Fantasy and "Fahrenheit 9/11"
If I were the late Osama bin Laden, I'd come away from Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 feeling a bit like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard: I'm still big. It's the pictures that got small.
Bin Laden and his colleagues in al-Qaida, their various subsidiaries and affiliates, the Wahhabi bankrollers in Saudi Arabia, and thousands of mullahs throughout the Muslim world believe they're engaged in a great crusade (whoops) against the Great Satan and the rest of the infidel world that will go on until they achieve final victory.
Michael Moore and his own fanatical worshipers, on the other hand, think it's all to do with Bush. Bush, Bush, Bush! Who's in the pay of the Saudis? Bush! Who's the top business partner of the Taliban? Bush! Who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong? Bush ? because he was paid to do so by a subsidiary of Halliburton run by a man who was at school with someone who has some stock in a company building a pipeline with someone who used to go bowling with the half-nephew-in-law of King Fahd.
Whatever the question, the answer is Bush. The message of Moore's film is: Get rid of Bush this November and all the bad stuff will go away. That's why its starting point is the 2000 election and the Florida recount. On the face of it, dimpled chads don't seem to have much to do with Afghanistan and Iraq. But, for Moore, this is where it all began, and this is where it will end: Topple Bush, and the world will once again be full of happy smiley people as it is in the slow-motion scenes of laughing children gaily flying their kites in idyllic Saddamite Iraq.
If I were the late Osama, I'd be insulted by Moore's picture. Al-Qaida's jihadi blew up plenty of stuff while Bill Clinton was president. He had the boys in America taking their flying lessons during the 2000 election, when Al Gore was ahead in the polls. The Islamists despise Bush, but they despise Clinton and Gore, and Carter and Kerry, too.
Americans, Moore told The Daily Mirror in London, are "the dumbest people on the planet. We don't know about anything that's happening outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing." Yet he's the one who's come up with the hickiest, most parochial thesis imaginable: that the horrors of the age are just some screwy distraction got up by a chad-wangling moron fratboy's creepy neocon viziers.
This is the real difference ? between those who see the big picture and those who insist there is no big picture to see, that Michael Moore's small hick picture is the answer to everything. In the days after September 11, the fringe Left were fond of lecturing us that we needed to address the "root causes." Well, they got tired of that. If it's a choice between some big socioeconomic geopolitical root cause or Dick Cheney, they'll take Cheney.
Which is a great pity. I look on 9/11 as the sudden revelation of the tip of a vast iceberg. It's all been there under the surface for some time, but we never grasped the size of it. At one level, it's about the mainstreaming of the fringe. I don't mean in the sense that pre-9/11 Michael Moore was regarded as a kook by the Democratic Party establishment and now he's the toast of the town.
I mean that troublesome groups on the far horizons of the superpower can now strike at its heart.
What did 9/11 cost its perpetrators? Flight lessons would be below $5,000 depending on how impatient the hijackers were (as Zac Massaoui told his instructors, he didn't need to learn how to land), boxcutters cost a couple of bucks, add in a couple of rental cars and hotel accommodation, and that's it: For somewhere around $150,000, the 19 terrorists killed more than 3,000 people and caused immediate economic damage of $27 billion, with the final tab yet to be calculated. That makes it surely the biggest bang for the buck in world history.
MAYBE IT was just a freaky one-off; maybe now that they've done it they'll leave us alone ? as the Spaniards have bet. But almost every technological advance works to the terrorists' advantage: an old-fashioned European army ? Belgium's, say ? is incapable of projecting itself to Saudi Arabia; but a terrorist group in Saudi Arabia, through now humdrum innovations like e-mail, cell phones, and automated bank machines, can easily project itself to Belgium. Then add nuclear technology, which has slipped the bunkers of the great powers to seep piecemeal through the murkier chancelleries.
Beyond that, consider the broader sea in which these currents course. Not all Muslims are al-Qaida supporters, but they don't have to be. If just one percent is generally sympathetic, that's enough for a vast global support network.
More to the point, the Islamists, unlike Michael Moore, keep an eye on that big picture: Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9% of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26% of the increase. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world's population to just over 20%; the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%.
1970 isn't that long ago. If you're, say, 50, you wear narrower trousers and shorter hair than you used to, but the landscape of your life ? your house, your car, your kitchen appliances ? doesn't seem significantly different.
But the fact is the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less Western. Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially) ? or the equivalents of the populations of three EU countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: in the United Kingdom, more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.
So we're living through a period of extraordinarily rapid demographic and cultural change that broadly favors the Islamists' stated objectives, a period of rapid technological advance that greatly facilitates the Islamists' objectives, and a period of rapid nuclear dissemination that will add serious heft to the realization of their objectives. If the West ? and
I use the term in the widest sense to mean not just swaggering Texas cowboys but sensitive left-wing feminists in favor of gay marriage ? is to survive, it will only be after a long struggle lasting many decades.
Now go back to watching Fahrenheit 9/11 and kid yourself that this will all go away if Bush, Cheney, and Rummy are thrown out this November.