Watched this last night, having picked it up on DVD for only €9 the other day. Gripping and fascinating, yet a little unsatisying.
Yes, Moore makes a good case that there’s something odd about the high level of violence in America, and that it’s driven by something unusual in the American psyche; but he doesn’t really get very close to what that unusual thing is, other than to blame “fear”. Anatol Lieven gets a lot closer to it in his America – Right or Wrong (summarised at length here), where he actually argues that America is not that odd after all, it has just been unable to deal with its own nationalism in the same way as European democracies.
So yes, there’s something weird about America. But I don’t think that completely explains America’s uniquely high rate of children killing other children with guns. He keeps on trying to link it to the US government’s militarism, but this is actually one of his weakest arguments – the Kosovo bombing campaign was also supported by countries he otherwise praises, like Germany, Canada, France and the UK, so is not really evidence of American exceptionalism in the same way as the current Iraq War; and his little photo-montage of US militarism in the last fifty years contains straight factual errors (Noriega was never actually president of Panama, and casualty rates for a number of the other events are exaggerated).
Moore compares the US with Canada several times, but I think fails to really unpick two very important points: first of all, Canadian gun control laws clearly are more effective; most of the 7 million Canadian guns are held for farming and hunting use; and buying handgun ammunition is more difficult than he protrays it as being. Moore is wobbly on this issue; he implies that the problem is not America’s permissive system which enables children to have easy access to guns, but the American psyche which makes them more likely to shoot other children with them. Yet at the same time obviously does agree that the laws, and the National Rifle Association, are indeed part of the problem.
The second point is his repeated statement that poverty can’t be an issue, because Canada has twice as much unemployment as the United States. Well, unemployment does not actually equate to poverty. Today’s rates are 7.3% unemployment for Canada and 5.4% unemployment in the US, and I shouldn’t be at all surprised if that difference in the unemployment rates reflects more differences in the procedure for registration than differences in the availability of work. Similarly, the Canadians register a poverty rate of around 15% and the Americans around 11%, but this is such a subjective measure that it’s difficult to read much into it. And Moore then undermines his own argument by commenting on the case of the woman whose enforced “workfare” jobs meant that she was unable to prevent her son from obtaining a weapon to shoot a classmate. I’m no Marxist, but I think the economy may well have something to do with rates of violent crime.
That, and the occasionally crude polemical tone of the film got to me – people he disagreed with got quirky background music, people he agreed with didn’t; the Charlton Heston interview at the end was interesting cinema but not really fair on Heston – I’ve been at the other end of the camera often enough myself to be annoyed even when such tricks are pulled on people I disagree with.
Interested to find an anti-Moore site with a number of rebuttals of claims made in Bowling for Columbine. Much of this is trivial stuff (eg James Nichols’ concern that he was made to look bad – heck, he did that pretty well himself), but one or two points I thought were more serious – it was my source on the factual errors in the “Wonderful World” montage above, though much of the page in question is more questionable.
I was sufficiently interested by one of the claims on the site to do a bit more digging myself. One of the most effective bits of the film is the moment when two Columbine survivors go with Moore to the headquarters of K-Mart and successfully persuade the chain to stop stocking ammunition. The anti-Moore sites (many of them) quote the more effective of the two students, Mark Taylor, as saying to the Canyon Courier, “I am completely against him (Moore). He screwed me over… He completely used us to make a buck… I had no idea what Moore’s agenda was. And he had an agenda. He had it all planned out, completely… I believe that every American has the right to have a gun. We should have the right to protect ourselves.”
It’s a pretty serious allegation, that Moore actually callously exploited a young man disabled in a traumatic shooting to make a cheap political point. But it smells very fishy to me. First of all, contemporary press reports here, for example) portray Taylor as fully participating in the action at K-Mart headqurters. Second, Taylor has pursued a number of lawsuits relating to the Columbine shooting, including one against a drugs company and another against three classmates. It seems to me unlikely that if he really felt wronged by Moore he would let it pass lightly. Thirdly, he is apparently publishing a book next year which reflects on his personal spiritual development since the shooting, and which doesn’t mention Moore at all. So on balance it seems likely to me that his remarks as reported are not completely accurate.
Unfortunately the original Canyon Courier article is no longer on-line. But it’s worth noting that the quoted remarks from the other victim, Richard Castaldo, are completely at odds with his most recent interview. There is also a reported response from Moore, who “said he made his agenda well-known to the youths. ‘That’s very odd to hear that,’ Moore said. ‘What part isn’t clear? We were there to try and get the bullets off the shelves. That’s why we were there. That’s why they decided to go.'”
So there we are. Moore does distort the facts to make a point, and you have to watch his films with that in mind; but so do his opponents, and they are the ones in power. I wish Moore would avoid the temptation to over-egg the pudding, but I also hope he wins.
What’s on the T-shirt, several of you