A media-saturated culture rewards sensational attitudinizing, blather without accuracy, rationality or ethics that is meant only to shock and awe. Misinformation accelerates at the cost of precision, provoking passion, if not much else, through exaggeration.
In a fascinating essay in Dissent, a magazine of the respectable left, Kevin Mattson demonstrates how Michael Moore, America's most prominent (or at least the loudest) leftist, hurts the cause he wants to serve by seeking to entertain rather than inform.
When a CNN interviewer confronted him about the glaring factual errors in his book, "Stupid White Men," he replied: "How can there be inaccuracy in comedy?" He wants to be taken seriously as a critic, but a critic has a responsibility to facts (if not necessarily to truth). If Michael Moore's movies were put through a lie-detector test, they'd break the machine.
Perhaps more than any other talking-head entertainer, he's responsible for keeping the Ugly American alive. A young American woman of my acquaintance, who lives in Berlin, says audiences pack the house there for Michael Moore movies, drawing laughter and cheers for his dumps on the Americans who inhabit his fantasies of corporate America and power politics.
In "Bowling for Columbine," he flashes violent images of the American military - drawing an irrational link between the U.S. government and the high school shooters at Columbine.
His next "documentary," which he calls "Fahrenheit 9/11," is to be released close to the presidential election next year. It's about George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, sons of fathers who extracted the family fortune from oil. We can expect it to be played for laughs, a tale of the president and the terrorist about as entertaining as Beavis and Butthead.
Such moral equivalence will knock 'em dead in Hollywood and Cannes. The ugly American lives, and Moore's the pity.