9/11 - unwatched

I haven't seen the Michael Moore flick 9/11. I only bought the DVD a week ago. Maybe I'll get around to watching it this year - but honestly, I don't feel any real urgency in popping it in the laptop. The film can be seen as Moore's big attempt to affect the election - a nearly but not quite successful attempt. Now that November is gone, watching the film would seem untimely. Or even obsolete? Is Moore even relevant any more?

Oh, yes. Firstly, the connoisoirs of cut-price DVDs in this town (who I call my co-employees) had a lot to good things to say about the film. Hyperbole aside, I did enjoy Bowling for Columbine. But the best thing is that he's still frightening people. In this case, it's the Democrats:

You know, let's let Hollywood and the Cannes Film Festival fawn all over Michael Moore. We ought to make it pretty clear that he sure doesn't speak for us when it comes to standing up for our country. — Will Marshall, President of the Progressive Policy Institute, the think-tank of the DLC

I liked Matt Taibbi at the eXile, and I'm glad I can still read his stuff at NY Press every week or so. Apart from being honest (especially with himself), he finds things out. In this case, he finds out that this Will Marshall is mixed in with the "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq" and hangs around the Project for a New American Century crew. In other words, unsuccessful hegemonists, with a bit of corporate stooge mixed in. Now he's using these skills in promoting a disastrous Iraq venture into pushing Moore away from the Democrat party. "With friends like these...", one thinks - but maybe there is method in all this:

For one thing, people like Al From, Donna Brazile and DLC president Bruce Reed—event speakers who are all high-level political heavyweights whose instinct for spontaneity died with their souls 100 years ago, and would never say anything without first calculating its potential impact—would seem to gain very little by mentioning Moore's name at all in the conference.

To say openly in front of a roomful of reporters that the party has to disavow Michael Moore is to remind a roomful of reporters that the Democratic party is still currently linked to Michael Moore. This would be like George Bush Sr. using the word "wimp" in public, or John Kerry using the word "effete" or "snob." No alert political operative would recommend it, under normal circumstances....

But as the election is now well and truly over:

I also noticed that unless something is done about it, this unelected bund of corporate pawns is once again going to end up writing the party platform and arranging things to make sure that no antiwar candidate is allowed to compete for votes in the primaries. It will push one of its own—probably Harold Ickes, or Brazile—in next year's election for the chairman of the Democratic Party. And when that person wins, the tens of millions of Democrats who opposed the war will have to get used to people like Will Marshall referring to them as "we" in front of roomfuls of reporters—Marshall, who this year wrote, in Blueprint, an article entitled "Stay and Win in Iraq" that offered the following view of the progress of the war:

"Coalition forces still face daily attacks but the body count tilts massively in their favor."

I see people like these as my enemies. It's not the damage they do to the Democrat party that bothers me much. It bothers me a little, but ultimately, it's not my business. The problem is that they want America to be a hegenom - a good hegemon, but a hegemon none the less. I don't want any hegemon. And if Michael Moore raises their ire, good for him.