Morford on Moore

I still haven't seen Fahrenheit 9/11. Yet in talking with my friends who have seen it I am struck with this thought, none of this new to me! However, now many of my friends have a base to hold a conversation on which I been articulating on for the last two years. Now I can speak and not look like a wacko.

Mark Morford brings up a point which I have not seen in most of the screeds on the movie: Who cares if Moore's flick is flawed, shameless propaganda? At least it makes America think

When's the last time a documentary -- not to mention one seriously calling into doubt the snide motives of our government's call to war -- was the No. 1 movie in the nation while the war was still under way? Never, that's when.

This, then, is the fabulous thing about Moore's flick. Sure, most of what the movie reveals might seem painfully obvious to anyone who follows the news with any sort of intellectual dexterity. And, yes, most of what Moore uncovers about everything from BushCo's appalling Saudi oil connections and his administration's whorelike corporate favoritism and the stealing of the '00 election you've heard a thousand times before.
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After all, we're Americans. We tend to forget very quickly how it was just after BushCo was elected, or just after 9/11, or just after the war on Iraq was declared. We forget how thoroughly the GOP-fueled fear saturated the country's air like a rank perfume, how rabid patriotism was our national drug, how violent warmongering was forced upon us like some sort of mandatory, painful surgery, the only option for a heartbroken, exhausted nation. Take a moment. Try to remember.
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And remember how you thought, oh my God, something is so not right about this. Something is terribly unsound about our thinking and methodology and macho gun-totin' kill-'em-all isolationist Texas swaggerin' approach to the world. This is not a war for freedom. This is not a war for the safety of American soil. Bush is marching us straight into a hellish quagmire, and no one seems to be asking why.
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He has, in short, made Middle America think again. He has cracked the GOP's frozen ideological sea, showed us all one thing we have so desperately forgotten: America does not, after all, have to be this way, and its citizens do, in fact, have a choice.

And, for that reason, "Fahrenheit 9/11" is perhaps the most wonderfully patriotic film ever made.

Morford's phantasmagorical use of language makes him a national treasure as well...