Michael Moore (right) talking with Congressman John Tanner on Capitol Hill.
-Contributed photo
Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
WESTERN BUREAU:
JAMAICANS, IT SEEMS, are everywhere, including in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.
Two Marines in full regalia approach a Black man in a parking lot, trying to get him to sign up. They ask him what his career objective is and he says he wants to be a musician. They ask him if he knows about Shaggy (the potential recruit does and Shaggy's picture is flashed on the screen) and they inform their target that he was once a Marine.
This scene, in the last third of the documentary, is part of an extended sequence which shows how the poor are targeted to join the US armed forces, while of the 535 members of the US Congress, only one had a child in Iraq. This leads the filmmaker to go on a recruitment drive to encourage members of Congress to get their children to sign up.
He gets incredulous looks and brush-offs, but no takers.
Fahrenheit 9/11 made a rare public showing in Jamaica at Redbones the Blues Cafe' in New Kingston on Saturday night and pulled in a substantial viewership.
While the film holds few surprises even the most informed would have to be terribly jaded to not be overwhelmed by the way in which Moore connects the dots of individual incidents.
BUSH AND BUSINESS
Of course, Fahrenheit 9/11 concentrates heavily on George W. Bush and not to his advantage.
Bush is shown not as a competent man holding the most powerful government office in the world, but as, simply put, a bumbling, sometimes mumbling incompetent, best kept on a leash.
After opening with a gripping shot of people near the former twin towers reacting to the bombing, as well as Bush staring vacuously at the book My Pet Goat in a Florida classroom as he is told of the attacks, the pre-attack period gets decent treatment. Not decent for Bush though, as he is seen taking swing after swing with a golf club, always on holiday, it would seem.
Moore does not make any bones about his position on Bush and the accompanying commentary is often the slash of a well-sharpened ratchet knife. As the camera holds on Bush sitting in the classroom, his mouth open, the narrator asks: "As Bush sat in that Florida classroom, was he wondering if he should have turned up to work more often?"
A treatment of his business failures in the 1970s is also given, but the web of links with the oil business, including vice-president Dick Cheney and the person appointed as head of Afghanistan, is most fascinating.
And there is a chillingly funny scene of a grinning Bush addressing a gathering of the rich. "This is an impressive crowd, the haves and have-mores. Some people call you the élite. I call you my base," he says.
SOLDIERS, SORROW
It is not all about Bush, though. In looking at the recruitment process, Moore also looks at the soldiers in Iraq, the gung-ho and the regretful, as well as one black family whose son was killed in Iraq. There is also the heartbreaking tale of one dead soldier's family who received his paycheck less five days - it was docked from the time he was killed to pay day.
Jamaica gets another plug with Colin Powell making an appearance. However, it is a clip from 2001 in which he and Condoleezza Rice are saying exactly the opposite of what Bush is saying a year later, about Saddam Hussein being a threat to the United States.
Fahrenheit 9/11 is a movie that uses a touch of humour, a commitment to activism and research to forge a heavy machete with one intention - to chop bush. It is, however, an implement that only Americans can use and on only one occasion. But that was yesterday.
