Michael Moore, Hero or Rogue

Reading the accounts of what Moore said to audiences in Europe proves what he thinks of this country and its' people.

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The issue isn't Fahrenheit or Bowling for Columbine Piffka. The issue is the things that Moore says about America in his European travels as quoted in the Brooks piece that starts this thread. Moore idolizes the Europeans and trashes America. That alone should call into question his motives and the accuracy of his focus in his documentaries.

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Moore doesn't trash America, he trashes the administration.

Have you seen the film or or are you parroting what you've heard?

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This thread isn't about the film Piffka. This thread is about Moore's conduct when talking to his continental buddies overseas. The film is being trashed elsewhere.

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Piffka wrote:

Moore doesn't trash America, he trashes the administration.

Have you seen the film or or are you parroting what you've heard?

Have you read the posting that opened this thread?

Apparently not.

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Oh for God's sake.. you wouldn't be talking about Michael Moore if he weren't a film-maker and I doubt (Oh, how I doubt) that you've seen a single one of his films.

I think Michael Moore is giving us truths that are hard to hear... hard even to see. (Some of you don't even trust yourself enough to go and see it for yourselves.)

Nobody likes the bearer of bad news. Right-wingers don't like it so much that they have a complete and heavily visited website called moorewatch.com -- how stupid is that?

For the record, I agreed with Moore when he said (and it was a few years ago... just in case anybody who reads this is wondering... it is not new news, the quote's from old interviews, nothing new here, folks! Just move along.) that most Americans are stupid.

We are totally content to live our little lives, not even realizing how desperate they are, praying to Jesus or whomever that we be saved. We willingly trash the world for its "un-American" views, trash our country in every way from littering to living in a "gated" community and then argue about what our favored news critic says because we can't think for ourselves. Yes. Americans... stupid. Not-In-My-Backyard STUPID!

We've allowed this administration to turn our country into the most-partisanly insane place possible while being "guided" by the most inept and deceptive of leaders.

We don't give a sh!t about anything but what we eat, drive and drink. We whine about the price of gasoline. We say that the rest of the world doesn't matter, because only we are important. We think that because we've invaded a country, they should turn on their backs and let us do what we will so that the president, his family, his minions get rich on war profits. We're angry when they don't. How dare they?

Most of us don't hold passports because we think we know it all. We talk about countries where we've never been, countries we couldn't even find on a map.

We talk about film-makers and say it doesn't have anything to do with their movies... which, of course we've never even seen. Talk about stupid. There it is in a nutshell.

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Foxfyre wrote:

The thing that I can't understand is that Moore trashes everything about America and Americans, and his adoring fans just soak it up and accept it all as gospel truth. If I held so low an opinion of my country I could be moving to one of those more noble places as fast as I could pack.

Of course, this is silly falsehood. To say Moore trashes everything about America and Americans is as sensible as saying that Barbara Bush loves everything about America and Americans. And it's a typical illogic and an ad hominem...he's not a patriot, so he must be wrong, so don't go see the film because it will be full of falseness.

Moore's argument here (I'll revise if needed after seeing the film) is essentially that of Chomsky and others, that America's footprint in the world has far more of the negative to it than mythology allows. The point is made much more succinctly by Michael Ignatieff in the link below. Ignatieff supported the war on Iraq and the last I saw/heard from him was two weeks past on a Cspan broadcast where he debated alongside Hitchens (for the war) against two others who argued the opposite.

Quote:

It has been a charged and burdened time -- the D-Day commemorations, the death of a president, the daily carnage in Iraq, the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, a July 4 just over the horizon -- the sublime and the squalid, the decent and the desperate in American life so overlaid upon one another that it is hard to reconcile the high rhetoric of one moment with the terrible reality of the other. As Americans remembered the boys of Pointe du Hoc and the president who immortalized them, they had to read reports of government lawyers telling their superiors that ''the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture.'' The discordance between the high sentiments heard at President Reagan's funeral and the lawyers' attempts to justify the unjustifiable left you unable to determine whether the rhetoric of the funeral was a moment of spiritual reaffirmation or just an exercise in organized amnesia. The memoranda from White House counsel, and from Department of Justice and Department of Defense lawyers, gave new meaning to Robert Lowell's phrase ''savage servility.'' Their argument that ''the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign'' rendered the United States' obligations under the Torture Convention ''inapplicable'' to interrogations conducted pursuant to his command left you wondering if they had ever heard of the Nuremberg tribunal. You might have thought that after Justice Robert Jackson's great opening speech at the war crimes trials of Nazi leaders in Nuremberg, no American lawyer would ever dare to use obedience to superior authority as justification for inhuman acts of abuse. In the memos that filled the pages of our newspapers, there was more than servility. There was also a terrible forgetting...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/magazine/27WWLN.html

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Piffka wrote:

Oh for God's sake.. you wouldn't be talking about Michael Moore if he weren't a film-maker and I doubt (Oh, how I doubt) that you've seen a single one of his films.

Of course we wouldn't be talking about Moore if he wasn't, in some way, a figure in the national news. What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? You were the one that asserted that Moore did not trash Americans, but only the American administration. Clearly you were wrong. Clearly you did not read the opening post to this thread and yet you have the nerve to question others as to whether or not they have seen Moore's films. As a matter of fact, I did see "Bowling for Columbine" and I have yet to see his latest piece of propaganda. Now make some hay on those two points if you can.

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I think Michael Moore is giving us truths that are hard to hear... hard even to see. (Some of you don't even trust yourself enough to go and see it for yourselves.)

Well bully for you. Other think otherwise, and since you didn't bother to read the article that lead off this discussion it hardly falls to you to be critical of people who may not have seen Moore's films.

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Nobody likes the bearer of bad news. Right-wingers don't like it so much that they have a complete and heavily visited website called moorewatch.com -- how stupid is that?

Less stupid, I would argue, than the notion that it is stupid to have a website that refutes the propaganda of Michael Moore.

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For the record, I agreed with Moore when he said (and it was a few years ago... just in case anybody who reads this is wondering... it is not new news, the quote's from old interviews, nothing new here, folks! Just move along.) that most Americans are stupid.

Well, we've already seen that you're pretty liberal with your definition of what is stupid, so this is no surprise. As for your assessment of Americans...who really gives a sh*t?

Apparently the fact that Moore may have made his anti-American comments several years ago is meaningful to you, and yet I have no doubt that you are not at all prepared to "just move along" when it comes to statement made by Bush a few years ago.

Quote:

We are totally content to live our little lives, not even realizing how desperate they are, praying to Jesus or whomever that we be saved. We willingly trash the world for its "un-American" views, trash our country in every way from littering to living in a "gated" community and then argue about what our favored news critic says because we can't think for ourselves. Yes. Americans... stupid. Not-In-My-Backyard STUPID!

Well there we go. Piffka has spoken, a la Plan 9 From Outer Space -- We are stupid, stupid stupid! Under the microscope of the sage perspective of Piffka we are all desperate little worms.

Quote:

We've allowed this administration to turn our country into the most-partisanly insane place possible while being "guided" by the most inept and deceptive of leaders.

We don't give a sh!t about anything but what we eat, drive and drink. We whine about the price of gasoline. We say that the rest of the world doesn't matter, because only we are important. We think that because we've invaded a country, they should turn on their backs and let us do what we will so that the president, his family, his minions get rich on war profits. We're angry when they don't. How dare they?

Good grief, how can anyone argue with the insight and clarity of these Piffkan statements? After all, Piffka is the American Everyperson. He or she is perfectly in tune with what all Americans thinks and so if he/she says we're stupid, we must be.

Quote:

Most of us don't hold passports because we think we know it all. We talk about countries where we've never been, countries we couldn't even find on a map.

We talk about film-makers and say it doesn't have anything to do with their movies... which, of course we've never even seen. Talk about stupid. There it is in a nutshell.

Here it is in a nutshell (that is in conformity with the A2K agreement for services): Your words resemble those of a pompous jackass. Go take your ill regard for your fellow Americans to a Michael Moore screening.

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The detractors who haven't seen the film and can't realize the quality of the filmmaking regardless of their feelings (all emotional) are just bullshiting. Ebert and Roeper both pointed out exactly what I said as well as others on these forums. Every documentary has a viewpoint and therefore a bias. Every Discovery Channel documentary is obviously pro-environment, for instance.

You're all promoting Moore's film either pro or con. What he says in Europe is still what he believes in and it is America and not this administration. I'm not going to say what the dissenters are sniffing at but if they don't know, that's their problem.

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(Keep protesting and Moore will add you to his Christmas card list).

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Finn d'Abuzz
You have hit the bullseye. When I posted this article I was not so much referring to the film but to Moores trashing America and the American people in Europe to the glee of the Europeans. As to the film sure he is as all political people do stretching the truth. However, if it even persuades one individual to vote against the dark prince it is of value. I do not condone however in fact I abhor Moores airing what he feels is America's dirty linen to European audiences. Of course he will get standing ovations. They have nothing for disdain for America that is until they need our help.
In short IMO Moore is nothing but a self serving leftist rogue.

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au

You are just making some of the same errors of uncareful thought which foxfyre makes above, and elsewhere. Why make a statement like "They (Europeans) have nothing but disdain for America"? You end up forwarding a cliched falsehood. That's not helpful in your own thinking or in anyone else's thinking.

It would be true to say that Europeans on average don't like America as much as Americans on average like America. How could it be otherwise?

Perhaps you might want to make a more limited claim, such as the common one that too many Europeans suffer from a species of anti-Americanism and so consequently misperceive both America's intentions and effects upon the world. And that would be fine, as their seems to be a good argument there. The problem is where I see that argument made, it is most often by folks who haven't done a careful appraisal (if any at all) of the sort of counter-claims which are to be found in voices such as Chomsky. East Timor, as just one small example, shows us an American presence in the world that the term 'evil', if I had any use for it at all, might be a descriptor.

None of these things are black and white. Distinct dichotomies like that are used for propaganda purposes to rouse folks to warlike behaviors, or are used to support mythologies. They obscure and do not clarify.

As to your notion that Moore is somehow unpatriotic (would that be your word?) in speaking negatively about America's presence in the world to a foreign audience, why would you think that? Ought Americans to speak only positively about their nation's policies to outsiders? If so, why? Would that be true of Iraqis or Russians or Canadians too?

How about if we set the criterion for what one ought to say as that which one really believes (nodding here to some responsibility to self-education) rather than whether it meets some nationalist consensus?

Let me add one final point. A nation, much in the same way as an individual, which presupposes enemies all about ready and willing to take it/him down out of irrational hatred, sets up for itself the perfect situation for that postulate to be self-fulfilling. If you believe axiomatically that enemies are behind the bushes, then whatever you find behind the bushes will be an enemy. You'll treat them like an enemy, and regardless of they really were, they'll soon become that enemy. How many plumbers or electricians who were held and tortured at Abu Ghraib do you think might be quite happy after release to take a potshot at some passing American vehicle?

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blatham
What purpose does the trashing of Americans to foreign audiences serve. Other than to feed the animosity of those who are willing even gleeful receptors. As an American if you have something to say and you want to see a change made say it to the people who can make that change. Again IMO MM is a rogue. I should note I said nothing about patriotism. Dissent is perfectly acceptable but trashing of Americans by an American to foreign audiences is in my opinion not. But than again what would you expect from the far left. .

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au

But it isn't 'trashing of America'. It is speaking negatively about certain elements of America, and most particularly, of certain present administration policies and ideas.

Can we assume American presence in the world is imperfect? If that is so, how would it sound to a Belgian if every American they heard refused to admit or speak to those imperfections?

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American policy of one administration does not represent the heart and soul of America and the attendance of "F9/11" is a forecast of things to come. Putting thoughts and words into what Moore is conveying in the movie or in his European tour is revealing an agenda which at least half of the American public does not want.

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au1929 wrote:

What purpose does the trashing of Americans to foreign audiences serve. Other than to feed the animosity of those who are willing even gleeful receptors.

For those foreigners who have the mistaken impression that George W. Bush and his policies are representative of the American public, I think Moore's film will do a lot to enhance America's reputation. That, at least, could explain the enthusiastic response of the Cannes audiences.

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yes

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Just trying to get some thoughts on this thread of mine. The story was reported in The Globe and Mail recently, so it is real news, but I can't access the source, so I found it elsewhere:

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=27653

Curiouser and curiouser...

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Absolutely, Joe. Ebert and Roeper again gave a capsule review and reiterated their stance that this is a legitimate documentary with a unique voice and a powerful film.

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Moore said
"

Quote:

They are possibly the dumbest people on the planet . . . in
thrall to conniving, thieving smug [pieces of the human anatomy],
" Moore intoned. "We Americans suffer from an enforced ignorance.
We don't know about anything that's happening outside our
country. Our stupidity is embarrassing."

It transpires that Europeans are quite excited to hear this
supple description of the American mind. And Moore has been kind
enough to crisscross the continent, speaking to packed lecture
halls, explicating the general vapidity and crassness of his
countrymen. "That's why we're smiling all the time," he told a
rapturous throng in Munich. "You can see us coming down the
street. You know, `Hey! Hi! How's it going?' We've got that big
[expletive] grin on our face all the time because our brains
aren't loaded down."

Who is he trashing Bush or Americans?

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Michael Moore, Hero or Rogue

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