BOWLING FOR BALONEY: PART ONE
Yes, Michael Moore Is Evil
By Larry Swickard
Perhaps I should be honored when students ask me my opinion about an historical event. But I am filled with chagrin that so many young people derive their historical knowledge from movies. Not only that, but many cling to and defend Hollywood's cinematic drivel as if it were gospel. From Oliver Stone's Platoon, to Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine, it seems that for many people as long as something appears on the silver screen then it must be true. The fact that adults indulge in such self inflicted ignorance doesn't bode well for the future of this republic. I am aware that I have expressed this lament before. But no sooner than I finish explaining to students, friends, and colleagues that Hollywood's historical treatments are typically fictional entertainment masquerading as truth, someone pipes up, "But didn't you see. . .?" The latest example was Bowling For Columbine. Many of my students and their parents accept it as gospel. I am reminded of George Orwell's lament that "We have sunk to such a depth that the restatement of the obvious has become the first duty of intelligent men" (Walter Williams, "People Not Roadblocks To Prosperity," Human Events, April 23, 1999, p-17).
Up to this point I have avoided writing anything about Michael Moore. My reluctance stems not from love of Hollywood. On the contrary, after living in California for many years, and witnessing the pernicious influence of stars and celebrities, who seem so ignorant about so much, on the political process at the State level, I have nothing but disdain for them. Michael Moore is a cinematic charlatan. Nothing he has done, from Roger And Me to Bowling For Columbine, represents honest work of any value. His films deserve no greater position than to view the sky from the inside of a dumpster. I didn't want to give Moore any recognition. But I have been pestered for the past year by people who have seen Bowling to the point that I can no longer remain silent. The record must be set straight. I tried to staunch the uninformed adulation for Bowling by pointing out that Moore is the intellectual and moral equivalent of an angry spoiled adolescent scribbling nasty epithets about teachers on school bathroom walls. He is a middle-aged teenager masquerading as a man and suffers the terminal pubescent dread of not being trendy, cool, and in tune with the pop-culture herd. Some of my students responded to my declaration with the look of a deer staring at on-rushing headlamps at night. Perhaps a few have spent too much time behind the Cannabis Curtain. In a moment of exasperation I blurted out that Moore is a wannabee sixties radical Commie toad suffering from paranoid delusions of persecution and he likes it. When this too failed to unlock the frozen hypnotized deer look I decided it was time to start from square one and explain what is wrong with Michael Moore and Bowling.
N.R.A. Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre has long chronicled the hypocrisy and leftist agenda of Hollywood's stars. For example, Hollywood turned the novel, The Basketball Diaries, into a movie. In Hollywood's rendering, we find the lead character, clad in a black trench coat, walking the halls of his high school armed with a shotgun to kill his classmates. But this scene doesn't even appear in the novel! The Columbine killers Harris and Klebold, who watched this movie, considered it "noteworthy." LaPierre also notes that the novel Jurassic Park could be considered neutral to mildly "pro-gun." But in the hands of multimillionaire leftist film maker Steven Spielberg, the movie took on a somewhat anti-gun message. Spielberg, who owns an extensive gun collection, also produced Schindler's List. But in Spielberg's hands, the movie leaves out the fact that Schindler was an avid gun collector and stockpiled guns and hand grenades for Jews to use in self defense against the Nazis. Spielberg also spent $100,000 dollars "revising" E.T. so that the F.B.I. agents that surround the extraterrestrial's spaceship are not armed as they were in the original version. He did this to placate child star Drew Barrymore who has become fanatically opposed to all weapons. Sylvester Stallone, who made his fortune with such violent films as the Rambo series is also against the private ownership of firearms (at least for the lumpen). While in London the local press asked for his reaction to the murder of actor and comedian Phil Hartman in California. Stallone observed that life in America was "pathetic" and still in the "Dark Ages," (as opposed to Europe) and nothing would change until the American government went door to door and collected every handgun. Stallone, of course, owns a 24,000 square foot mansion in Miami that features and indoor shooting range (Wayne LaPierre, Guns, Freedom, And Terrorism, Nashville, Tennessee, Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2003, pp. 199-201).
Michael Moore has taken on prominence because he has become Hollywood's leftist bad boy. He yells in public what the Hollywood elite say at their private cocktail parties. His mission is to demonize the N.R.A., American gun owners, and Middle America. Bringing down the Bush Administration would also be a huge feather in his cap. The fact that Moore hails from the far left is not in dispute. He praised the Clinton Administration's gun point forcible return of Elian Gonzalez into the waiting arms of Cuba's communist dictator Fidel Castro. Moore's position had nothing to do with parental rights. He, like many in Hollywood including Chevy Chase and Robert Redford, greatly admire both Castro and the political system in Castro's "worker's paradise." Moore observed that at least in Cuba Gonzalez could finally obtain the excellent and free medical care and excellent education that is unavailable in the United States (James Hirsen, Tales From The Left Coast: True Stories of Hollywood Stars And Their Outrageous Politics, New York, New York, Crown Forum, 2003, pp. 69-70). Moore is also embraced by Hollywood for his abrasive personality and willingness to promote their wild eyed grassy knoll conspiracy theories. Moore is one of the left's standard bearers in constantly beating the drum that people who are politically conservative are so because they are intellectually inferior to liberals. This college dropout often and loudly impugns the intelligence of former President Reagan (who graduated from college with a major in economics) and other conservatives. He claims that going from Reagan to the two President Bush's' represents a "depletion of the political gene pool" (Ann Coulter, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, New York, Crown Publishers, 2002, pp. 33, 125-128). Following the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, rather than condemn the terrorists, Moore lamented that they had struck the wrong cities. After all, Moore pointed out, New York and Washington D.C. had gone for Gore not Bush in 2000. In addition, he asserted that the United States has killed tens of thousands of people around the world through tax-payer supported terrorism. In other words, the United States not the terrorists were the bad guys. One can only surmise that he would have popped corks on the bubbly had the terrorists attacked Omaha or Cheyenne instead. In addition, Moore's book, Stupid White Men, is endorsed by radical leftist Irish poet Tom Paulin who refers to the Israeli Army as the "Zionist SS" (Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War On Terrorism, New York, New York, Crown Forum, 2003, pp. 222, 251, 287).
Moore attempts to pass himself off as a champion of the common people. But this is mere hypocritical symbolism. His idea of being a "regular guy" is to falsely claim he is from Flint, Michigan, wear sloppy clothes and a baseball hat, and avoid encounters with a shaving razor. This is Hollywood's image of what its like to be from Middle America. In reality Moore lives in a $1.27 million dollar Manhattan penthouse, sends his daughter to a private school, is chauffeured around with bodyguards in limousines, and treats his employees like slaves (Laura Ingraham, Shut Up And Sing: How Elites From Hollywood, Politics, and the U.N. Are Subverting America, Washington, D.C., Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2003, pp. 64, 81, 88). Moore has made his biggest splash with his "fraudumentary" Bowling For Columbine. The film was first screened at the Cannes Film Festival. The Europeans loved it and gave Moore a standing ovation. The French bestowed all manner of awards on Moore. Back in the United States, Hollywood was so enthralled with a film that trashed both the N.R.A. and Middle America that they awarded Moore's fraudumentary an Oscar for Best Documentary. But the truth is that Moore's film is a lie built upon elaborate and deliberate deceptions (Ingraham, pp. 104-105). Remarkably Americans flock to Hollywood films, spending their hard earned cash, that trash Middle America and its values. It is your money that makes possible the lavish lifestyles of those that hate you. In part two I will begin a close examination of Moore's film.
