The Final Word on Moore (Amen)

I haven't seen Bowling for Columbine yet, but I will. It endeavors to deal with a topic I find of interest and I recognize the ability of Moore to effectively utilize propaganda to make a point, at least among his core constituency. But I will have to wait until I can be assured of being with an audience not prone to using derisive laughter as social commentary. Yes, you self-anointed cognitive elite of Uptown and Dinkytown, we know you agree with the dubious conclusions and broad, hoary clichés presented in the film, you don't have to repeatedly announce it to me by loudly gurgling your phony laughter in my ears! (Sorry to yell, but my recent experience in viewing The Trials of Henry Kissinger at U Film Society has left my nerves kind of raw on this matter.)

In any regard, I think the sun may have finally set on any pretense of credibility for Moore's tactics and conclusions. The wanna be National Review of the Left, The American Prospect, has a damning review by Garance Franka Rute, called Moore's the Pity. And listen up Michael Moore, when your natural constituency (that is people with names like Garance Franka Rute) turns on you, it's time to consider another career.

While she credits Moore for approaching the topic with an open mind (which is way too charitable for anyone who's ever seen a previous example of Moore's work), her specific criticisms focus on the fact that he misses entirely the dynamics of gun violence in the US:

Moore again and again focuses on America's culture of fear, especially fear of young black men, and then blames American political discourse, big corporations and especially television news for creating a climate in which -- to judge by the people in his movie -- uneducated rednecks arm themselves to the teeth, lock their doors and prepare for an invasion by the black "hordes." And then he leaves it at that.

Though liberals have doubtless cheered this movie in part for focusing on crazy white people with guns instead of the usual stereotypes about violent minorities, there is no way that a movie that so completely elides the devastating impact of gun violence on blacks and cities can arrive at anything like a reasonable portrait of America, let alone a valid conclusion about the causes of gun violence.

There is a point at which an effort not to perpetuate offensive stereotypes turns into an impoverishing erasure of the facts. So here are some facts to chew on, courtesy of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and the U.S. Department of Justice: In 2000, 16,586 people in America took their own lives with guns; 10,801 were murdered by others firing them. Despite making up only 12 percent of the population, blacks constituted 53 percent of the gun-murder victims or 5,699 people, in 2000. Young black men ages 14-24 make up only 1 percent of the U.S. population but around 15 percent of the murder victims. Nor are Moore's suburban white gun owners, no matter how ridiculous their fears, the reason that black Americans were six times more likely to be murdered than whites in 1999, and seven times more likely to commit homicides.