DUDE, WHERE’S MY COUNTRY’S CONSTITUTION?

Michael Moore makes good on his stated promise at last year’s American Library Association conference in Atlanta…

“This donation is only the beginning of what will be an ongoing effort on my part to rally my fellow Americans to support their local libraries. I intend to raise tens of thousands more, both in my appearances around the country and via my Web site,” Moore said. “I will not allow one of our most precious national resources‚ our free, public libraries‚ to suffer any further abuse. It is their budgets that get cut first. It is their staffs who are paid some of the lowest wages among professionals in the country. And now, it is their privacy, and the privacy rights of any person who holds a library card, that is now under attack.”

www.ala.org/Content/ContentGroups/Press_Releases2/Press_Releases_2003_May/Oscar_winner_Michael_Moore_donates_$25,000_to_ALA_Spectrum_Initiative.htm

He also fulfills his implied promise to continue ruffling feathers as word of his latest film project Fahrenheit 911 (its central thesis, simply put, is that Bush is in bed with Bin Laden) hits the cyber-street. Set to be released during the 2004 presidential election cycle, the word “Fahrenheit” in the title implies that there’s been some censorship going on around this rather pivotal political point. The premise has already begun to draw ire and scorn from the right and some skepticism on the left as well, along the lines of “he may have gone too far this time with the making stuff up stuff…” And the perennial Disney boycotters (Miramax owns Disney, as the FCC will cheerfully affirm) are all atwitter at the thought.

According to an article at www.startribune.com:

“Michael Moore has found backing from Miramax for his next film after Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions withdrew its support. The film, ‘Fahrenheit 911,’ reportedly will allege that the family of Osama bin Laden profited from a working relationship with former President George H.W. Bush. The original agreement with Icon was drawn up by Gibson’s partner while the actor was in Italy, but when Gibson found out about the film ‘he didn’t want any part of it,’ an Icon executive said. ‘He figured he had enough controversy on his hands’ with his film about the last days of Christ, ‘The Passion’…”

At www.ethicsdaily.org/article_detail.cfm?AID=2588, a conservative religious site called “Ethics Daily” reports on the Mickey Mouse contingent, along with an clever campaign to prevent Fahrenheit 911 from ever being seen, at least during the month prior to the 2004 presidential election, based on the theory that the film is “nothing more than a full-featured issue ad against President Bush” and the fact that campaign finance reform legislation “bans issue advertising 30 days before the election.”

Beyond that, I’m not going to directly direct you to any of the many more anti-Moore hate blogs, NRA rants, and online petitions, but they are all too easily found with a simple Google search.

It will be interesting to watch which way the wind blows over at Disney over this. And it’s interesting to muse too about these huge corporations and the recent FCC ruling that will reportedly help them be even more homogeneously hegemonous. And I’m sure, in many ways, it will. But then sometimes it seems like it’s possible to get so big you’re small again. You sort of get your soul back at some point. Because when a company like Disney-Viacom gets that big, it tends to start owning some contradictory and even downright fractious concerns. And, before you know it, the right and left (or at least their pocketbooks) are insisting the behemoth choose sides. And then, strangely, at that point, it’s the consumer, not the company, that starts to seems greedy. As if to say, there isn’t room at Disney for politically diverse viewpoints. I want only my (conservative or liberal) point of view presented.

After all, C-SPAN does it, to their everlasting credit. Even libraries proudly claim to have “something to offend everyone.” (Then, again, C-SPAN and libraries are not commercial ventures.) Maybe we’d all be better off, though, if, instead of threatening boycotts at every turn, we encouraged, or at least tolerated, a little ideological promiscuity in our media conglomerates.

This is all rather confusing for me, I must confess, as a longtime sign-carrying protestor. The line gets a little unclear at times. We should resist the urge to call for the suppression of any speech, while vigorously employing “counter speech.” We have to advocate strongly for what we believe, but not use violent rhetoric and veiled threats against individuals, or take too much umbrage at a media giant large enough to hold more than one point of view and the state of Texas too. And we should be especially tolerant of “speech” compared to all the other bad things corporations so famously do.

(Speaking of all this, do any of you remember the time cartoonist Harvey Pekar went on the Letterman show and refused to obey Dave’s dictum that he cease and desist his annoying habit of blurting out something along the lines of: “GE, which owns NBC, is the largest nuclear weapons producer in the world,” and was thus “disappeared” during a commercial break? Of course, the dysphoric yet irrepressible Pekar memorialized this moment in his graphic novel American Splendor, and it will surely be further made famous in the acclaimed biopic of the same name, due to open in theaters in September.)

Michael Moore also announced on June 1 at the Miami BookExpo that he was working on his next book to be released in October 2003. The working title is Dude, Where’s My Country?

To the delight of many librarians and booksellers, Moore has been dealing undauntedly with the issue of censorship from many different angles recently. His all-time best-seller last year, Stupid White Men: And Other Excuses for the Sorry State of the Nation, was almost shredded by its own publisher, Random House, after the first run had been printed. With the help of the library community (which he continually acknowledges: “A librarian from Englewood, New Jersey, got on the Internet…”), Moore resisted the demand that he retitle and rewrite substantial sections of the book, and it was released to popular acclaim.

Moore joked to the BookExpo audience that: “In the year when George Bush was enjoying a 70% approval rating, the book that more Americans read than any other nonfiction book last year was something called Stupid White Men… starring George W. Bush!” And, in light of this personal windfall, he added: “And, if I could, and maybe just to sort of make up for the Oscar thing, I’d like to take a couple of minutes and offer my thanks and my incredible appreciation to George Bush [for the tax cut he signed this week]… I don’t know what I’m going to do with all this money… But I’ve got a few ideas!” He said he’s going to spend the entire thing on various efforts to defeat Bush next year. (Send your ideas to www.spendmikestaxcut.com.)

After Stupid White Men, Moore went on to make the blockbuster, Bowling for Columbine, which he initially claimed faced threats of non-distribution. But whether it did or it didn’t, and whether the whiff of censorship hurt or hindered it, the film went on to win the Oscar for Best Documentary. He then managed to set off a cacophony of dueling censors, according to his own account of the Academy Awards debacle, with some people (crew?) booing him, and then other people (actors?) booing the booers. There were some long faces on the talking heads, but Moore himself seemed typically tickled by the controversy.

For a perhaps somewhat more objective perspective on the booing ratio dispute, see Matthew Rothschild’s interview in The Progressive (August 2003) with film critic Roger Ebert, who jump-started Michael Moore’s career by positively reviewing the then-unknown filmmaker’s first movie, Roger and Me. Ebert told Rothschild:

“I agree with what he said. I don’t think Bush was legitimately elected. But I was very offended as a reporter when Michael came directly back to the pressroom where I was, along with 300 or 400 other reporters, and lectured us, ‘Now do your job. Don’t report it was a divided house. Only five loud people were booing.’ I was just talking with Sean Walsh at the Wisconsin Film Festival, who directed Spellbound. He was one of the directors Michael had invited up on stage, and I asked him very carefully about that, and he said, ‘No, it sounded about 50-50.’ ”

He added: “You know, they say be careful what you ask for because you’re going to get it. On our Ebert & Roeper program, we have an annual show where we pick the winners ¾ who ought to win the Oscars ¾ and then at the end of that show there’s a segment where Roeper and I say what we would most like to see. So I wound up and said, ‘I’d like to see Michael Moore get up there and let ’em have it with both barrels and really let loose and give them a real rabble-rousing speech.’ I asked, basically, for that to happen. And then, when it happened, I don’t think Michael Moore really sold it to that audience. So I’m in favor of people getting up there and saying it, but at the same time there is a way to communicate effectively so as to help your cause, and I don’t think Michael found that…”

Ebert speaks to other intellectual freedom issues in this interview as well, such as Hollywood activists like Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon; Bush and the Christian right; “progressive films” that deal with race, class, and sex; and how watching movies can open our minds and increase our empathy. Very interesting interview which can be read online at: www.progressive.org/aug03/intv0803.html.

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