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| The
Two Hours Hate:
Fahrenheit
9/11 Review
by George
Orwell and Joe O’Brien
The Hate had started. As usual,
the face of George W. Bush, the Enemy of the People, had flashed
onto the screen. There were hisses here and there among the
audience. The sandy-haired super-liberal in the super-ironic
“I FUCKED ANN COULTER” T-shirt gave a piercing
cackle of mingled superiority and disgust. All subsequent
crimes against the world’s humanity, all mutilated Iraqi
children and American soldiers, acts of sabotage, heresies,
deceptions, sprang directly out of Bush’s administration.
Winston’s diaphragm was constricted. He could never
see the face of Bush without a painful mixture of emotions.
It was an oval WASP face, with a great fuzzy aureole of gray
hair and small, scum-spewing lips- a clever face, and yet
somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness.
It resembled the face of a reptilian monkey, and the voice
had an arrogant, obnoxious child quality. Bush was delivering
his usual malapropisms and evasive falsehoods spliced through
rapid-fire MTV editing, so exaggerated and perverse that a
child should have been able to see through it, and yet just
plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that
other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken
in by it. |
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| He was abusing democracy, he was denouncing
dissent, he was stroking the cocks of the wealthy elite, he
was speaking about the advantages of a dictatorship, he was
pissing on freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom
of thought. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt
as to the reality which Bush’s specious claptrap covered,
edited along side him on the screen there marched meat-headed
teenage soldiers getting off on the adrenaline of war to the
soundtrack of The Bloodhound Gang’s “Fire Water
Burn." |
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"This
is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have mores. Some
people call you the elite - I call you my base."
- George W. Bush |
As the Hate unfolded,
uncontrollable exclamations of laughter and rage were breaking
out from nearly everyone in the room. The self-satisfied reptile-monkey
face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the U.S. army
behind it, were too much to be borne; besides, the sight or
even the thought of Bush produced fear and anger automatically.
He was an object of hatred more constant than either Iraq
or Saudi Arabia, since when America was at war with one of
those powers it was generally at peace with the other.
In a lucid moment Winston found that
he was cackling with the others and slapping his forehead
violently with his palm. The thing about the Two Hours Hate
was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was
impossible to avoid joining in. A hideous ecstasy of fear
and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash
Republican faces in with a sledge hammer, to register to vote
for Kerry in November, seemed to flow through the theater
like an electric current, turning one even against one’s
will into a grimacing fireball. And yet the rage that one
felt was an abstract, undirected emotion that could be switched
from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. |
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Thus, at one moment
Winston’s hatred was not turned against Bush at all, but,
on the contrary, against Michael Moore. The moment came as Bush
was sitting in a classroom for a photo-op/reading of “My
Pet Goat” and was told of the attacks in New York and
Washington. Bush sat speechless and actionless for several minutes,
and Winston’s heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic
on the screen. Winston remembered what he did when he himself
learned of the attacks, which was remain seated in his Intro
to Philosophy class, with nearly a hundred fellow American human
beings, trying hard to concentrate on the professor’s
lecture on Saint Thomas Aquinas’ theories on the existence
of God rather than the horrible implications of the new reality
at hand. |
After being told
"America is under attack" when the
second plane hit the tower on 9/11, George W. Bush
continued to read "My Pet Goat" in a Florida
classroom for the next seven minutes.
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Moore’s attempt to ridicule and
demonize Bush backfired as far as Winston was concerned, for
Winston suddenly felt a kinship with Bush, albeit a small
one, and he realized that political leaders, however incompetent
and manipulative, are human beings susceptible to paralysis
by dread.
And yet by the end, he was again one
with the people around him, and all that was said of Bush
seemed to him to be true. This is because Winston was reminded
of two quotes by two of his favorite authors. One was by Kurt
Vonnegut, from Mother Night: “I will risk the
opinion that lies told for the sake of artistic effect- in
the theater, for instance...can be, in a higher sense, the
most beguiling forms of truth.” The second quote came
from the infinitely more accomplished of this review’s
co-authors, derived from the book from which this review is
3/4-plagiarized, from the last scene of the movie being reviewed.
It says, “it does not matter if the war is not real,
or when it is, victory is not possible. The war is not meant
to be won, it is meant to be continuous. The essential act
of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human
labor. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis
of poverty and ignorance. The war is waged by the ruling group
against its subjects, and its object is not victory, but to
keep the very structure of society intact."
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| Michael
Moore and Sgt. Abdul Henderson on Capitol Hill attempting to
convince congressmen to send their sons to Iraq. |
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| Winston thought of the enormous face of
Michael Moore and the smile that was hidden behind his stubbly
beard. It was a smile often as smirky as Bush’s, often
as deceptive, but, he soon realized, far less dangerous to the
world around him. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn,
self-willed exile from Moore’s loving man-breasts! All
in the name of fairness and balance, questioning every single
thing, even Winston’s own long-held ideas and passions.
Two gin-scented tears trickled down the side of his nose as
Neil Young sang of keepin’ on rockin’ in the Free
World. It was all right, everything would be all right soon
enough, if only for four more Jimmy Carter-esque years. He loved
Michael Moore. |
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