I had no idea whether this story was true, but it appealed to my prejudices about the middle-aged, middle-class Bay Area liberals who ran Mother Jones. So I ran with it. You can guess what happened next: On the day our paper came out, that former Mother Jones editor was on the phone, spitting nails. She hadn't sabotaged the damn telephones, she said, and by spreading Moore's false account I had damaged her reputation and played into his petty vendetta.

Maybe she was right about all of that; I still don't know, and don't much care. I learned a valuable lesson about my own gullibility and the importance of fact-checking. But I never blamed Moore for snowing me, or embellishing for effect, or crafting an instructive fable, or whatever it was he did. I came to him for an entertaining anecdote -- one that flattered my intelligence and political astuteness -- and he supplied one. And frankly, I wondered whether the ex-Mother Jones editor would have gotten so pissed if something about the story hadn't struck home with her.

My point is not to damn Moore as a fabricator, but rather to suggest that from early in his career there were signs that his true calling lay not in journalism but in storytelling, or, more specifically, in the dangerous and difficult territory that lies between them. In the years since "Roger and Me," he has become an increasingly skillful entertainer and propagandist, probably the closest American parallel to Dario Fo, the Italian radical clown, satirist and Nobel laureate. Moore might be understood as a court jester in the vein of King Lear's Fool, whose burlesques and exaggerations and farcical asides are meant to cast light into shadowy regions where the sober, scrupulously neutral Ivy League guys and gals of mainstream journalism dare not venture.

I've never been impressed by the various "gotcha" moments identified by my journalistic colleagues in Moore's movies. Again, I don't have any idea whether that bank in "Bowling for Columbine," for example, actually hands you a real gun when you open an account. (Various critics have said that isn't true, although Moore insists it is.) The larger point is that Moore's work can be slippery at times -- in "Fahrenheit 9/11" you may get the impression he traveled to Iraq to interview troops there, even though he didn't -- but he has never claimed to be making cinima-viriti.

In the extraordinarily polarized climate of the moment, many people will have made up their minds about "Fahrenheit 9/11" before they see it. (And many more will make up their minds without seeing it at all.) The film has become a sort of proxy vote in the 2004 election; its question is binary, a matter of on or off, red or blue, Democrat or Republican. Relatively few people will notice what a deft blend of the comic, the tragic and the grotesque it is, or how much Moore and his team of collaborators have mastered their own peculiar medium. (Sometimes I feel he's at his purest and sweetest in his goofy found-footage collages, like the priceless salute here to Romania, Costa Rica, Palau and other members of the "coalition of the willing.")

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