# Posted 10:10 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

STOP PAYING ATTENTION TO MICHAEL MOORE: To what extent does criticism, no matter how harsh or how justified, only build Moore up into a bigger celebrity? If one wanted to completely marginalize a public figure, how would one go about it? The answer is not that if you ignore him, he'll go away. Rather, I think the challenge is to ensure that liberals are the ones who are bashing Moore.

Thankfully, David Denby, the New Yorker's film critic, is making a good start. He writes that:

Michael Moore has teased and bullied his way to some brilliant highs in his career as a political entertainer, but he scrapes bottom in his new documentary, “Sicko.”...

Moore and the rescue workers (the other sick [passengers on the ship] having mysteriously disappeared) wander onto the streets of Havana and ask some guys playing dominoes if there’s a doctor nearby. They go to a pharmacy and then to a hospital, where the Americans are admitted and treated. Few people in Moore’s audience are likely to be displeased that they receive help from a Communist system. But what is the point of Moore’s fiction of a desperate, wandering quest for medicine on the streets, as if he hadn’t known in advance that Cuba has free health care? Why not tell us what really happened on the trip—for instance, what part Cuban officials played in receiving the American patients?

Well, it'll come out sooner or later. Besides, doing PR work for Castro is much less offensive than whitewashing Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a la Fahrenheit 9/11. (Remember the footage of joyful Iraqi children in a playground and the deafening silence about Saddam's occasional human rights violations?)

Denby later observes that:

Moore winds up treating the audience the same way that, he says, powerful people treat the weak in America—as dopes easily satisfied with fairy tales and bland reassurances. And since he doesn’t interview any of the countless Americans who have been mulling over ways to reform our [health care] system, we’re supposed to come away from “Sicko” believing that sane thinking on these issues is unknown here.

If you read the whole interview, you'll see that Denby reserves a certain affection for Moore, or at least for his politics. Denby concludes the review by noting that:

A shift to the left, or, at least, to the center, has overtaken Michael Moore, yielding an irony more striking than any he turns up: the changes in political consciousness that Moore himself has helped produce have rendered his latest film almost superfluous.

This makes it seem like Moore is the advocate of responsible politics, not the loudspeaker of the wing-nut left. To marginalize Moore, he must become someone who mainstream liberals are embarrassed to identify as one of their own. But that's no small task. The extremes often generate a devoted audience. And then the rest of the party either pays lip service or avoids unnecessary conflicts with the base. (It's the same with conservatives, of course.)

Ultimately, I suspect that Moore may have to be the author of his own political demise. He needs to insult America in a way that makes any association with him taboo. For example, a bad enough cheapshot at American soldiers might do the trick. Sort of like John Kerry's remark about them all being dropouts, but worse.

You could say that it's mean-spirited to strategize about how to marginalize anyone other than the KKK or some other hate group. I'd respond that anyone who whitewashes a murderous dictatorship and generally debases our standards of public debate deserves exactly that. The same goes for conservative wing-nuts as well as liberals. I just pay more attention to the latter, since the conservative ones rarely get much positive coverage in the publications I read or much praise from the liberals in my Ivy League demograpic.

Labels: Michael Moore

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