Posted on 06/04/2004 10:28:35 AM PDT by presidio9
A series of odd, but possibly interconnected phenomena happened in the past two weeks. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," a hyper-virulent anti-Bush documentary, won the top prize at the Cannes film festival in France. Al Gore gave a hyper-virulent anti-Bush speech, sponsored by Moveon.org, which is supported by George Soros, who believes George Bush's policies are ruining the world. And over Memorial Day weekend, the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" opened, in which tornadoes rip through Los Angeles, New York City is destroyed in a flood and the Earth's Northern Hemisphere is destroyed by snow and ice high as the Statue of Liberty's shoulders -- because Dick Cheney refused to believe in global warming.
What each of these events has in common is that they are not quite normal. They were launched from a wing of Democratic politics that has drifted into what one might call the political paranormal.
The participants in the political paranormal share a slightly psycho desire to remove George Bush from the presidency. It has qualms about the pedestrian mechanics of election politics -- two men campaigning and people voting. But what if Bush wins?!! To ensure that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld triumvirate is dislodged from its illegitimate (Florida) grip on power, something more is needed so that all voters will see what, possibly, only they see.
More for Michael Moore is propaganda; more for Al Gore is hydrogen-filled speeches about "the most dishonest president since Richard Nixon" and for German filmmaker Roland Emmerich it's the glorious destruction of America for its political leaders' multiple sins.
It is a style of politics that has committed believers. The day after Mr. Gore's remarkably intense anti-Bush speech ("a policy based on domination of the rest of the world"), the New York Times carried a story saying some Democrats prefer Mr. Gore's semi-hinged political style (my descriptor, not the Times') to John Kerry's too decorous style of politics.
Mr. Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" has not yet been let loose in America, so we can take only the word of the French that it was the finest example of filmmaking shown at the Cannes festival, described by one reporter this year as "an international anti-Bush rally on the Cote d' Azur." Michael Moore is often described as a political satirist, but his techniques tend more toward mockery and ridicule. His past subjects have included the swaths of America he doesn't much care for -- the suburbs, corporations and now a Republican president. Mr. Moore, like other anti-Bush comedians, understands that his audience doesn't want to disagree with George Bush; they want to smirk at him. Most of all, they want to condescend to him.
But between the twin cities of Manhattan and Hollywood, where condescension is a civic virtue, many Americans identify with Mr. Bush's lack of sophistication. The danger with a "Fahrenheit 9/11" is that these voters will think they too are being condescended to; and so Michael Moore's politics of ridicule exists as not much more than a smirkers' cult.
Roland Emmerich, by contrast, is a propagandist on a Riefenstahlian scale. Mr. Emmerich understands that when critics give speeches saying the Bush presidency should be pushed into the sea solely for not supporting the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gas, the International Court of Justice or the ABM treaty, this doesn't cut much ice with average voters. So the director-writer-producer of "The Day After Tomorrow" says, "You want ice, I'll give you ice!" and paints global warming (literally, with his computer) as an unimaginable apocalypse of wind, water, wolves and urban tundra that is allowed to happen (in his movie) by the unconcern of a Dick Cheney look-alike.
Moveon.org urged its followers to take some friends to the movie to "meet up with other MoveOn members to give out flyers that explain, in everyday language, what causes global warming (and) how Bush's environmental policies could lead us into a real-life climate crisis."
I dodged MoveOn's pamphleteers by attending in the afternoon, when most of them are asleep. For a New Yorker, the movie isn't much fun if you worry about more bad things happening to the city. The ocean suddenly rises about 300 feet and fills the city, which would be bad enough. But then the temperature drops -- "10 degrees every second" -- which renders the alternate-side parking rules moot and makes it impossible for the Sanitation Department's plows to dig out. With the U.S. under 100 yards of ice, everyone heads for Mexico, which won't let the "illegals" in until the President forgives all their debt.
Yikes. When I walked out of the theater the first thing I did was look outside. Ominously, it was raining. But that's what happens to our head inside the paranoid style of politics, the phrase made famous in a 1964 essay by Richard Hofstadter. Back then it used to be a communist under every bed. Now it's a neoconservative in every federal office.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Pretty good article. The left really is heading towards the loony bin, literally foaming at the mouth. They are ripe for being painted as complete lunatics. Someone needs to put all their hyperventilation together and show the modern Democrat party.
The left in this country does not have firm contact with reality. Not so long ago, I spent some time on DU, where I learned two acronyms: LIHOP and MIHOP. I was thinking, international house of pancakes?? Turn out they stand for Let It Happen On Purpose and Made It Happen On Purpose. 9/11, that is. Add to that the many paranoid postings about "peak oil" and the imminent collapse of our civilization. (But the real turn offs about DU are its popup ads, and the avalanche of vulgar language. Glad FR doesn't allow that.)
Yikes. When I walked out of the theater the first thing I did was look outside. Ominously, it was raining. But that's what happens to our head inside the paranoid style of politics, the phrase made famous in a 1964 essay by Richard Hofstadter. Back then it used to be a communist under every bed. Now it's a neoconservative in every federal office.
Here is Hofstadter's first example of the paranoid style of politics: "How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man." That of course is Senator Joe McCarthy, exhibit A in Hofstadter's cautionary essay.
Here is Al Gore May 23 before the New York University College Democrats: "It is now clear that their obscene abuses of the truth and their unforgivable abuse of the trust placed in them after 9/11 led directly to the abuse of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison and, we are now learning, in many other similar facilities constructed as part of Bush's Gulag . . . ."
Though commonly thought a critique of the far right, Hofstadter's essay made clear that he wasn't writing about right or left, truth or falsity, but about off-the-charts political enmity: "What must be emphasized . . . is the apocalyptic and absolutistic framework in which this hostility was commonly expressed."
The Kennedy family is often associated with the famous phrase: "Don't get mad, get even." The Democrats followed that advice until the 2000 election. Now for many, there is greater pleasure in just being mad.
Did you get the munchies afterwards?
lol.
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