Michael Moore. Will we ever be rid of him?
Apparently not. His Oscar-winning, hoax-cum-documentary "Bowling for Columbine" was released on video/DVD late last month, and since I work at a video store (sigh), I get to hear about it every five minutes.
But enough about me. Moore is - even now, on the second anniversary of 9/11 - working on using the tragedy to further his agenda even more. His next film is called "Fahrenheit 911: The Temperature at Which Truth Burns," and it will be about the insidious connections between the Bin Laden family and (wait for it) the Bush family.
I didn't make that up.
If you're not terribly familiar with Moore, he is an oddity in the popular scene. See, everyone knows someone who's got a serious problem with the truth: A serial exaggerator or someone who simply likes to lie. Well, Michael Moore is precisely that kind of guy.
To go into details of his prevarications would take pages. In fact, it would take whole Web sites, which in fact exist. Bowlingfortruth.com, moorelies.com and moorewatch.com, are just a few of the Web sites devoted to legitimately documenting Moore's ability to make Al Gore look like Abe Lincoln.
For the barest glimpse: Moore lies about international homicide statistics, the NRA, Charlton Heston, George Bush Sr., Willie Horton, Lockheed-Martin, Canada, America, Michigan and bowling. His exaggerations, editing tricks and outright falsehoods can be refuted with minimum effort.
In short, Michael Moore has a real problem with the truth. He's only slightly less unhinged than Kim Jong II, yet he demands to be regarded as some sort of fearless truth-teller in American society. Moore assures us that he is the true patriot in this country because he hates everything about it except his right to hate it.
In his acceptance speech at the Academy Awards, Moore said, "We like nonfiction, and we live in fictitious times." As usual, what he was saying was the opposite of the truth: Moore himself loves to fictionalize real events, and since Sept. 11, 2001, our country and world have rarely lived in more serious or "nonfictional" times.
The War on Terror is indeed serious, and it isn't anywhere near being over. If professional liars like Moore want to advance their own ego in any number of mediums, then that is, after all, their right. But we as a people can't pay them any kind of serious heed if we want to make it in these serious times.
Look at it this way: "Bowling For Columbine" received the attention it got for the most part because it told the leftist Hollywood establishment and critics precisely what they wanted to hear. Like Moore, the majority of them do not believe that the war in Iraq was justified, particularly on the grounds of Saddam Hussein having or attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction. So, essentially, they were willing to trust some guy with a camera and a budget but unwilling to entertain the notion that the intelligence services of most of the civilized world might be correct. Kind of scary, yes?
Moore's first documentary, "Roger and Me," was a hit piece on corporate America. His second was an attempt to paint Americans as violent, insane gun nuts. And now his next will be an all-out attack against the President, to be released in election season. The anti-war crowd is fond of saying that in war, "truth is the first casualty." They might be interested to know that one of their spokesmen is, in fact, waging a war of lies against America itself.
Eric Spratling is a journalism senior. Reach him at eric.spratling@asu.edu.
