You know how people talk about somehow feeling compelled to look at an accident scene, maybe with a visible corpse, or pieces of one, when they're passing by, and they also feel like they don't want to see it. It's like that.
I own a DVD copy of Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine." I know I saw it once after I bought it, and I might have seen it once before that. I watched it again yesterday.
It goes deeper than I remembered it. It's an intense and unflinching exploration of the guns in America problem. And the problem, as Moore crystalizes it, is not the guns. It's the Americans. Where the gun advocates say "guns don't kill people; people do," they're right. People who more than anyone else in the world think they should kill people kill people. (Clearly, you wouldn't want to give such easy access to guns to such murderous people, but Moore leaves that logic to you to figure out. In fact, he talks about his own earlier years, and what an award-winning crack shot he was, and how he is or had been a lifelong member of the NRA.)
I know Moore is a well-known left winger. I wouldn't argue with anyone who says he is. But as I watched, I couldn't find anything that didn't seem to be an accepted, and specified, fact. If you know Moore's style, he doesn't argue with people, and he's frankly very polite and deferential. He's soft-spoken and even-tempered. He's just focused. And you can't really argue with his focus. In my opinion, he doesn't say one word that anyone would consider untrue.
He's not at all in this documentary the only person to say so -- he's not even the main person to say so -- but we have a problem. It's a big problem. We are dramatically obsessed with killing each other, with guns. This documentary was made in 2002. At the time, the country with the second highest rate of gun murders had around 300 the previous year. At that time, we had over 11,000. We're way off the charts, and it's gotten much worse since then.
The thesis Moore seemed to uncover is that we're overwhelmed by fear. Moore produced documentation that fear, like sex, sells -- so the various media are constantly telling us what they encourage to imagine is threatening -- and our fixation on finding things to fear leads us to counterattack. Or, as some might experience it, protect ourselves. But from what? The bogeymen we invent, or that are invented for us?
What most commentators in this documentary concluded was that we wrongly imagine that African-Americans are a pervasive threat, and shows like "Cops" are always focusing on African-Americans who are apprehended, and manhandled, by the police. And it's not just African-American people. There was even a segment on "Africanized" bees, which it seems don't actually exist, or never came to this country. I read an article one time that said that all of our anti-drug laws were stimulated by fear, insecurity, and inadequacy feelings by Caucasians regarding people who are not Caucasian. Michael Moore and his sources are not the only ones who have concluded this. One caricaturish and ridiculous to the point of being comical (not for the victims of it) example is the difference in sentencing depending on whether a drug crime involves powdered cocaine, which was more common in Caucasian communities, and crack cocaine, which was more common in African-American communities.
Anyway, that was Moore's thesis: that artificial fear motivates excessive gun violence in this country. What we are fed to fear is whatever is easiest to sell.
As I said, I own a copy of this DVD. If you still have a DVD player, as I do, you're welcome to borrow it. I would just like it back.
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