Annoyed Rant

One of my coworkers has been out of town for a week, visiting San Francisco. She came back today and one of the first things she told me was that she had seen Fahrenheit 9/11. "It was so great!" she gushed. (She gets excited over leftist causes--a fan not just of Michael Moore, but of Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and even Howard Stern lately, because he has become a "champion" of free speech, I guess. I still think he's just a loudmouthed jerk, regardless of how correct he is about free speech.)

"You probably already know about all the stuff in the movie," she says, correctly, "But you should see it anyway. It's great the way it condenses all this stuff about Bush so people can finally know the truth!"

Really. So people can finally know the truth, huh?

Well, guess what. I work in a bookstore, where we have been shelving and selling books about George Bush, Osama bin Laden, and the Saudi family for, um, about as long as George W. Bush has been president. We have had numerous leftist books for much longer. We're a small store, too. You can find everything we have and more if you go down to your local Borders or Barnes & Noble. On top of that, I have been reading this information and these kinds of critiques in magazines and newspapers and on the web for quite some time now. What I'm getting at is that there is nothing in Michael Moore's Big New Thing that hasn't been freely available for a long, long time.

This is what rubs me the wrong way. Moore's thesis is that the American people have been "deceived." Ditto for the rest of the leftist crowd. They all think that if Americans just had access to The Truth™ then we wouldn't have elected George W. Bush, we wouldn't have gone to Iraq, and we might not have even been attacked on September 11, because, gosh darn it, that was our fault, too (you know, poor policy maneuvers and such). But the American people have a wealth of information at their fingertips. We probably have more information available to us than any people on the planet. We have our "mainstream" news sources, we have books from presses both large and small, we have magazines both glossy and underground, we have radio, we have television, and we have the internet (which is just about boundless). You might even say Americans are drowning in an information glut. The problem is not that Americans have been deceived with missing information. They haven't! They just haven't had that information packaged for them in ways that leftists approve. That's not deceit. That's not misinformation. That's not even propaganda. That's just a fact of life.

And it's the apathy of the American people, too. See, anybody who wants a different perspective is free to walk into a bookstore, even the little independent one where I work, and pick up a book that has all kinds of nitty gritty information about world events. You can even find books with non-mainstream perspectives. You can find books with flat out treasonous perspectives. And yes, here in America, we not only allow this stuff, we just about encourage it! Free speech is everywhere. But Americans don't care. Americans aren't seeking this stuff out in droves. Instead, Americans are sitting at home in droves (or, rather, sitting in their SUVs in droves) and not paying attention.

This isn't deception. This is apathy. Americans are more concerned about getting loads of cheap credit, about keeping high-paying jobs they don't deserve, about sending their kids to universities where they won't learn much of anything useful, about keeping retirement benefits without paying anything into them, about getting cheap healthcare, and about keeping all the problems of the world safely outside the sanctity of their homes and SUVs. Americans don't care about world politics or geopolitical strategy, or what might be involved in maintaining that standard of life they so love. Americans just want to feel happy and isolated, so they can get fat in peace. They are just as greedy as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but on a smaller scale. All those "elite" tycoons are living the American Dream. They're not qualitatively different, they're quantitatively different. That's it.

And that's the problem with leftist mythology. They work from a perspective that says rich and powerful people are fundamentally selfish and ruthless, but poor people are fundamentally noble. Newsflash to the Left: We are all selfish and ruthless, just some of us are less successful at acquisition.

Michael Moore made the wrong movie. Instead of going to powerful people and making them look like idiots, he should have gone to average Americans and quizzed them on facts, history, and geography. He should have asked them about geopolitics. He should have pressed them on what they believe and why. He should have seen where they get their information about the world. He should have gone to bookstores and hung out in the political and history sections to see what people bought and why. Instead of exposing the idiocy of our elites, which we take for granted anyway, he should have exposed the idiocy of the average American and then shown how much we have in common with our leaders. We like to say that power corrupts, but we always mean somebody else when we say that. The Average American is just as corrupt as any leader, and we ought to admit it.

The media haven't deceived us. We have voted with our feet and chosen to hear what we wanted to hear.