LOVING MICHAEL MOORE
August 15, 2004
A Sermon by the Rev. Susan Manker-Seale
This June many of us went to our annual General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Long Beach. My teenagers, Kat and Ben, went too and participated in the youth events. One day Kat asked me if she could take a taxi to go see the movie Fahrenheit 9-1-1 (9/11) at midnight. I started telling her how great the original of that movie was, Fahrenheit 451, and how that oppressive society tried to control their people by burning all the books. I told her I thought the new version ought to be interesting. “Wait, wait!” she said. “It’s Fahrenheit 9-1-1, you know, 9-11. It’s the new movie by Michael Moore.” Oh, how did I miss that?
Well, of course I let her go with her friends by taxi at midnight. Some sweet UU had bought out the entire theater and sold all the 500 tickets at GA, giving the youth first dibs. Kat said the line at the theater went all the way down the block and around the corner, all UUs, so many that they couldn’t start the movie until 1:30 AM.
Curtiss and I didn’t get to see it until after July 5 when I returned from California. The theater at Foothills mall was packed. I could hardly believe it, considering the movie had been out two weeks already. We saw Marion finding a seat down below us (I don’t think we ever told her), and we wondered how many other members of our congregation were sitting out there in the dark. Incredible! An entirely filled theater for what? A documentary?! And this wasn’t the Loft!
Documentaries used to be boring. They were about people who had died, or events in history long gone. I did like the little movies they showed in the Student Union at ASU, the ones where two guys would hike up into the Rocky Mountains and chase bears and do other crazy things. They were funny and real happenings. Maybe people might think those aren’t documentaries, but they fit the definition I found on the internet: “an inclusive term that describes any kind of non-fiction story, including news, industrials, information pieces, how-tos and more.” I guess the nature movies I liked would be classified as how-tos: how to not get eaten by a bear or how to survive falling off a cliff.
Now-a-days, you don’t have to go to the college theater to see nature documentaries or a thousand other subjects. They’re on cable and satellite, on their own channels no less. Good ones make it to the Loft and other alternative theaters. Michael Moore’s documentaries have broken the snob barrier and invaded our mainstream theaters, the ones that actually make money and influence all ages and all types of people. What an amazing achievement!
Bowling for Columbine changed the way we think about documentaries. Moore’s documentaries are not just informational. They’re way more than that. His works are controversial, challenging experiences about a live issue today, of which we are all players, and, as he said blatantly at the end of Fahrenheit 9/11, about which we ought to do something.
I’m not even going to get into whether his works are entirely truthful, well-researched, or Bush-bashing. I have my own opinions on that, but I sure discovered quite a number of opinions on the first to fifteen websites I visited out of the 2,286,126 listed that contain the name Michael Moore. He’s quite influential, don’t you think? One of those websites was entitled MichaelMooreHatesAmerica.com. I took a peek and left quickly.
There are a lot of people who hate Michael Moore, as I’m sure you know. Moore writes letters on his website, MichaelMoore.com, and on the one dated June 18th, a week before the opening of his movie, he reviewed the attempts to censor his movie that had occurred that spring:
I’m glad our theater chains here didn’t bow out to that sort of censorship, at least most of them. Free-speech won out. When you consider the violence we allow ourselves to watch in movies today, it’s shocking to witness the blatant attempts at censorship of a work that confronts the violence in our lives, whether from corporate harassment, gun laws, or waging war on a house of cards built with lies (or misinformation might be a more acceptable term). I’m not being partisan here. If we have learned anything over the last decades, it is that many in government do lie no matter who is in charge, from Johnson to Nixon to Clinton to Bush. Some folks seem not to notice the pattern, but others realize it is a form of governing to keep the public in the dark about anything they possibly can. An open government is not alive and well in this country today. Maybe it never has been. It was just a dream.
Speaking of Free-speech, I learned another shocking bit of news from the paper a few days ago, of which some of you may be aware. To control protestors at their conventions and political gatherings, both the Democrats and the Republicans are forming what they call “free-speech zones,” which are described in the article as being a “living oxymoron--a tiny cage, enclosed by razor wire and shoved underneath a bridge next to a gigantic temporary parking lot.” (That was the zone for the Democratic convention). The author of the article, Connor Mendenhall, goes on to say that Bush uses these zones as well, where protestors who have messages critical of the administration are escorted, and the media are prohibited from speaking to them! (AZ Daily Star, 8-13-04)
Our civil rights have come under attack these last couple years in a way I never thought to see. After Congress meekly voted for the Patriot Act, we are witnessing more efforts to restrict our freedoms. Wartime creates such fears that government responds with more restrictions and people talk themselves into agreeing that they are needed. I just wonder when our rights will be returned, if ever.
I’m a little nervous writing my opinions, even though they are non-partisan, because I know this will go on our website. Maybe I’ll be watched by “Big Brother,” if you remember Orwell’s 1984. But I could take heart from Michael Moore, who isn’t afraid to say what he thinks, to ask the hard questions, and to suffer the insults of the opposing team. He’s earned the love of millions of Americans, judging by the response to his movie, as Moore lists them in his web-letter of July 4th:
There you have it. I think people love Michael Moore. They love his controversial nature, his willingness to confront the powers that be, his challenge to all of us to really learn what is behind the terrible tragedies of the last few years such as Columbine and 9/11, and to figure out a way, to figure out a way, to do something!
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson