SteynOnline is celebrating its seventeenth birthday (with seventeen per cent off all my books and CDs and other Steyn Store products). So, while we're in birthday mode, I thought we'd revisit the first ever film column to appear under this shingle, way back at Thanksgiving 2002. One of the few heartening developments since this website launched is that Michael Moore doesn't appear to be as big as he was. I speak figuratively, I hasten to add: I mean that he seems to carry less weight in the culture than he did. But, seventeen years ago, Moore's post-9/11 rise was just hitting its stride. After playing a few festivals and art houses, Bowling For Columbine went on general release, and here's what I had to say:
Bowling for Columbine is the latest documentary from Michael Moore, the leftwing multi-millionaire provocateur in his usual cunning disguise as an all-American lardbutt loser - baseball cap, unkempt hair, untucked shirt. This time, the nominal subject is American violence, but, by now, connoisseurs of Roger and Me and Moore's TV work know that, whatever the subject, the routine never varies: he turns up at company headquarters unannounced and demands to see the chairman. The receptionist says he's not available, and Moore merrily films the stand-off before moving on to some other target. If he showed up to see me without making an appointment, I'd tell him to piss off and then fire a warning shot. If I showed up to see him unannounced and accompanied by a camera crew, his people would do the same to me.
But most folks are nicer than that.
And so you can't help noticing that, for a champion of the little guy, he goes to an awful lot of time and effort to make the little guy look like a chump. Moore has no interest in digging deep into his subjects when all the fun's to be had on the surface of American life - the squeaky receptionists, the bored security guards, the bland PR women, the squaresville company guy in the suit, the State Police trooper with the infelicitous phrasing, the bozo in the pool hall... His vision of America as a wasteland of gun kooks, conspiracy theorists and perky brain-fried mall clerks will doubtless have them rolling in the aisles in Paris this weekend. In my corner of New Hampshire, there were only four other moviegoers in the theater. But Moore, a great favorite with the BBC, now does his shtick with an eye to the non-American market.
That may explain the extraordinary amount of sucking up to Canada in this movie, which, while gratifying to insecure Canucks and self-loathing Americans, may be of less interest to third parties. Moore's thesis, such as it is, is that America's murder rate is the consequence not just of the country's love of guns but of deeper currents of paranoia and fear in the American psyche. To that end, he crosses the Michigan border into Ontario, where one Canadian after another tells him that they don't lock their doors. The level of guns per capita in Canada is similar to America but the murder rate is much, much lower. Ergo, it must be because Americans are living in fear while Canadians are much more socially progressive.
Whatever, dude. Unlike Moore, I have homes on both sides of the border and it's the Quebec one I keep locked. By the time you read this, I'll be in New York, but my home in New Hampshire will be unlocked, and so will my car at the airport, the key in the ignition, so I'll know where to find it. By contrast, in Quebec it's illegal to leave your car unlocked, even if you stop for a pee on an ice floe up by Hudson's Bay. Pace Moore, Canada has vastly lower rates of handgun ownership. Long-gun ownership is much closer, but, statistically, Canadians are slightly more murderous than Americans in this sphere: in the US, there are 1.7 homicides per 100,000 long guns; in Canada, it's 1.9. So European visitors to North America should be aware they're more likely to be killed by a homicidal Canadian rifleman than an American one.
On the overall murder rate, if Moore's interested in "cultural differences", it seems odd that he should avoid the most obvious one. Alberta Report's Colby Cosh, a braver man than I, points out that black Americans are 13 per cent of the US population but commit over half the murders. Once you factor those out, non-black Americans murder at about the same rate as Canadians.
But by now Moore's waddled on in search of other targets - like, er, American foreign policy, the subject of a zippy little montage set to Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World", Satch's final "Oh, yeah" coming as the second plane slices through the World Trade Center and the caption informs us: "Osama bin Laden uses his expert CIA training to murder 3,000 people." This is so glib, so pat, that I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't elicit bursts of applause in Continental cinemas.
His finale is more problematic. Moore doorsteps Charlton Heston, president of the National Rifle Association, and, sportingly, Chuck invites him in for a chat. The tubster starts badgering Heston to apologize for appearing at a campaign event held in Flint, Michigan, a few days after young Kayla Rolland had been shot at school by a fellow six-year-old. Heston resists, but Moore, the bullying pacifist, keeps on at him, until Heston politely ends the interview and walks away. If you can identify any point to this stunt, let me know.
I don't mind a bit of selective manipulation, but here's what Moore, touting his picture of poor dead Kayla as a badge of his compassion, doesn't tell you: the boy who killed her had been dumped by his drug-addicted mother and moved into his drug-dealing uncle's crack house, where the young lad didn't have a bed of his own and so curled up on a pile of blankets under which he happened to find a stolen gun. The uncle was wanted for theft: no cops troubled him. The crack house rang with gunfire every night: nobody bothered to investigate. The woman, whom Moore paints as the victim of Michigan welfare policies, was an unfit mother, but the state's policy preference for "biological parenting" ensured that nothing Mommy did to the kid would persuade them to remove him from her care. I don't think Kayla Rolland's murder has much to do with a "culture of fear" or gun control or Charlton Heston or any of Moore's other diversions.
But she's served her purpose, and now we know where Michael Moore stands: every child has the right to grow up in a gun-free crack house.
~from Mark at the Movies, November 30th 2002
Kathy Shaidle, a big hit as our summer movie columnist, will be resuming this beat next month. She is one of the very best writers on classic cinema, and we are honored to publish her.
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16 Member Comments
Drill down further and only a small fraction of the Black community does the killing. How did we get to this point? Dare I point to the great "success" of the LBJ "Great Society" that replaced men with government money (aid to dependent families) and began the long slide of a once cohesive community into 80+% single parent culture. Government became the non-judgmental extended family member bankrolling illegitimacy and at the same time abortion. Now add the workaround of covering over this disaster with Progressive revisionist history and the outcome is assured....more of the same. So entrenched and so revised it is self perpetuating .
Mark, thank you for occasionally watching the crap movies so we don't have to.
Indeed, he's not only a fine critic, but endured an M. Moore shlocumentary. No greater love..........
On Dec 6 this year it will be 30 years since the Montreal Poly shootings when 14 women engineering students were killed by Marc Lepine.
I just reread 'our' Marks MacLeans magazine column from ten years ago - interesting to see the response of the UK guys during the events last week on London Bridge and compare with the Poly guys response?
Moore's point is that every child is a right to grow up in a gun-free crackhouse. Lol. An apt boil down of this ridiculous movie....this review is a Steyn classic!
Michael Moore's documentaries dishonestly deal with factual events, as Mark has very clearly pointed out. What they document is Moore's blatant dishonesty. In reality Moore's documentaries provide fertile ground for real documentaries documenting his documentaries' dishonesty! (Make sense???) Larry Elder took a good stab at it with his documentary "Michael and Me". I'd love to see additional documentaries taking aim at the tub of fraud that is Michael Moore.
If Michael Moore can have his poster child of gun violence, I can have mine. Her name is (was) Hadiya Pendleton, a beautiful young black woman who was caught in the crossfire of rival Chicago gangs and shot dead in January 2013, shortly after performing with her high school band at President Obama's second inauguration. The President and First Lady attended her funeral. The symbolism of the whole nasty affair is disturbing enough--rampant black-on-black violence extinguishing the life of a flower of black youth in the adopted city of the nation's first black president--but the personal tragedy overwhelms mere allegory. I can't post a photo of her here, but if you search online for her image, you may still be able to find my favorite: a selfie taken in a mirror of her winking and sticking out her tongue. Sassy, flirty, the embodiment of young womanhood--gone. Snuffed out. Her killer, a young black man named Micheail Ward, was finally sentenced last January to 84 years in prison. He won't be shooting anyone again. But every weekend, as the bodies pile up, more Micheail Wards step up to fill the void. If black males commit half the murders, I'd wager that they also make up half the victims.
It's hard to figure out how that talented young woman's murder and all the other murders of black against blacks in Chicago's inner city could keep going on under BHO's watch. There were other stories that came from Chicago that will stay with me forever. I naively believed he was going to actually do something about turning the endless stream of dead inner city black youths into a thing of the past. He was our hope-and-change President, right? That was the one thing I was hoping would change while he was in office those eight arduous years. Man was I ever naive!
Give the man credit, Fran. He thinks so much of the "city of the big shoulders" that he has, ahem, "persuaded" the town elders to part with 20 acres of parkland in the Southside for a temple to his greatness. They can't wait to give it to him, but the members of the very community he halped organize aren't letting go without a fight. They recently tied red ribbons to the hundreds (that's right, hundreds) of trees to be felled for the Obamausoleum. And it won't even be a presidential library in the strictest sense. All records will be digitized. While the Obama Foundations is touting that as a good thing, historians aren't convinced. From a 2/19/19 New York Times article:
Without a dedicated repository, they argue, the rich constellations of related material found at the other libraries — papers donated by family members, cabinet members and aides, as well as pre-presidential and personal papers — could end up scattered, or even uncollected. And without help from specialized archivists, the promised digital democratization could just as easily turn into a hard-to-navigate data dump.
...
Timothy Naftali, the former director of the Richard Nixon library, where he is credited with overhauling museum exhibits to give a more honest accounting of Watergate, called the decision "a huge mistake."
"It was astounding to me that a good presidency would do this," Mr. Naftali said.
"It opens the door," he added, "to a truly terrible Trump library."
Huh? What does Trump have to do with Obama's private seizure of public assets? Anyway, at least Trump's presidential library will have slots.
Yeah, I don't buy that bit about "without a dedicated repository.....material.. could get scattered."'I visited the Clinton Library once passing through Little Rock and I walked passed the Oval Orifice room and never saw the blue dress. In fact, Ms. Lewinsky's name was never mentioned once anywhere. If they want to represent a true picture of what the President was "up" to while in the Oval Orifice, why was that piece omitted? Scattered about somewhere, for posterity to uncover, I guess.
The data stored on 1980's era minicomputers has all vanished. No one has an interface to read the storage drives. Have you tried to read any data off 3.5 inch floppy disks or VHS tapes lately? The magnetic media has deteriorated so the information is likely not usable anymore.
If Obama goes all digital then future archaeologists will not be able to learn anything of those dark years and will only be able to speculate on the missing period in history. Somehow that leaves me with a warm feeling. Mark had better preserve his archives on acid free electrons or convert all his books and columns to stone tablets.
Excellent write-up! I have a favorite quote about Michael Moore, but I had to google it in order to find out it was from Christopher Hitchens: "Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious, ignorant and so on, and they've taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all those qualities."
Michael Moore's film company name could be Sloppy and Lazy. It may not be possible to make so little effort to disguise the intellectually dishonest propaganda without it being intentional. If it's a form of contempt for his audience he's not alone in that. Young, particularly female stars, some years ago would misbehave in public as a contest amongst themselves to gawk at their own entries in the tabloids, with, I think, a challenge to their fans to walk away; with those sticking by now earning their contempt. Owner of an intoxicating allure, the entertainment industry can't chase its fans away. Attempting to do so has the opposite effect. Moore has done that with the truth in juxtaposing things with little or nothing to connect them in an absurd mockery of cause and effect, which people accept, perhaps because of the spectacular proportion of outlandishness taken on a life of its own or their own slate's blankness.
I still have that post by Colby Cosh bookmarked -- His analysis of the crime stats was eye opening and I understand from folks like John Lott that these stats have more or less stayed the same.
And yes, this coming Saturday, in honour of Clint Eastwood's new movie "Richard Jewell," I'll be looking at Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole" (1951). Appreciate the opportunity now more than ever. Thanks again to everyone for their well wishes -- I'm feeling a little better every day :-)
Best wishes for your continued recovery, Kathy.
I'm looking forward to this Saturday, then, Kathy! Hooray for healing!