Political Films

We live in a country where both sides in most political debates are usually wrong. It baffles me sometimes. It almost seems like the debates that are freely discussed in public are designed to give each side ammunition to discredit the other. Let's take the subject of political films and Michael Moore, for example. His movie "Fahrenheit 911", was designed to show audiences that George W. Bush is an incompetent president and that he demonstrated very weak leadership during the 911 tragedy. All of this was true. But Moore went on to paint a picture of our government, and particularly the Bush family, as being controlled by the rulers of Saudi Arabia. This distortion totally undermined the power of his film and gave conservatives an easy out to dismiss the whole shebang as boneheaded propaganda.

Now we have the Oscar-winning Al Gore, and his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." As I understand it, the main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland's 630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100. The inconvenient truth is that there is not much scientific support for this doomsday scenario.

To be sure, global warming is frightening, but the only thing that can be said about it with accuracy is that we currently don't know how high the environmental price we are paying really is for our consumption of fossil fuels - let alone, specifically, how Greenland will be affected. We are driving down a road heading for a cliff in the fog, and we really have no idea how much farther we have to drive before we reach the cliff. That is scary, but it is a different message than "Stop the car right now, or we are all going to die!"

Gore's movie will ultimately give the morons who deny the reality of global warming weapons against more sober-minded politicians when they attempt to argue the subject with scientific facts. Inevitably there will be a temporary reversal in polar ice melting and those on the other side of the debate will declare victory. I suspect that in the long run, "An Inconvenient Truth" will do more harm than good.

If only the general public would pay money to watch the political documentaries produced by Frontline and Nova. Maybe if they hired Quentin Tarantino. I can see it now, Frontline and Quentin Tarantino present "The Naughty Nurses of Walter Reed Medical Center."