevolent, equitable and healthy
democracy, one which, by aspiration if not always in action, welcomed
immigrants, embraced diversity, strove for greater economic equality, sought
to defend human rights against assaults by the world’s tyrants, was governed
by the sturdy rule of law rather than the arbitrary whims of rulers, elected
fundamentally decent even if ideologically misguided men to the White House,
and gradually expanded rather than sadistically abolished opportunity for
the world’s neediest.
But suddenly, teaches this fairy tale as ominous music plays in the
background, a villain unlike any we had previously known invaded our idyllic
land, vandalized our sacred public spaces, degraded our admired halls of
power, threatened our collective values. It was only upon Trump’s assumption
of power that the nation’s noble aspirations were repudiated in favor of a
far darker and more sinister vision, one wholly alien to “Who We Are”: a
profoundly “un-American” tapestry of plutocracy, kleptocracy, autocracy,
xenophobia, racism, elite lawlessness, indifference and even aggressive
cruelty toward the most vulnerable and marginalized.
This myth is not just false but self-evidently so. Yet it persists, and
thrives, because it serves so many powerful interests at once. Most
importantly, it exonerates, empowers, and elevates the pre-Trump ruling
class, now recast as heroic leaders of the #Resistance and nostalgic symbols
of America’s pre-11/9 Goodness.
ellen-instagram-1537551468Screenshot: The Intercept
The lie-fueled destruction of Vietnam and Iraq, the worldwide torture
regime, the 2008 financial collapse and subsequent bailout and protection of
those responsible for it, the foreign kidnapping and domestic rounding up of
Muslims, the record-setting Obama-era deportations and whistleblower
prosecutions, the obliteration of Yemen and Libya, the embrace of Mubarak,
Sisi, and Saudi despots, the years of bipartisan subservience to Wall Street
at everyone else’s expense, the full-scale immunity vested on all the elites
responsible for all those crimes – it’s all blissfully washed away as we
unite to commemorate the core decency of America as George Bush gently hands
a piece of candy to Michelle Obama at the funeral of the American War Hero
and Trump-opponent-in-words John S. McCain, or as hundreds of thousands of
us re-tweet the latest bromide of Americana from the leaders of America’s
most insidious security state, spy and police agencies.
Beyond nationalistic myth-building, there are substantial commercial,
political and reputational benefits to this Trump-centered mythology. An
obsessive fixation on Trump has single-handedly saved an entire partisan
cable news network from extinction, converting its once ratings-starved,
close-to-being-fired prime-time hosts into major celebrities with contracts
so obscenely lucrative as to produce envy among most professional athletes
or Hollywood stars.
Resistance grifters exploit fears of Trump to build massive social media
followings that are easily converted into profit from well-meaning,
manipulated dupes. One rickety, unhinged, rant-filled, speculation-driven
Trump book after the next dominates the best-seller lists, enriching
charlatans and publishing companies alike: the more conspiratorial, the
better. Anti-Trump mania is big business, and – as the record-shattering
first-week sales of Bob Woodward’s new Trump book demonstrates – there is no
end in sight to this profiteering.
All of this is historical revisionism in its crudest and most malevolent
form. It’s intended to heap most if not all blame for systemic, enduring,
entrenched suffering across the country onto a single personality who
wielded no political power until 18 months ago. In doing so, it averts
everyone’s eyes away from the real culprits: the governors, both titled and
untitled, of the establishment ruling class, who for decades have exercised
largely unchecked power – immune even from election outcomes – and, in many
senses, still do.
The message is as clear as the beneficial outcomes: Just look only at Trump.
Keep your eyes fixated on him. Direct all your suffering, deprivations,
fears, resentments, anger and energy to him and him alone. By doing so,
you’ll forget about us – except that we’ll join you in your Trump-centered
crusade, even lead you in it, and you will learn again to love us: the real
authors of your misery.
The overriding value of “Fahrenheit 11/9″ is that it avoids – in fact,
aggressively rejects – this ahistorical manipulation. Moore dutifully
devotes a few minutes at the start of his film to Trump’s rise, and then
asks the question that dominates the rest of it, the one the political and
media establishment has steadfastly avoided examining except in the most
superficial and self-protective ways: “how the fuck did this happen”?
Knowing that no political work can be commercially successful on a
large-scale without affirming Resistance clichés, Moore dutifully complies,
but only with the most cursory and fleeting gestures: literally 5 seconds in
the film are devoted to assigning blame for Hillary’s loss to Putin and
Comey. With that duty discharged, he sets his sights on his real targets:
the U.S. political establishment that is ensconced within both parties,
along with the financial elites who own and control both of them for their
own ends.
Moore quickly escapes the dreary and misleading “Democrat v. GOP” framework
that dominates cable news by trumpeting “the largest political party in
America”: those who refuse to vote. He uses this powerful graphic to tell
that story:
It’s remarkable how little attention is paid to non-voters given that, as
Moore rightly notes, they form America’s largest political faction. Part of
why they’re ignored is moralism: those who don’t vote deserve no attention
as they have only themselves to blame.
But the much more consequential factor is the danger for both parties from
delving too deeply into this subject. After all, voter apathy arises when
people conclude that their votes don’t change their lives, that election
outcomes improve nothing, that the small amount of time spent waiting in
line at a voting booth isn’t worth the effort because of how inconsequential
it is. What greater indictment of the two political parties can one imagine
than that?
One of the most illuminating pieces of reporting about the 2016 election is
also, not coincidentally, one of the most ignored: interviews by the New
York Times with white and African-American working-class voters in Milwaukee
who refused to vote and – even knowing that Trump won Wisconsin, and thus
the presidency, largely because of their decision – don’t regret it.
“Milwaukee is tired. Both of them were terrible. They never do anything for
us anyway,” the article quotes an African-American barber, justifying his
decision not to vote in 2016 after voting twice for Obama.
Moore develops the same point, even more powerfully, about his home state of
Michigan, which – like Wisconsin – Trump also won after Obama won it twice.
In one of the most powerful and devastating passages from the film – indeed,
of any political documentary seen in quite some time – “Fahrenheit 11/9″
takes us in real-time through the indescribably shameful water crisis of
Flint, the criminal cover-up of it by GOP Governor Rick Snyder, and the
physical and emotional suffering endured by its poor, voiceless, and
overwhelmingly black residents.
After many months of abuse, of being lied to, of being poisoned, Flint
residents, in May, 2016, finally had a cause for hope: President Obama
announced that he would visit Flint to address the water crisis. As Air
Force One majestically lands, Flint residents rejoice, believing that
genuine concern, political salvation, and drinkable water had finally
arrived.
Exactly the opposite happened. Obama delivered a speech in which he not only
appeared to minimize, but to mock, concerns of Flint residents over the lead
levels in their water, capped off by a grotesquely cynical political stunt
where he flamboyantly insisted on having a glass of filtered tap water that
he then pretended to drink, but in fact only used to wet his lips, ingesting
none of it.
President Barack Obama drinks water as he speaks at Flint Northwestern High
School in Flint, Mich., Wednesday, May 4, 2016, about the ongoing water
crisis. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
President Barack Obama appears to drink water as he speaks at Flint
Northwestern High School in Flint, Mich., Wednesday, May 4, 2016, about the
ongoing water crisis.
Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP
A friendly meeting with Gov. Snyder after that – during which Obama repeated
the same water stunt – provided the GOP state administration in Michigan
with ample Obama quotes to exploit to prove the problem was fixed, and for
Flint residents, it was the final insult. “When President Obama came here,”
an African-American community leader in Flint tells Moore, “he was my
President. When he left, he wasn’t.”
Like the unregretful non-voters of Milwaukee, the collapsed hope Obama left
in his wake as he departed Flint becomes a key metaphor in Moore’s hands for
understanding Trump’s rise. Moore suggests to John Podesta, who seems to
agree, that Hillary lost Michigan because, as in Wisconsin, voters, in part
after seeing what Obama did in Flint, concluded it was no longer worth
voting. As Moore narrates:
The autocrat, the strongman, only succeeds when the vast majority of the
population decides they’ve seen enough, and give up. . . . . The worst
thing that President Obama did was pave the way for Donald Trump. Because
Donald Trump did not just fall from the sky. The road to him was decades in
the making.
The long, painful, extraordinarily compelling journey through Flint is
accompanied by an equally illuminating immersion in West Virginia, one that
brings into further vivid clarity the misery, deprivation, and repression
that drove so many people – for good reason – away from the political
establishment and into the arms of anyone promising to destroy it: from the
2008 version of Obama to Bernie Sanders to Jill Stein to Donald Trump to
abstaining entirely from voting.
We meet the teachers who led the inspiring state-wide strike, some of whom
are paid so little that they are on food stamps. We hear how their own union
leaders tried (and failed) first to prevent the strike, then prematurely
tried (and failed) to end it with trivial concessions.
We meet Richard Ojeda, an Iraq and Afghanistan War veteran, Democratic State
Senator, and current Congressional candidate, who tells Moore: “Our town is
dying. One out of every four homes is in a dilapidated state . . . . I can
take you five minutes from here and show you where our kids have it worse
than the kids I saw in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Needless to say, all of that
began and took root long before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower
escalator in 2015.
To Moore’s credit, virtually no powerful U.S. factions escape indictment in
“Fahrenheit 11/9.” The villains of Flint and West Virginia are two
Republican governors. But their accomplices, every step of the way, are
Democrats. This, Moore ultimately argues, is precisely why people had lost
faith in the ability of elections generally, and the Democratic Party
specifically, to improve their lives.
And in stark and impressive contrast to the endless intra-Democrat war over
the primacy of race versus class, Moore adeptly demonstrates that the
overwhelmingly African-American population of Flint and the largely white
impoverished West Virginians have far more in common than they have
differences: from the methods of their repression to those responsible for
it. “Fahrenheit 11/9″ does not shy away from, but unflinchingly confronts,
the questions of race and class in America and ultimately concludes – and
proves – that they are inextricably intertwined, that a discussion of (and
solution to) one is impossible without a discussion of (and solution to) the
other.
No examination of voter apathy and the perceived irrelevance of elections
would be complete without an ample study of the 2016 Democratic Party
primary process that led to Hillary Clinton’s ultimately doomed nomination.
And this is another area where Moore excels. Focusing on one little-known
but amazing fact – that Bernie Sanders won all 55 counties over Clinton in
the West Virginia primary, beating her by 16 points in a state where she
crushed Obama in 2008, yet, at the Democratic Convention, somehow ended up
with fewer delegates than she received – Moore interviews a Sanders
supporter in West Virginia about the message this bizarre discrepancy sent.
Moore asks: “This just tells people to stay home?” The voter replies: “I
think so.” Moore offers his own conclusion through narration: “When the
people are continually told that their vote doesn’t count, that it doesn’t
matter, and they end up believing that, the loss of faith in our democracy
becomes our deathknell.”
With all of this harrowing and depressing evidence compiled, it becomes
easier and easier to understand why Americans are either receptive to anyone
vowing to dismantle rather than uphold the system they have rightly come to
despise, or just abstain altogether. And it becomes even easier to
understand why the guardians of that system view Trump as the most valuable
weapon they could have ever imagined wielding: one that allows them to
direct everyone’s attention away from the systemic damage they have wrought
for decades.
Broadly speaking, there are three kinds of political films. There are those
whose filmmaker fully shares your political outlook, mentality and ideology,
and thus produces a film that, in each scene, validates and strengthens your
views. There are those by filmmakers whose politics are so anathema to yours
that you find no value in the film and are only repelled by it. Then there
are those that do a combination of all those things, causing you to love
parts, hate other parts, and feel unsure about the rest.
Without doubt, “Fahrenheit 11/9″ falls into the latter category. It’s
literally impossible to imagine someone who would love, or hate, all of the
scenes and messages of this film.
Indeed, for all the praise I just heaped on it, there were several parts I
found banal, meandering, misguided and, in one case, downright loathsome: a
lurid, pointless, reckless, and deeply offensive digression into the
long-standing, adolescent #Resistance theme that Trump wants to have sex
with, if he has not in fact already had sex with, his own daughter, Ivanka.
What makes the inclusion of this trash all the more tragic is that it comes
very near the beginning of the film, and thus will almost certainly repel –
for good reasons – large numbers of people, including more reluctant and
open-minded Trump supporters, who would be otherwise quite receptive to the
important parts of the film that constitute its crux.
Then there is the last 20 minutes, devoted to a direct comparison between
Trump and Hitler. I am not someone who opposes the use of Nazism as a window
for understanding contemporary political developments. To the contrary, I’ve
written previously about how anti-intellectual and dangerous is the
now-standard internet decree (inaccurately referred to as Godwin’s Law) that
Nazi comparisons are and should be off-limits.
As the Nuremberg prosecutors (one of whom appears in the film) themselves
pointed out during the post-war trial of Nazis: those tribunals were not
primarily about punishing war criminals but about establishing principles to
prevent future occurrences. There are real and substantive lessons to be
drawn from the rise of Hitler when it comes to understanding the ascension
of contemporary global movements of authoritarianism, and this last part of
“Fahrenheit 11/9″ features some of those in a reasonably responsible and
informative manner.
Ultimately, though, this last part of the film is marred by cheap and
manipulative stunts, the worst of which is combining video of a Hitler
speech overlaid with audio of a Trump speech, with no real effort made to
justify this equation. Comparing any political figure to someone who oversaw
the genocide of millions of human beings requires great care, sensitivity,
and intellectual sophistication, and there is sadly little of that in
Moore’s invocation (which at times feels like exploitation) of Nazism.
There are, without doubt, people who will most love the exact parts of the
film I most disliked. And those same people will likely hate many of the
parts I found most compelling. But that’s precisely why Moore’s film is so
worth your time no matter your ideology, so worth enduring even the parts
that you will find disagreeable or even infuriating.
Because – in contrast to the endless armies of cable news hosts, Twitter
pundits, #Resistance grifters, and party operatives, all of whom are vested
due to self-interest in perpetuating the same deceitful, simple-minded and
obfuscating narrative – Moore, for most of this film, is at least trying.
And what he’s trying is of unparalleled importance: not to take the cheap
route of exclusively denouncing Trump but to take the more complicated,
challenging, and productive route of understanding who and what created the
climate in which Trump could thrive.
Embedded in the instruction of those who want to you focus exclusively on
Trump is an insidious and toxic message: namely, removing Trump will cure,
or at least mitigate, the acute threats he poses. That is a fraud, and Moore
knows it. Unless and until the roots of these pathologies are identified and
addressed, we are certain to have more Trumps: in fact, more effective and
more dangerous Trumps, along with more potent Dutertes, and more Brexits,
and more Bolsonaros and more LePens.
Moore could have easily made a film that just channeled and fueled standard
anti-Trump fears and animus and – like the others who are doing that – made
lots of money, been widely hailed, and won lots of accolades. He chose
instead to dig deeper, to be more honest, to take the harder route, and
deserves real credit for that.
He did that, it seems clear, because he knows that the only way to move
forward is not just to reject right-wing demagoguery but also the sham that
masquerades as its #Resistance. As Moore himself put it: “sometimes it takes
a Donald Trump to get us to realize that we have to get rid of the whole
rotten system that gave us Trump.”
That’s exactly the truth that the guardians of that “whole rotten system”
want most to conceal. Moore’s film is devoted, at its core, to unearthing
it. That’s why, despite its flaws, some of them serious ones, the film
deserves wide attention and discussion among everyone across the political
spectrum.
👆
