Why yes he is. But he'd rather you didn't know.
I just saw Fahrenheit 9-11 on the 25th, like so many across Canada and the Continentual US. This film struck me as few political films can. First of all, there is something about viewing a film based on real events and personalities that is more gripping and moving than watching a film, even one based on "a true story". Documentaries are fun stuff, especially if they concern the gruesome politics of the most powerful man in the most powerful nation on earth. It would be a distortion to say this film is as George Bush senior calls it a "personal attack on his son". Its far broader than that, and indicts not just one man, but the system that produces him and many others like him.
The most powerful statement (among so many) occured at the end, when Moore refers to the powers that keep the masses ignorant and apathetic. It is their ignorance and consent which keeps the heirarchal nature of our society intact.
I think Moore was making reference to Gramsci's notion of ideology hegemony. Ideology is here defined as "meaning making in the service of power". So hegemony is a way of meaning making that carries with it a politics of domination. It is the theory that the rulers of society maintain their rule by winning over the commonsensical understandings held by the masses (i.e. in F9-11 the woman who responds to Lila Lipscomb's greif over the death of her son by telling her to blame "al quada" epitomizes this).
These four elements to ideological hegemony help to explain its workings:
Before we get into them, some notes from a professor at my school who provided some excellent examples of hegemony in action (professor Robert Hackett)
"Hegemony tends to neutralize antagonisms by redefining them. There is a difference of interests between people who benefitted from [British Columbia Premier Gordon] Campbells tax cuts vs. people who have to pay more for public services. The idea of hegemony would be to suggest that conflict is neutralized and redefined, i.e. "this is necessary to grow the British Columbia economy". It might interpret differences of interest as differences in "lifestyle". If succesful, hegemony naturalizes existing social relationships, advertisements in the media, as "the way things are". There's no alternative. Even though these conditions were created. They are transformed into the status of an internal truth. I think its not necessarily intentional. The idea of ex-nomination...meaning a failure to "mean" something....There is no party that calls itself the "capitalist party": they all are. In Hartley's 'Understanding News', there was the tabloid headline "Senator and Blonde in Crash". Hartley says women tend to be defined by their looks while men are defined by their job or position." The senator is implied as a man, and the blonde is clearly a woman. But could it have been a female senator with a blonde man? Clearly not, but why?
he continues,
"There used to be no name for "sexual harassment". That's a concept that took ideological or counter-hegemonic work to become a thing or issue. Hegemony generalizes particular interests of the elite class and transforms them into the interests of the whole society. From the particular to the general, the old moniker "What's good for GM is good for America" comes to mind.
The Three Aspects of Hegemony:
1. It is Lived Practice. As thinking, knowing human subjects we enter into this process, we are complicit or not in this practical effort. This is not "brainwashing", but the acceptance of a practical way of organizing our lives and activities that just so happens to conform to elite interests.
2. It is common sense. A more or less unconscious way of understnadin gthe world, a space that allows competing views within limits. It implies that acceptable understandings are not limited to narrow partisan boundaries, but that there are nonetheless limits, outside of which, one appears to be a radical. Chomsky overlaps here, in that he theorized that US political debate taks place within just such a boundary of "common sense". For example, it is acceptable dissent to criticize US involvement in Iraq as posing to great a cost for its benefits in the "war on terror". It is unacceptable dissent to question the motives for ever going there in the first place, and cast light on the economic incentives for the invasion, i.e. questioning whether "bringing freedom and democracy" to Iraq are really the true cause for the invasion.
3. It is always contested. Hegemony is not a monolithic force. The power bloc as Gramsci describes the elite, cannot be assured of success in winning the consent of the social order. News media and other actors in the meaning-making stage, do occasionally generate real, critical dissent that effectivelly challenges the assumptions and power relations upon which the whole ideological structure relies. So to the extent that consent is won, Hegemony survives, and to the extent that it fails, or when Counter-hegemonic understandings arise, then a new fight for 'common sense' takes place, with new boundaries drawn. For example, the latest battle in terms of gender has hit a rut (in my view). Women have since the 1970s adopted a "radical" politics of fairness and equality, and won important victories over the language of gender (among other things). For example, most people don't refer to "mankind" or "man" and refer instead to "humanking". However, most economic and political elites are still....men. And the statistics haven't really changed all that much since 1990. See Statistics Canada Figures on Employment/Gender Gap or CBC columnist Georgie Binks insightful column. So these battles still rage, to put it pointedly.
Lastly, to link hegemony back to Fahrenheit 9-11, I believe this film, while populist admittedly, and full of emotional, documentary dramatics, is still a valid and intensely powerful peice of counter-hegemonic pop culture.
The idea that thousands (hopefully millions) of people will be leaving theatres in the US questioning their status as "subjects", as essentially "sheep" who'se consent has (or not) has helped (or hindered) the ability of these these elites to remain in power can only have enormous political ramifications.
Just reading some of the responses by fans who have seen the film at michaelmoore.com is really impressive. Audience members in traditionally conservative towns vividly describe the sense that they are "not alone", that the common sense of the conservative/patriotic/pro-bush/religious power bloc has had its feathered ruffled. This is a powerful thing. A whole lot of people have been given a tremendous vocabulary for debate in a way, viewing the "independent" media, just doesn't enable.
I loved the scene in F9-11, where Fox News is the only station pronouncing Bush a winner. But even if Bush hadn't won, I doubt Gore would have been reversed history substantially. The footage of him stamping down on the black Florida voters (who protested the fact that they were disenfranchised) in Congress was extremely disappointing and revealing.
And the whole US congress is virtually all white men between the age of 40 and 65? What is this? How can they speak for the vast populations of blacks, hispanics and other minorities in US society? What an obscene political system. Did Brown vs. Board of Education take place in the last century, or was that just for fun....?
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