A guest blog entry responding to my brief review of Fahrenheit 9/11:
Eric, I understand your reaction. I think If I had gone alone, I would be of the same mind.
I, however, accompanied two people with whom I had tried to interest in the questions surrounding 9-11 and the subsequent geopolitical mess for over two years, but to no avail.
This movie woke them up. They turned repeatedly to me during the movie and asked if the news accounts Moore featured were true.
The military record issue was surprising to them because it meant the mainstream news orgs didn’t do their job. They were surprised that news anchors dont tell the truth.
They hated Wolfowitz and reacted viscerally to the moniker Prince Bandar Bush.
They cried buckets at Lila’s story.
They loved the music…after all, they were raised to expect their news to be entertaining.
They were furious that an Israeli national working for the Harris Corporation could guarantee oil to American businessmen with government support even before the Iraqi War began; in fact, because of it.
I walked behind them out of the theatre muttering over their heads, "Well, this saves me ten hours describing the cast of characters."
You’re surprised at the acclaim because you are steeped in facts all day, and want to see more of them. You need to understand how – truly, really, unbelievably – ill-informed most people are to begin with.
When you go to school at the Sorbonne in Paris, every freshman is taught the story of how the intellectuals acted with lightning speed after the French Revolution to prevent the French priestcraft from capturing the minds and imagination of the great unwashed, the enormous uneducated French populace. They threw a theatre up on almost every corner in record time, and employed the likes of Moliere and La Comedie Francaise, etc, to get their emerging and developing points-of-view into the common man’s head before the priests or Jesuits. The intellectuals prevented a religious lock-down on the country as a result.
The French bishops who came over to French Canada and the Northeastern section of the US remembered the intellectuals’ subterfuge and warned their compatriots here of the danger; hence, the ubiquitous steeple in every neighborhood of the original 13 colonies, not to mention the total religious lock-down in French Canada that continued through the 1960s as a result.
I suspect Moore might be more aware of this than you think. Read David Brooks’s June 26, 2004 Op-Ed.
Hmmph. As I finished writing this, one of the two who attended Fahrenheit 9-11 with me just called to ask if I wanted to see it again today…Sunday, June 27. Because she doesn’t get her news from the web, she is genuinely concerned that MSNBC and FOX and the alphabet-majors are interfering with the range of information she needs to make an informed vote.
~ Janie Angus