Cities On Flame With Rock And Roll

I don't really need Michael Moore to point propaganda out to me. I am confident that I know propaganda when I see it. The trouble is, while the tone of Fahrenheit 9/11 is propagandistic, once you mute Moore's voiceover, tune out his smirking use of licensed music (Joey Scarbury's theme song for The Greatest American Hero -- "Who could it be? / Believe it or not, it's just me" -- and R.E.M.'s otherwise irredeemable "Shiny Happy People", here playing behind a montage of the Bush Jr. and Sr. glad-handing with King Fahd, Prince Bandar and other prominent Saudis), blow away the hot air pumped out by his talking heads, and cleansed your palate of stock footage, you are left with images whose veracity -- I hesitate to use the term truth-value -- could never be obscured, much less played up, by means of cropping or editing. These are the kinds of images that would be undeniably persuasive -- or chilling, or enraging, or heart-breaking, or... -- regardless of what factors into their presentation. They are the kind of images that do not tell me anything I did not already know about the current President of the United States -- for a Texan, and, worse, a Dallasite such as myself, a homegrown horror -- or, for that matter, human nature. But they do remind me of many things I wish I could forget.

Case in point: Moore dedicates a significant portion of Fahrenheit 9/11 to telling his audience a little more about the composition of the U.S. Armed Forces who have been sent to war in Iraq. It is a brave move, and one that issues a challenge to any self-styled patriot who mouths off about "supporting our troops" as if good wishes and distant sympathy wrapped in yellow ribbons could substitute for a working knowledge of a soldier as an individual. So we see the wounded and maimed working towards recovery, and we see snapshots of those who have been killed in action and hear their survivors read the letters they sent home. We see Marine recruiters working a lower middle-class mall, employing dirty tricks -- "Just let me confirm your personal information so I can mark you off my list as someone I've spoken to..." -- in order to fill quotas. Moore goes one to replay Army recruiting video in which perfectly fit (polygonal) CGI service men and women "withstand", "achieve", and "earn money for college". By the close of the clip, these figures are no longer dodging flak in helicopters but have risen to a mountaintop, where, with the algorithmic sun brilliant behind them, they morph in and out of uniforms and civilian clothes. As if the transformations under consideration were that smooth and seamless and possible with a few key-strokes. We are presented with paid actors in Halliburton advertisements portraying soldiers who benefit from that corporation's unalloyed altruism: hot meals, warm blankets, telephone service back home ("It's a girl!"). But mostly we see very young men and women, most of them barely out of their teens, pimply, gawky, in need of braces, their heads swallowed up by heavy helmets, talking about their fear, their confusion, their disgust with the carnage around them, and the adrenaline rush they feel when they enter combat.

Moore never quotes any statistics to the effect that those who have enlisted for military service in the past, say, 6 or 7 years share specific or a specific set of demographic characteristics -- namely, that, as he claims, many of these "good kids" come from America's disenfranchised classes. Either the absence of such figures is a misstep on Moore's part, or such numbers do not exist. Given the Pentagon's mania for information, "intelligence" about its own forces, I find it hard to believe that this information has not been collected. Whether it is a matter of public record is something else altogether. What is a matter of public record, however, what is included in Fahrenheit 9/11 because, I have to surmise, it does not constitute any threat to national security, are the comments of one soldier about the music he and the rest of his armored vehicle battalion listen to during their engagements with the "enemy". He tells us that they jacked into the Bradley's communications system with their CD player and fired their shells into the heart of Baghdad to the accompaniment of The Bloodhound Gang's "Fire Water Burn".

The roof / the roof / the roof is on fire
We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn
Burn motherfucker burn

Hello my name is Jimmy Pop and I'm a dumb white guy
I'm not old or new but middle school fifth grade like junior high
So I don't know mofo if y'all peeps be buggin' give props to my ho cause she all fly
But I can take the heat cause I'm the other white meat known as "Kid Funky Fried"
Yea I'm hung like planet Pluto hard to see with the naked eye
But if I crashed into Uranus I would stick it where the sun don't shine
Cause I'm kind of like Han Solo always stroking my own wookie
I'm the root of all that's evil yea but you can call me cookie

The roof / the roof / the roof is on fire
We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn
Burn motherfucker burn

Yo yo this hard-core ghetto gangster image takes a lot of practice
I'm not black like Barry White no I am white like Frank Black is
So if man is five and the devil is six than that must make me seven
This honkey's gone to heaven
But if I go to hell then I hope I burn well
I'll spend my days with J.F.K., Marvin Gaye, Martha Raye, and Lawrence Welk
And Kurt Cobain, Kojak, Mark Twain and Jimi Hendrix's poltergeist
And Webster yea Emmanuel Lewis cause he's the anti-Christ

The roof / the roof / the roof is on fire
We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn
Burn motherfucker burn

Everybody here we go
Ohh Ohh
C'mon party people
Ohh Ohh
Throw your hands in the air
Ohh Ohh
C'mon party people
Ohh Ohh
Wave 'em like you don't care
Ohh Ohh
C'mon party people
Ohh Ohh
Everbody say ho
Ohh Ohh
C'mon party people
Ohh Ohh
Everybody here we go

The "burn motherfucker burn" refrain is what kept them motivated. Football players do much the same thing before their clashes, using angry sounds to psych themselves up. Yet, the rest of this song seems superfluous, especially as you can visualize -- its easy, really -- Baghdad itself engulfed in an incantatory rhythm of yellow and white flames and oily, dogshit-brown smoke. Apparently, catharsis is no advantage on the field of battle, unless it is something you induce in your opponent. Then you know for certain they are overthrown. Gives one a new sense of the sounds to be heard over the Al-Jazeera network, what those wails and cries of "Allahu Akbar!" reverberating around every bombed civilian target in Iraq mean, doesn't it? And how would you feel if you discovered your favorite style of music were being used in this manner? If Diamanda Galas, Cosmos, Gogoroth, Henri Pousseur, Hair Police, The White Stripes, Big Mama Thornton, Beth Orton, Elmer Bernstein, Pete Seeger, Skinny Puppy or Joe Maneri were used in the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay? Would you find fault with the music itself? How might you explain away the efficacy of such sounds when put inhumane ends? Is there a good measure for the perversity with which these acts are undertaken?

What is it that Kim Greist's character (Jill Layton) says in Terry Gilliam's Brazil to paranoid fantasist Sam Lowrey (Jonathan Pryce)? "How many terrorists have you actually met, Sam?" And he answer he never gives but should have: "You mean other than myself?".

Martial music is part of any war, of course. In recent times, music as brutal noise has also been part of many psy/ops actions. Few music nuts I know were immune to the irony of the U.S. military aiming high decibels of hard rock at Manuel Noriega in an attempt to drive out of his compound, given how vital cocaine had more than likely been to the creation of the music itself. But the current hostilities in Iraq make more a war unlike any other in this country's history. I myself cannot read these "rap-metal" lyrics without thinking about, rather than being an anomaly, they are just another expression of the same, often envious, racial fantasies that have always been important in American pop music. Al Jolson. Johnny Otis. Cool vs. hard; East Coast vs. West Coast. Elvis Presley. The Twist. Motown. The Rolling Stones. Soldiers in Vietnam turning their tanks into giant boomboxes blasting Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" as they decimated one village after another (according to Hammer Of The Gods author Stephen Davis). Disco. Michael Jackson. Ice-T's Home Invasion. Kid Rock. And so forth. I'm not bothered by the fact that this Bloodhound Gang song "advocates" violence. I think, stupid and unenlightened by irony as those lyrics are, they still employ metaphors of destruction that, in true American fashion, sprawl over a number of associations and experiences -- sexual conquest chief among them. What does bother me is that, in this one small incident in a gigantic horror, what is otherwise the empty boasting of an African-American stereotype, a symbol of social dysfunction in America, has become the agent of American might, American right, and American vengeance. Don't they know that "motherfucker" need not be an insult, a challenging thump in the chest, a dehumanizing taunt thrown down at a vanquished foe; "motherfucker" can be a term of respect, and an honor earned? Are they so ignorant of their own culture? It is all especially disconcerting to me when I think too about those who are defending valor in Iraq, under circumstances in which valor is surely hard to find.

We can all argue endlessly about the nature of this war, whether it is being waged over oil and profit margins, whether it was a purely political stratagem intended to convince a rattled electorate that indeed what is needed is a "war president", whether it is a contest between good and evil, where the terrorists were, whether Saddam Hussein was a threat or not. Sure, we can and will, while the muddle of aggression in the Middle East boils hotter and hotter. What I do think is inarguable, however, is that, in many ways, this war being fought on other continent is a domestic conflict that its combatants have chosen to fight on foreign soil. In that respect, I guess Operation Iraqi Freedom is not all that different from the First World War. When small men are cursed with huge fortunes... Osama bin Laden re-made the World Trade Center and the lives and deaths of those inside the towers into a staging area for his own hatred of the ruling Saudi regime -- which includes his own family. The Coalition of the Willing is killing men, women and children who we are assured are "evil" in order to preserve an unsustainable way of life that has outgrown the ideals in which it originated.

As he is compelled to do, Moore repeatedly brings his film's focus back down to the town of his birth, Flint, Michigan. He speaks to a group of African-American high schoolers, not a one of them naive about the deplorable economic prospects waiting for them on the other side of graduation, about the rewards of military service. They tell Moore that the recruiters are very active on their campuses, and, when asked who among them is related to someone or is friendly with someone who is in the Armed Forces, they all raise their hands. Of course, it could be a cherry-picked group of individuals, carefully screened and artfully coached (wardrobe here seems suspiciously coordinated). When one of the young men mentions how he has been watching the news lately and looking at reports on the devastation in Iraq, only to reflect on how the bombed-out buildings on television resemble the downtown Flint he has always known, one could be excused for momentarily wondering if the young man is reading from a script. He is so "on message", as Karl Rove's Team Bush likes to say of their candidate, that one might hear rhetoric. But listen again, because his articulation is somewhat unsure, and he sounds nervous about making the connection he has made. Is his voice tremulous less with incredulous laughter ("can-you-believe-it-its-happening-all-over-again?") than with disenchantment? I hear it differently, in fact; he is singing a lament, and not just for himself.