The Garden of the Blind

I just finished perusing Michael Moore’s seminal work, “Dude, Where’s My Country”. I didn’t read it through in its entirety because I don’t hate myself and I have only so much tolerance for rambling, repetitive, self-important writing. I could quickly sum up the key points of the book:

Michael Moore hates George W. Bush
Michael Moore loves to hear his name being used

He makes a few other points, some of which aren’t hopelessly wrong (his chapter on how to talk to your conservative brother-in-law was especially interesting to me, both for the insight it gave me into his philosophy and for his relatively good points about reframing your arguments to suit your audience), but it all comes down to the two key points.

Having just finished reading 1984, I was amused by the collection of his favorite quotes, included in a section about the Patriot Act. The first three quotes all (I think) come from a book-within-the-book that explained how the Party worked and are appropriate descriptions of how a totalitarian society could control its people. The fourth quote goes

The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw him into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as ‘Sir.’

The inclusion of this quote is amusing because, within the book, it is meaningless. In the book, the historical information about capitalists was pure fiction created to portray the Party in the best possible light. So, it is a quote that is intended to describe the society before it became a totalitarian state, and yet Moore is using it to (I guess) describe a world under the Orwellian Patriot Act. The only interpretation of this quote that would give it any relevance to the section of the book is if you see the revisionist history in the book as actually being descriptive of the current conditions under the party, but that’s a pretty weak argument and still doesn’t quite make the quote relevant.

Don’t get me started on the logical issues with his book, from his tendency to want things both ways (Osama wasn’t responsible for the 9/11 attacks, but we should be hunting him down!), to his obsession with circumstantial evidence (the Bush family had business dealings with other oil families!), to his passing references to insane conspiracy theories.

I’m done with this self-important blowhard. Now it’s time to read some non-political (read: funny) Al Franken stuff.