Friday, December 03, 2004

Lila Lipscomb and Michael Moore: A Slice of Unprincipled American Selfishness

By the Glorious Revolutionary Federation of Fortune 500 Killers

Accolades from the liberal-bourgeois elite, large clusters of which infect Morningside Heights, swarmed around the summer 2004 release of sell-out filmmaker Michael “Vote for war criminals Wesley Clark and John Kerry” Moore’s documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11.” The movie’s release on DVD (ca-ching, ca-ching for Moore) invites a closer look at the section of the film many liberal-bourgeois commentators heralded as the “most emotionally powerful” and “strongest” aspect of Moore’s movie: the story of Lila Lipscomb, a middle-aged Flint, Michigan woman who lost her son in Iraq. Lipscomb subsequently becomes a vocal opponent of the war.

As Moore shows in the film, however, Lipscomb was hardly always anti-war. Audiences see her spewing pro-American banalities at the beginning of the film in her kitchen. Another movie shot shows her hanging up an American flag as her mother country prepared to build itself up for an aerial massacre on Iraq.

So what caused Lila’s transition from pro-war uber-patriot to outspoken anti-war speaker? One wishes we could say that the catalyst was of a principled nature. Nope. Instead, it appears that Lila only decided to think of the war as unjust after her son died in it. In other words, only when the war started to affect her personally did she even bother to consider it more deeply. Such is typical of a disgustingly selfish mentality that only expresses concern for social problems if their consequences can be framed in terms that demonstrate that practical costliness. More specifically, Lila represents a variant of unprincipled anti-war thought that attacks the war from ethnocentric, practical angles—its cost to AMERICANS’ social services, its resulting in the deaths of AMERICAN soldiers (many of whom were sadistic, homophobic, militaristic male killing machines taking part in torture and war crimes), its fomenting anti-American attitudes that make world travel more hostile for AMERICANS—and not principled ones that repudiate the racist-imperialist assumptions of the pre-emptive war doctrine.

The Federation does not admire Lila. Your fifteen minutes of fame are up. You and your promoter Moore’s film were responsible for millions of poorly read, politically illiterate bourgeois-liberals’ embrace of anti-Bushism—that is, the myopic and narrow view that all the foreign policy and domestic horrors of the past four years are the almost-total responsibility of one man’s administration rather than a bipartisan atrocity. Now that your crew lost so pathetically in 2004, it’s time for you to get out of the way for the principled anti-war alternative waiting to emerge. Thanks for wasting everyone’s time and diverting their attention. Hope a dog urinates on your flag.

The Glorious Revolutionary Federation of Fortune 500 Killers is a Columbia University-based anti-capitalist, anti-racist student insurgent group. To learn more about the group, e-mail ceodeath@ceodeath.org, or visit its site at www.ceodeath.org.

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