Tim Blair: The awful truth? It's a crock (Bowling for Columbine)

The Australian ^ | Dec 30, 2002 | Tim Blair

[beckett]

Tim Blair: The awful truth? It's a crock

December 30, 2002

CHILDREN'S television is quite an art. It's not just a matter of throwing together simple tunes, basic storylines and bright colours. Successful children's TV also requires the presence of a large, formless creature, an entity usually combining equal elements of human and bovine. The cow-beast is crucial.

So it is with Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore's Cannes-winning documentary on the wrongs of guns, capitalism, and America, now screening in Australia. The simple tunes and basic storylines are in place. Moore himself plays the Dorothy the Dinosaur role, clumsily loping about in pursuit of Bad Guys. It's a kid flick for the adult anti-American market.

Moore manipulates this market so expertly that you anticipate fans squealing "Go Mikey!" every time he plods smugly into frame. Fans like The Age's Stephanie Bunbury: "Isn't that great, you think with a huge sigh of relief as you see him bearing down, amiable but inexorable, on the next feral gun owner or racist lunatic. Go Mikey!"

Yay! Margaret Pomeranz of SBS's Movie Show awarded Columbine five stars, and also got into the toddler spirit: "Moore shambles around with his baseball cap on, his stomach hanging out; almost a teddy bear figure, Moore seems to encompass so much that's terribly important in the world today with the United States on the brink of yet another international gun expedition." Movie Show co-presenter (and film reviewer for The Australian) David Stratton detected vast importance, too: "It's a sobering film, but never a dull one, thanks to the brilliance of Moore's sometimes scatological approach to a profoundly important subject."

The subject is obviously so profoundly important that no local reviewer has been bothered to report the controversy in the US over Columbine's inaccuracies and distortions. Journalists have a damned nerve charging people money for less information than is available free on the internet. Writing about Columbine without addressing its flaws is like writing about Michael Jackson without mentioning that these days he looks like an albino bat.

A mind given to conspiracy theories might conclude that an element of cover-up is involved. For the record, and because you apparently won't read it elsewhere in the Australian press, here is a brief list of things believed wrong about Columbine, from sources ranging from Salon.com and Forbes to London's Sunday Times (these and more may be found at www.moorewatch.com):

• The title refers to two teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who shot up Columbine High School in 1999, killing 13 people and themselves. Moore asserts that they went bowling on the morning of the massacre. Police now say they did not.

• Moore shows a television ad for the 1988 Bush/Quayle presidential campaign targeting the "revolving door" prison system run by Michael Dukakis in Massachusetts. Superimposed on the ad, as though there originally, are the words: "Willie Horton released. Then kills again." Moore added that line, which in any case is wrong; Horton didn't kill, but raped a woman while released.

• Moore theorises that the Columbine killers were inclined towards murder because their town is home to a Lockheed-Martin weapon-making facility. The plant in question actually builds devices that launch TV satellites.

• Moore implies that the US-led bombing of Kosovo on the morning of the killings possibly motivated Klebold and Harris. He doesn't mention their alleged Nazi fixation, or that they killed their classmates and teachers on Hitler's birthday.

• A graphic superimposed over footage of the second jet slicing into the World Trade Centre reads: "Sept. 11, 2001: Osama bin Laden uses his expert CIA training to kill 3000 Americans." Sure, Mike. Moore wrote the day after the attack that the victims "did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him . . . Why kill them?" Soon afterwards he deleted these words from his website.

• Although his film is about US gun violence, Moore avoids speaking to any black victims of gun violence – in a society where 55 per cent of gun murder victims are black.

• Columbine spends much time praising peaceful, multicultural Canada, where everybody leaves their doors unlocked and nobody shoots each other. Moore doesn't mention 1989's Ecole Polytechnique massacre in Montreal, when gunman Marc Lepine killed 14 women due to his hatred of feminists.

• Moore largely dodges the issue of gun crime in cities, where 70 per cent of US gun murders occur. A crime of the type that took place in Columbine (more than five dead in a mostly white suburban area) represented less than one-tenth of one per cent of murders in 1999.

• Moore claims that the US provided tens of millions worth of aid dollars to Afghanistan's Taliban rulers in 2000-01. That money was provided for famine relief and was distributed by the UN and non-government organisations.

No wonder Moore is so popular in France, where Thierry Meyssan's book Effroyable Imposture (which argued that September 11 was engineered by the American government) became a bestseller.

Some of his reviewer/fans share Moore's accuracy problems. Bunbury claimed that "he bails up the entire management of Kmart and confronts Charlton Heston on his own front veranda" although he meets only a few Kmart management types and interviews Heston inside his house; and The Australian's Jane Cornwell wrote that Columbine's vile three-minute cartoon history of the US, written by Moore and made by animators FlickerLab, was produced "by the guys from South Park".

Just as wrong are reviewers' standard lines about Moore "taking on big business" and "standing up for the little guy". Moore usually stands up to the little guy, bullying sales staff and humiliating small-town folk. At the cinema where I saw Columbine, a typically open-minded and compassionate inner-city crowd giggled indulgently as Moore (aided by sneaky editing) made fools of police, PR flacks, the unemployed, the undereducated and the working class.

Millionaire Moore – who is to working class as French is to resistance, despite once spending one entire day on the Buick assembly line in his hometown of Flint, Michigan – is waging a class war, but it's against the rubes and hicks he claims to represent. They are mere joke fodder in his deceitful Playschool morality play. Go to hell, Mikey.

[BillyBoy]

Good to know that some conservative Aussies know the truth about Moore's depiction of America.

[driftless]

I haven't seen BFC, but I have read the first chapter of Moore's "Stupid etc". The guy needs to be institutionalized. In the book he tries to make the argument that in the space of less than a year under Bush we have gone from being the richest most powerful country in the world (thanks to Clinton of course) to a third-world trash heap populated with jobless, starving citizens and hapless minorities suddenly oppressed by a few thousand terrible, white Republican males who want to reintroduce slavery and make church attendance compulsory.

The movie and the book appeal to America-hating foreigners because this is what they want to believe about the U.S: we're all just a bunch of gun-toting, tobacco-chewing, bible thumpers who lucked or bullied are way into our current wealth and power. If we were actually as stupid as Moore would like gullible lefties to believe, we'd still be living in log cabins and trapping squirrels for dinner. Moore knows this, but it is very profitable for him to play the anti-America game. We can expect more of this drivel from him as it has made him a multi-millionaire.

[E Rocc]

Millionaire Moore – who is to working class as French is to resistance, despite once spending one entire day on the Buick assembly line in his hometown of Flint, Michigan

It wasn't an entire day. Ben Hamper wrote that just before Moore-on left for San Francisco he visited the line. Showed up in his Honda, hung around for a bit, and left. This is his (at least former) friend talking.

-Eric

[dday76]

Bowling for Columbine... I was just led by the hand to the movie by an extremely liberal friend of mine. She brought me along with a big smile.
Afterwards, I had a few questions for her, like, "should the US have let the USSR take over Afghanistan?"
"Do you think instructions on flying jumbo jets or US air traffic schedules were included in the Afghan rebel training program?"
"Would the mother of the 6 year old that shot the girl been a better role-model if she had turned down an opportunity to work, or if she had lived on the street?"
"Do you think good business ideas like preventing consumers from buying handgun ammo had anything to do with KMart recently filing for bankruptcy?"
... someone already made the point about the whole "we don't use titans as weapons any more" thing.

I must admit, I doublechecked this stuff. I know it's cheating to cite actual Facts. I hope everyone can forgive me.

[Bonaparte]

Sounds like you know as much about missiles as you know about Hitler.