I’ve just come back from witnessing Fahrenheit 9/11 (witnessing, because seeing doesn’t do the experience justice).
I’m almost at a loss as to how to describe this film, so I’ll settle for the 3 stages of emotion it forced me through:
SHOCK — I knew that George W. Bush was an idiot, but I didn’t know just how much of a coniving, egocentric, narcissistic idiot he was until I watched this film. He is the archetype of the phrase “lowest common denomenator”, and I felt dirty each and every time I saw him on screen. I felt sick watching the connections being made between his family and Saudi money. I felt unclean watching his immediate reactions to 9/11, and realizing just how little was actually done in Afghanistan.
HEARTACHE — I watched an Iraqi woman screaming her rage and pain at God for the destruction of her home, and wondering why no revenge was being taken against the forces that committed this act against innocent people. I watched a mother from Flint, Michigan vent her white-hot rage and aching grief over the loss of her son to George W. Bush’s ill-conceived occupation of Iraq. I watched, stunned, at Bush’s lack of empathy for any of these women, and others like them…
DISGUST — That a group of twisted men govern a once-proud nation, and have polarized it into two armed camps of ideology. My friend James and I wondered aloud where this dichotomy in American life will lead…civil war? Bush Junior has no business being President of the United States!
And that’s the clear-cut message of this film. It’s not a proper documentary — it’s an indictment, a condemnation, a stab of rage and anger at a man and an administration that has turned the United States into something ugly and unwholesome. It’s a political statement that isn’t designed to sway the unconverted. It’s a testimonial to those who have been victimized long enough by a government obsessed with war, oil, and Saddam Hussein ever since September 11th.
It disturbed me in numerous ways. It was a call to arms. It was frank, brutal, partisan and furious. I love it to pieces…though I may not have the stomach to watch it ever again.
