Sunday, May 18, 2003
MICHAEL MOORE CRITICIZED FROM THE LEFT
Dissent magazine has a good piece by Kevin Mattason critical of Michael Moore from a left-liberal perspective. Now, I loathe Michael Moore: He's a boorish liar, as far as I'm concerned. So I'm glad at least someone on the left is willing to take him to task for his lack of real substance:
[H]e inherits the New Left's conflation of "guerrilla theater" with politics. Unfortunately, confrontation is very often not political but emotional or melodramatic, inviting opponents to scoff at legitimate concerns. It rarely produces deliberation or reform. The historian Christopher Lasch argued that Abbie Hoffman's guerrilla theater "imprisoned the left in a politics of. . .dramatic gestures, or style without substance-a mirror image of the politics of unreality which it should have been the purpose of the left to unmask." Aimed at Moore's predecessor, this critique hits Moore too. Generating a humorous buzz doesn't shake things up so much as symbolize powerlessness.
Unfortunately, the Michael Moores and Bill O'Reillies of the world seem to have more and more influence on what passes for popular political dialogue in the U.S. Has television and its degradation of our attention span and hunger for dramatic images and sound bites reduced us to shouting caricatures? It seems so.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:19 AM
