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Dude, Where's My Country?
Moore is a liberal gadfly who has won a tremendous following in the US and the world, primarily on the strength of his movies and books. His TV Nation and The Awful Truth television series won the Emmy. The movie Roger & Me, which was an expos`E9 of General Motors, was also an award winner. At the Oscar ceremony last year, he spoke against President Bush and the war in Iraq even as he received the award for his film, Bowling for Columbine. Moore's Stupid White Men has been a bestseller, and his latest book is also one. He is a cult figure, who the right-wingers love to hate. He is also funny, in the in-your-face confrontational kind of way. However, the issues that he raises are hardly funny. 7 Questions for George of Arabia raises issues like the close ties of the Bush family with Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich nations and their key players, including the Saudi royal family and Osama bin Laden's family. US Vice-President Dick Cheney and his Halliburton connections come in for close scrutiny. The unholy nexus of big business and government is also examined in another chapter where the now defunct Enron and its cosy connections with the Bush administration are revealed. Home of the Whooper effectively questions the rationale behind linking the 9/11 attacks with Iraq and non-existent WMDs that were never there. Moore also points out that the US looked the other way when Iraq used biological weapons in Iran and against the Kurds, how companies like Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, Bechtel, Caterpillar, DuPont, Kodak and Hughes Helicopter were responsible for delivering "dual-use" technologies, including high-powered computers, lasers and other items to Iraq in the 1980s and even till 2000. Saddam Hussein was declared a monster by the same nation that supported such dictators as Pol Pot in Cambodia, Mobutu SeseSeku in Congo/Zaire, Joao Goulart in Brazil and General Suharto in Indonesia. One of the more interesting chapters is How to Stop Being Terrorised. Stop Being a Terrorist. Moore offers suggestions such as catching Osama bin Laden, doing it right when it comes to overthrowing a democratically elected leader of another country, not propping up existing dictators, finding out why every one is "so pissed off about Israel" and not calling the killing of civilians "collateral damage". Having lived in the US for several years, I was not surprised by Moore describing the nation as basically liberal. He does have some impressive statistics to support his contention. How to talk to your Conservative Brother-in-Law is, indeed, funny even if one does not subscribe to any extreme ideology. Moore excites passion; his writing has a demagogic tone, which often leads to a somewhat careless treatment of facts. Critics have pointed out some factual errors in the book, including the one about the Saudi's flying out of the country when all other planes were grounded (They were among the first to leave after the flights resumed). However, the documentation that Moore provides to support his stand is extensive too. We have to remember that his basic contentions have forced Americans, and many the world over, to look at the kind of propaganda that the US government machinery under President Bush is capable of unleashing. This sweeping power that the state has vested in itself through the Patriot Act and other measures, strike home when we realise that Judith Miller, a reporter with The New York Times, is facing a jail sentence for contempt of court-for refusing to name her sources to prosecutors investigating the disclosure of the identity of a covert CIA agent. Even though she has not written an article, on October 7, Judge Thomas F. Hogan, of United States District Court in Washington, ordered her jailed for as long as 18 months, noting that she had contemplated writing such an article and had conducted interviews for it. The fear and anxiety that dominate discourse in the US today should have had no place in a nation where people are quite open and fair-minded. After all, it is a nation that allows the likes of Michael Moore pen such books, and in them the world finds a foil to "official" Washington. |
THERE were no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in
Iraq. President Bush and Prime Minister Blair have both admitted to this
recently. Everyone who had read Michael Moore's latest book, on which
the docu-drama Fahrenheit 9/11 is based, will nod his head and
say: "I knew that all along."