Grey-Haired Bush-Haters Love Moore’s Movie
In this part of Florida, Republicans are so dominant that they remove dissident literature from “town hall” meetings, and Democrats don’t bother to run for state office in most districts. It’s much like the old Soviet Union here except The Party calls itself “Republican” instead of “Communist.” But just as there was always an underground in the Soviet Union, there is one here. And it turned out en masse to see Michael Moore’s Movie, Fahrenheit 9/11.
For the most part, Moore’s movie drew retirees. The under-30 crowd was watching Spiderman 2 in another section of the Regal 8 theater on Cortez Road, leaving Fahrenheit 9/11 to the grandma and grandpa crowd. It was a polite crowd, in that they didn’t scream or boo loudly during the movie, but the depth of emotion they felt was obvious if you looked at their faces, and they were certainly not shy about expressing their feelings verbally once the move was over.
“I don’t know how we ever let that awful Bush person get in office,” one stooped-over granny said bitterly.
I said, “I think the country can survive Bush. We’re a resilient people.”
She said, “But we need to get him out of office right away. It was terrible, the way he and his brother had that Harris woman keep blacks from voting, not that the Democrats who let that go by were much better.”
This was not the only person in the crowd with these views. The level of disdain for Bush in that theater was as high as the level of hatred U.S. conservatives once had for the Soviets they now work so hard to emulate.
I am not a Michael Moore fan for various personal reasons, and when I said so to several of the faithful they recoiled from me in horror. How, I wondered, do these people get along with their neighbors, most of whom are statistically likely to be Communist/Republican Party members?
This is the depressing part of modern American politics to me: That there is less room every year for civilized disagreement. The belief that we’re all on the same team, trying to attain the same goals (a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity), and only disagree on methods of achieving those goals, seems to have died.