The RePUBElicans just don’t have a sense of humour, do they?
[quote]The power of laughter
Michael Moore, Bush-baiter, cult figure and global internet brand, has much to teach modern politicians
Jackie Ashley
Thursday May 20, 2004
The Guardian
There are many ways of making a political point, as MPs unhappily discovered yesterday. One of them is to hurl a balloon full of purple powder into the chamber of the House of Commons, an act that should be universally condemned. But, when traditional means fail, perhaps there are other ways of getting through.
Look at what’s happening in the US, where the press is notoriously unenthusiastic about leftwing dissent. How else do you explain the 4 million Americans who every month visit the Guardian’s website. My own e-postbag always contains a good number of correspondents from the States, who complain that pro-abortion or anti-war articles in this paper would not see the light of day in the mainstream press there.
But now America has Michael Moore. He’s huge. Huge personally - a great big hairy doughball of a man. He’s huge commercially. He’s huge on the web. And he’s huge in the scale of his ambition - he is determined to bring down George Bush.
This week we have been treated to Moore doing what he does best, a lumbering rampage, at the Cannes film festival. Not for the first time, corporate America has played straight into his hands. Disney has decided not to distribute Moore’s new film, Fahrenheit 9/11, a documentary about Bush and the war, despite spending $6m on it through its Miramax division. Moore is crying censorship, and complaining that Disney’s Michael Eisner told his agent that he did not want to anger Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, because tax breaks worth many millions of dollars were at stake.
The resulting row has made headlines round the world, thrown Disney on the defensive and given Moore yet another cause connected to a traditional American issue - free speech. The New York Times accused Disney of craven censorship and awarded the company “the gold medal for cowardice”. According to film critics who have seen it, the movie makes strong points about links between the Bin Laden and Bush families, and about US behaviour in Iraq. It is not as damaging as the torture pictures from Abu Ghraib: yet, thanks to Disney, it has taken the Moore phenomenon to a new level. He is entirely serious in thinking that he can tilt the balance in middle America against Bush in the coming election. Many American conservatives are worried he may be right.
So is Moore a new kind of politician? Is he a way forward that conventional politics has not fully grasped? Certainly, in an age when politicians routinely whinge about the media without being able to use it effectively, he has a bundle of lessons for modern democrats.
The first and easiest is the power of humour. Moore became known here via his skewering of greedy corporate bosses on his television series TV Nation, and his polemical books, such as Stupid White Men. He may be angry, but stunts and gags abound. A good example of his style was his Oscar acceptance speech for his anti-gun film Bowling for Columbine; in it he broke all protocol by attacking Bush for the Iraq war and concluded: “Shame on you Bush: any time you’ve got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up.”
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guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,1 … 63,00.html
Hey PUBES, lighten up! It’s not as damaging as last week’s news. Remember that.
