Press Action ::: The American Chip

Saturday, June 26, 2004

The American Chip

By Jordy Cummings

Fahrenheit 911 is not a political film. It is an emotional film, reflecting Moore’s stated love of Ingmar Bergman. It is meant to produce, in grand Germanic-Tragedian (i.e. melancholy, Brecht, Kushner, Clint Eastwood, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) tradition, a range of emotions that come out to sublime melancholy. Its humor is so raucous as to render it surreal, and its surrealism is so sad as to render it ur-real. Moore’s ending monologue—he really is hardly in it at all—is most unlike his the finale of his other films in which he is out to fry the big fish.

It is a far more psycho-political neo-Kantian travelogue for anyone, conservative, liberal, marxist, anarchist, who was emotionally—emotions, from the heart not the head, are where all sincere politics are derived—offended by just about everything that has happened since the day that Bush was declared president, Dec. 13, 2000 (my 24th birthday). For those of us who were aware of the events, it is cathartic. For those unaware, it is nearly a Eureka moment—as I witnessed from a whole range of slack-jawed folk walking out of the cinema.

On a personal level—I recalled that day on which I witnessed the coup d’etat, which is it was it was—that Moore so effectively shows. Gore almost comes out looking like Allende before he shot himself, but he—and the entire senate—balked. And Fox News, as we now tire of hearing as we are used to it, was part of the game. I remember being (in Swanton, Vt., covering the election for a university newspaper) in an American Legion Hall and watching Gore celebrating on CNN while Fox news gave it to Bush. I noticed a double-headed eagle on the wall.

While Moore is no doubt a liberal, the film can be read as the most effective revolutionary agitprop to have been seen in major theatres since JFK, and it has the advantage of being truthful. (Not that I trust the Warren Commission or anything—I just don’t buy the Camelot myth nor that it was the military industrial complex that killed its favored son Kennedy ... anti-Castro Cubans and the Mafia maybe—or perhaps Castro’s pals with justification hired the mob; one knows that LBJ cut off the Castro-assassination operation Mongoose...)

Some critics have called F911 an “alternate history” of the last four years. This is as supreme a declaration of false consciousness as exists anywhere, but in fact, it is true to the extent that not even movement chroniclers and polemicists (can I say us?) were able to manifest such a perfect genealogy. This sort of thing is impossible art that can only exist by accident, from a Mozart/Kerouac/KeithMoon type fool such as Wesley Clark-endorsing Moore. What I mean, of course is genealogy in its most wide reaching sense, going right inside the truest of contradictions. To reverse a cliché, it is not a film with questions; it is a film with answers. Even the reason Moore endorsed Clark seems to be part of his intuitive plan for this work of art. Flawed and incomplete as his thesis, the final monologue of the film says it all about America, war and capitalism.

As noted though, it clearly goes beyond that. The film in many ways is a film about how America’s longstanding cultural-industry produced false consciousness, rendering even intelligent people susceptible to propaganda ... as Ellul puts it, propaganda is there to reassure, not provoke ... much of the propaganda was integ-prop (integrative propaganda) as opposed to agitprop. The agitprop itself was the 911 attack, how it was used was integ-prop. Liberals and conservatives have been asking for a police state for a while, whether in the case of bombing Move or Waco.

Trent Lott spoke openly of doing things “we’ve dreamed about for ten years.” These things were the most sophisticated propaganda operation in the history of the United States, about fear, about mass emotional manipulation, about Iraq, about Jesus, about the homeland, in which one cop guards much of the Oregon coast ... Representative Jim McDermott, a psychiatrist, is most impressive on this issue.

As much as the blame should go to the comb-licking Wolfowitz and the clearly hammy Richard Cheney, the film—whether intentionally or not—makes a very Ward Churchillian case about not so much collective guilt, but collective denial, in which the denial has existed for so many generations as to dialecticize itself into a cognitive dissonance in which people trust the government more than their senses. Wilhelm Reich said that Germans and Italians, the petty-bourgeoisie and proletariat—who stood nothing to gain from fascism—were often its widest supporters. Reich in the essential Mass Psychology of Fascism and the Frankfurt School—particularly Marcuse, Horkheimer and Adorno—looked at how various cultural and material comforts provided in a decontextualized manner rendered the subject to fiddle while he burns because he is afraid that “now at least I have a fiddle, they make sure I have a fiddle ... if I question them they will take my fiddle.” So he plays the fiddle, like Hitler and Mussolini’s followers, like Al Qaeda.

Robert Anton Wilson wrote that it was easy to brainwash someone. “First starve ‘em. Then feed ‘em.” And this is how subjectivity is created and how citizenry is destroyed, from Rome to Florida. To me, even beyond Lila Lipscombe and her cathartic Moore-free journey to her son’s killer’s house, the most harrowing moments were about people younger than me, in various stages of America’s military society. Amputees and psychologically damaged men stoned on morphine speak both vengefully and humbly, “lovely anger” in a word. Military recruiters go around to poverty strapped regions of Flint, Mich. Flint residents talk about how their town looks like it is in Iraq, bombed out. And indeed, much of, it, 15 years after GM left, does. And so it goes.

As Paul McCartney said in a rare intelligent lyric, “the movement you need is on your shoulder.” That movement is the American chip. Perhaps it is a ruffle, with its good/evil twin. The chip will grow into a genuine movement, in a few years, when these young kids who listen to Mudvayne while being forced to kill civilians and lose their humanity, then come home, pumped full of confusion and morphine. American soldiers are getting sick of the Battleship Potemkin.

Jordy Cummings, editor of Pure Polemics, lives in Toronto and can be reached at yorgos33ca@yahoo.ca.

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