Hapless, Fruitless, Pointless

      Christopher Hitchens has panned the new Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 9/11. You don't say.... I know, try to contain your expressions of surprise.   At one point, Hitchens, in his typical bombast, associates Moore with two of the most controversial directors in film history-- Sergei Eisenstein and Leni Riefenstahl, but curiously and glaringly not D. W. Griffith-- as a means to imply a connection between Moore's lefty political stance and Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda and Eisenstein's more categorically-difficult but still-technically "Stalinist" films.  (Eisenstein started as a propagandist but became increasingly unsure about, and even somewhat subversive to, Stalin's Soviet Union.)  Ergo, not only is Michael Moore's movie a bad movie, it's a dangerous movie, Hitchens implies, a movie with blood on its hands.  He then launches into an extended all-out savaging of Moore's film which may or may not be valid.  Late in the article, though, Hitchens, who'd already tipped his hat, takes it off entirely and falls victim of the same charge on which indicts Moore.  Here's Hitchens' outrage simplified, as much as it can be:

At no point does Michael Moore make the smallest effort to be objective. At no moment does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer.

Well, consider then the "objectivity" of the first several sentences of Hitchen's final paragraph:

If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed.   If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq.   And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD.

Hmm... Isn't that a just a tad aspersive, particularly in terms of the mentionings of Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo?   This doesn't sound in the least bit objective to me: it's standing on another form of moral outrage-- roughly equivalent to the moral outrage which is at the foundation of Moore's film-- to offer a cheap sneer or a jeer (i.e., "Michael Moore would have let people die").   This, however, is the state of debate, born of moral and political injurement, holier-than-thou and vitriolic, and stunningly hypocritical.   I'm not defending Moore or Hitchens here; instead they seem to me the flip sides of the same coin.  The rhetorical sins of which Hitchens accuses Moore are many-- wilful obfuscation and decontextualization, factual inaccuracy and propagandism, and such, and I'm relatively sure that Moore committed many of them, if not all of them.  I'm also reminded, though, of that line from Pericles about people loathing to hear about the sins they love to act.  It's the great rule of the rhetoric of moral outrage: beware your enemy, not for what he's said and done, but for becoming the same as him.  Too bad the poles of right and left, especially in the United States but throughout the rest of the world as well, refuse to see the obvious.  Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the hapless, fruitless, pointless protestation-of-hypocrisy that, so far at least, characterizes 21st-century rhetoric.

      Long story short, mès amis, don't put too much stock in what either of them say.  Listen to them, watch them, read them, et cetera, but don't think for a second you're getting much more than screed.