I had a swell time at Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s documentary about George Bush’s dubious progress from Florida to Iraq. It’s his best movie — funny, heartbreaking, outraged and outrageous — and deserves its huge success. When did you last see a muckraking expose of events that are still unfolding? The film should make the media blush for its torpor and fake judiciousness and embedment with the Administration. Moore displays footage never before seen of events most Americans know nothing about. because the media haven’t told them. If Joe Darby hadn’t jump-started the Abu Ghraib scandal with those photos, you might well be seeing the brutalisation of Iraqi prisoners for the first time in a brief scene in Fahrenheit 9 Moore keeps his impish-blimpish on-screen presence down, but there are some hilarious bits — learning that Congress hadn’t read the Patriot Act before passing it, he drives around the Capitol in an ice cream truck blasting it through the sound system. The odd thing is, I found the movie immensely cheering and energising, even though I don’t agree with its main thesis, drawn from Unger, that Bush’s oil-business interests, particularly his close financial and personal connections with the Saudis, drove his post-9/11 decisions to go easy on Saudi Arabia and invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Excerpted from an article by Katha Pollitt in The Nation, July 19
