Posted on 03/30/2003 4:09:23 PM PST by Incorrigible
A stupid white man and a smart one
Sunday, March 30, 2003
On Oscar night a week ago, all of America got a chance to see what a self-important blowhard Michael Moore is. Seventeen years ago, Paul Berman got a sneak preview.
The differences between Berman and Moore are illustrative of just how far the left has fallen since the glory days of the 1960s. Berman came of age as a Columbia radical at a time when radicals were supposed to read lots of books and think lots of thoughts. That time is past, however, and the left now looks up to such dubious icons as Moore, the director of the Oscar- winning "Bowling for Columbine" and the author of the purportedly nonfiction best-seller "Stupid White Men."
The two had a confrontation in 1986 that is instructive. At the time, Berman was a respected writer of impeccable leftist credentials. The leftist Mother Jones magazine commissioned him to go to Nicaragua and write about the Sandinistas. Once in Nicaragua, Berman used his gifts of political analysis to deduce that the Sandinistas were in fact violating a good number of the principles of liberal democracy and were tending toward Leninism. He wrote an article for Mother Jones stating the problem and what he perceived to be the solution.
Unfortunately, by the time Berman submitted the article, the new editor was a guy from Michigan named Michael Moore, an auto worker's son who had edited a liberal publication based in Flint. Moore declared that he would not run Berman's article because "Reagan could easily hold it up, saying, 'See, even Mother Jones agrees with me.'"
"He tried to censor me," said Berman when I got him on the phone the other day. "Truths seem as simple as black and white to him, and he has no ability to see complexity. He's a very ideological guy and not a very well-educated guy."
Also not a very nice guy. The publisher fired Moore shortly after that largely on the grounds that he couldn't get along with the staff. Moore blamed it all on the Berman article, however, and spent the next few years vilifying a man he had never met.
"He used to go around the country denouncing me," said Berman. "He went around saying I don't speak Spanish."
Berman does, as he then explained in Spanish.
Moore's irascibility and vindictiveness, though well documented, don't concern Berman. What concerns him is the superficiality of the modern-day left that Moore so perfectly embodies. Moore's Oscar- night tirade against President Bush was a perfect example. Moore got up on the Oscar stage with his fellow nominees in the documentary film category and stated, "They are here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times."
One problem: Many key parts of Moore's oeuvre are fictional. Forbes magazine writer Daniel Lyons has compiled a list of what amounts to outright falsehoods in "Bowling for Columbine," such as the altering of a 1988 Bush- Quayle campaign ad so that it reads "Willie Horton released. Then kills again." The actual ad did not mention Horton. In any case Horton did not commit murder during his infamous furlough, but rape. Moore's book offers an even longer list of untrue assertions.
That sort of intellectual sloppiness on the current-day left contrasts with the scholarship of Berman. After Sept. 11, Berman began to examine the Muslim extremism that was apparent right in his Brooklyn neighborhood, which is home to a couple of radical mosques. He bought literature at the local bookstore and read it. The result was his current book "Terror and Liberalism" (Norton, $21), in which he dissects the extremist movements of the Mideast and the failure of American liberals to deal with them honestly.
Berman is no fan of President Bush, but he supports the war in Iraq. He believes that everyone who shares the values of liberal democracy should as well.
"The real opposition ought to be one that demands that Bush do more, not less; that he be more ambitious in the Muslim world, not less; that he devote more energy and not less to articulate our position," Berman argues.
In his view, the current antiwar crowd lacks the courage of its convictions about liberal democracy. Mideastern extremists, whether the Ba'ath Party in Iraq or the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, are totally opposed to everything that American and European leftists stand for, from women's rights to personal freedom. His criticism of Bush is that the president has failed to communicate that.
"Bush has been unable to articulate what are the values he's defending except in terms so clichéd as to lack any meaning at all," Berman said.
Unfortunately, there's some truth to that. The Bush people really have done a bad job of explaining the reasons for this war. This has left them open to cheap shots from stupid white men like Michael Moore. If you're interested in what an intelligent white man has to say, Berman's book is a good place to start.
Paul Mulshine is a Star-Ledger columnist. PMulshine@StarLedger.com
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