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Bestselling political
propaganda
Tour the offensive, incoherent with Moore
By John Davidson
Collegian Opinions Editor
Michael Moore is an ignorant fat ass and his
book is a worthless piece of self-promoting garbage that doesn't
make any sense and that no one should read.
The above sentence is an example of the prosaic
style and substantive argument to be found in Moore's riveting
new manifesto, the cleverly-named, Dude, Where's My Country?
The book is sheer political propaganda, much like his previous
book, Stupid White Men, and has in recent months taken its place
among a host of what one might call "entertainment propaganda
books," which are everywhere these days; Dude is currently
on the New York Times Bestseller list at No. 2 along with Al
Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars That Tell Them at No. 1 and
Michael Savage's The Enemy Within at No. 7.
In our now hyper-politicized post-9/11 society,
that familiar old literary genre of political propaganda is
making a comeback. From across the political spectrum numerous
books have emerged over the past year that seek to reduce the
issues to a few basic talking points. The purpose of these books
is to convince common folk Americans, mostly through humor and
invective, either that A) President Bush cooked up the Iraq
war and then lied about it while his huge "right wing conspiracy"
used Sept. 11 as a pretext for global domination, or B) anyone
who disagrees with the war in Iraq for any reason is a leftist
pinko-liberal who hates America and God.
These new books are neither academic nor journalistic;
they rely heavily on ad hominem arguments, polemic language
and blatant reductionism meant to delight the reader, who is
most likely a twenty-something college student. Certainly, Moore
was targeting a younger, quasi-educated demographic for this
latest effort. Or maybe he just thinks and writes like a quasi-educated
college student. It's hard to tell.
Dude, Where's My Country? is a book about
a lot of things. And nothing. Most of all, it's about Michael
Moore and how smart and influential and devastatingly insightful
he is about the post-9/11 world, American politics and culture,
corporate greed and the future of mankind. In one chapter he
writes from the perspective of God-in the first person. Moore's
version of God says things like, "Killing humans is my
job, and boy do I love it. You've all gotten me so pissed off,
I may just ax another 10,000 of you tonight!"
He begins another chapter with the assertion,
"There is no terrorist threat," which he repeats four
times in the opening paragraph, for emphasis. The very next
chapter, entitled, "How to stop terrorism? Stop being terrorists!"
is a numbered list of things we should do to stop terrorism.
Moore suggests: "Stop terrorizing our
own citizens with the Patriot Act," "Start bombing
the hell out of people with WHITE skin," and, in case it
still isn't clear how Michael Moore thinks about geopolitics
and the Middle East, "It might be a good idea to find out
why hundreds of millions of people on three continents, stretching
from Morocco on the Atlantic to the Philippines in the Pacific,
are so pissed off about Israel."
Moore rants and raves from issue to issue
without actually mounting anything that could be considered
an argument. The book begins with seven questions to President
Bush that, taken together, suggest the following: Osama bin
Laden did not mastermind the attacks of Sept. 11 (Saudi Arabia
did), Bush conspired with the Taliban when he was governor of
Texas, the Bush family has a "special relationship"
not only with the Saudi royal family but also the bin Ladens,
and, finally, that Bush is "chickenshit" because his
immediate response to the attacks of Sept. 11 was "to go
into hiding underground."
But by the end of the book Moore is blaming
Osama bin Laden for Sept. 11 and endorsing Oprah Winfrey for
president (Martin Sheen, Tom Hanks or any one of the Dixie Chicks
are alternatives if Oprah won't run). Two chapters in particular,
"Horatio Alger must die," and "How to talk to
your conservative brother-in-law," make the case that Americans
care only about their own money and nothing else, and that socialized
medicine and labor unions are the answer to America's problems.
Taken as a whole, Moore's book is incoherent
and pointless; taken in its several parts, it's offensive and
irritating. If the book's sheer unfunniness doesn't drive you
crazy, then maybe the poor grammar will; split infinitives,
overuse of exclamation marks and misuse of ellipses combine
to give the text an almost junior high or late elementary school
style. There is no serious research to be found in it, neither
in the one chapter with footnotes nor in the notes and sources
in the back.
In fact, Moore quotes so many different sources
out of context throughout this book, taking a statement of his
own out of context seems like an appropriate way to capture
the essence of the entire work:
"This makes no sense."
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