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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
While introducing Alfia and Davidson at the festival, Hubbard called them "the bravest people I've ever met." Their work, such as it is, seems designed to bolster that image -- without requiring any actual risk. "Operation Eagle Strike" begins with Alfia and Davidson standing, arms crossed, before the Capitol building. "The left is about to find out while they can protest America, we can protest them," Davidson says. "One of our central tenets about the left is that all their issues are just vessels that just carry water for their true sinister agenda: the destruction of freedom, the destruction of morality, the destruction of America."
Then Alfia intones, "Protest Warriors, let's go to battle." This is followed by the sound of a siren and computer graphics suggestive of cheap spy movies, with a line tracing across a map to its target -- the assembled traitors at the Washington National Mall. Inspirational music swells as the Protest Warriors are shown meeting, gathering their signs, and saying the pledge of allegiance. The soundtrack becomes warlike as they start walking to confront their enemies.
At the mall, they have a standoff with some shrill ANSWERites, who chant, "No more violence/ No more hate." The Warriors boldly confront a leftist pamphlet seller, asking him, "All the Iraqi people who have since been released from torture chambers and dungeons, do you think they're glad you're not calling the shots?" This gets a hearty laugh from the packed theater.
For all their professions of patriotism, the Protest Warriors are weirdly disrespectful of real soldiers when they co-opt military motifs to give their face-offs with skinny anarchists and angry hippies the frisson of danger. In many ways, they're the distillate of the Bush-era right -- paragons of smugness who confuse martial iconography with physical courage. They're hot to do battle with America's foes -- not by actually fighting them abroad, but by patrolling the borders of acceptable rhetoric here at home.
Being around people who are so defensive about national greatness makes one wonder what private anxieties are driving them. True pride, after all, is rarely strident and bellicose. I suspect that, just as there's no one more homophobic than a closet case, so those most enraged by criticism of America harbor some secret suspicion that it's accurate. How else to explain a documentary like "Michael Moore Hates America"?
One of two anti-Michael Moore films to show at the festival, Michael Wilson's "Michael Moore Hates America" was easily the most interesting movie there and the only one likely to make it to real theaters. (Wilson says he is in talks with distributors and is expecting an October release.) While its competitor, "Michael and Me," an anti-gun-control jeremiad by the radio talk-show host Larry Elder, was tedious and predictable, Wilson's movie had surprising nuance and commendable sincerity -- though not enough to make up for the thuggish bathos at its core.
What's strange about "Michael Moore Hates America" is that Wilson, a beefy 28-year-old from Minnesota, seems motivated by a real sense of wounded shock that another portly Midwesterner could criticize his country the way Moore does.
"Michael Moore had pissed me off," says Wilson's voiceover at the beginning of the film. "This guy had painted a picture of my country where no one can succeed." Wilson is angry about Moore's distortions and ethical corner cutting, but more than that, he seems hurt by Moore's failure to embrace corporate capitalism.
Early on, he talks about how his father was laid off from his blue-collar job but didn't let economic hardship impinge on his patriotism. Wilson recalls his words: "'In America,' he said, 'if you work hard, you can make it.'" A little later, there's a shot of Wilson holding his newborn baby daughter. "Because my father had passed his faith on to me, I knew she could live any life she could dream. But Michael Moore had told her she couldn't!"
