In the spirit of, “I’ll suffer so you don’t have to,” I decided to rent Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine yesterday. After the filmmaker’s regal reception at the Democratic Party convention, where he was seated next to President Carter, I realized that not bothering to view his works would forever hamper my ability to defeat his positions. What I saw was more horrifying (and boring) than I ever expected. This movie won countless awards and is loved thousands of people but it amounts to little more than the enactment of one cheap emotional stunt after another.

Moore is the star of the film and we unfortunately are subjected to his lumbering, dour, guilt-racked frame in shot after shot. He is constantly lead-faced and saddened; appalled and unflinching. He will go to any length to uncover the truth–provided he doesn’t have to deal with clever people who may disagree with him.

Moore’s outlook is the embodiment of the Manichean worldview. There are no grays or even light browns in his work. He divides society into victims and oppressors and, just as we see every day on the talk shows, he pulls victims out of his hat and films confrontations with their accusers. The result is a fruitcake drenched in emotional hysteria.

A photo of a girl who died a tragic handgun death is left by Charleton Heston’s garage. Stories of Dick Clark’s tax deductible workfare employees are relayed to him, and victims from Columbine, who were shot by psychopaths with cheap bullets, are put on display before executives at K-Mart Corporate Headquarters. It’s all in the effort to portray the director as the Christ of all that is sensitive, new age and tolerance oriented.

This film is a triumph of emotion over reason. There are no facts except those that Moore can twist within the confines of his theories. It is the glorification of the sixties ethos, “The issue is not the issue.” What else is there then? When somebody is shot, it can never be a result of the shooter’s emotional state, it must always be the fault of outside nefarious influences. It was a nearby Lockheed-Martin plant that was to blame or a nearby plutonium plant or the towering shadow of the Air Force Academy. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris murdered their classmates not due to mental illness but due to fifty years of American foreign policy and the presence of a television satellite manufacturing plant in the town. Like many leftists, Moore refuses to judge murderers as individuals. They are merely pieces of information that have to be jaggedly fit within his greater ideology. After all, reality would spoil his game of verbal twister. No explanation is offered as to why all the other children in Colorado do not follow the example of Klebold and Harris as they too live in the same environ. Were Moore to attempt to do so he would completely undermine the film’s premise.

His home state of Michigan is targeted earlier and viciously in the film. In keeping with his omnipresent intellectual cowardice, Moore decided to interview members of the Michigan Militia about gun ownership. One would assume they would make easy marks for the New York pseudo-intellectual, yet, despite two hours of director manipulated narrative, the film cannot refute a basic argument of a militia member who asks, “If I don’t defend my children, who will?” Indeed. No one will. If an intruder breaks into my house and I call the police, they may arrive within fifteen minutes time. By that point, were it not for my Mossberg shotgun, I would have already been robbed, mutilated or dead. Were shotguns, like handguns, banned in Chicago then I would not be able to successfully defend myself. Michael Moore, the multimillion dollar critic of his former state, country, and race, cannot rebut this simple observation.

Our Svengali is such a (figurative) lightweight that he cannot bear discussing the issue of the Second Amendment with any legitimate scholars, so he instead brings up the topic with the scarred and neurotic brother of Terry Nichols. Mr. Nichols is frightened and barely coherent. Moore is smug and satisfied after Nichols admits to not being familiar with Gandhi, but just how would the leader’s pacifism help citizens deal with a felon in the bedroom? It could not, yet rather than consider such things Moore would prefer to look worldly besides a broken man. I’m sure the outcome would have been different had he approached Dr. John Lott but our director is not the type to ever take such chances. Besides, logic cannot outdo Jerry Springer on the entertainment meter.

He makes note that the town of Virgin, Utah passed a law making gun ownership mandatory. The viewer is supposed to recoil in fright at the announcement but any who do are merely as ignorant as Moore. When a similar ordinance was passed in Kennesaw, Georgia crime decreased. The same can be said of his home state of Michigan after concealed weapons permits were granted. Later in the film, Moore accidentally stumbles upon the truth when an attorney states that gun ownership in America increased while violent crime decreased, but Moore, the triumphant conspiracy theorist, is unable to discern that there may be a connection between the two. Apparently, non-tendentious relationships are not something he wishes to dwell on. Independently, however, the recent drop in violent crime amid our rampant population growth completely refutes the film’s message. Firearm ownership does not result in a violent culture as the outcome of gun control efforts in Britain and Canada (the country he so admires) make clear.

The real monster ex machina in Bowling for Columbine is not a gun but another mechanism for self-defense known as the United States of America. Moore regards us as being wholly inferior to other nations. If only we could be more like Canada then our problems would be solved. There, life is a socialist paradise. People don’t lock their doors and the criminals who enter only take a couple of things and then merrily go on their way. The director knows this is the truth not through any statistical analysis but due to his interviews with adults in a Sarnia bar and with some kids outside a Taco Bell. Why should he have to study the matter when such experts are readily available? Anyway, Moore regards Ottawa’s free health care system as the epitome of heaven on earth; although he never inquires as to how long they have to wait for their MRIs or how many people there flood the borders whenever they experience a serious health crisis. Canada’s health care system is a joke and only a detached elitist like Michael Moore would be uneducated enough to regard socialism as being anything other than the acrid, gelatinous mess that it is.

Yet, for this viewer, there is nothing as foul and evil about Bowling for Columbine than its incessant race baiting. A short cartoon tells the history of the United States and we discover that our past is merely one long parade of racism against blacks. It’s all whitey’s fault. There are no individuals on this earth, only varying hues of pigmentation. One gets the feeling from his films that whenever he runs out of things to say that he decides to foment a race war. As in Fahrenheit 9/11, his attempts to foster paranoia within the black community will likely never end. He postulates that white fear is the motivating factor behind gun ownership. Then he implies that the Second Amendment was written exclusively for the benefit of white men which is a blatant lie. More canards are offered such as the risible claim that the NRA is the direct descendent of the Ku Klux Klan and that they, like the Klan, were formed to subjugate blacks. That the first NRA President was a former Union General is an extraneous fact apparently. Michael Moore is a man incapable of simply responding to what is so he must fabricate events in order to have anything meaningful to say about them.

Personally, I recommend seeing this film because conservatives in this country need to know what we’re up against. On display here is the soul of a truly sick man whom many of the young hail as a conquering hero. Michael Moore is a racialist in the tradition of the Nazis, the Imperial Japanese, the Klan and the Black Panthers. Like with many other leftists, racism is at the root of most of what he says. To Moore, white is synonymous with evil and black is synonymous with good. Whites fear blacks because we are all cowards; whereas all blacks are brave. Whites flee to the suburbs and hole up with their guns awaiting a siege. So then what do we make of white people like me who live in the city? What about all the black Americans who own guns? Moore must attribute it to our false consciousness I suppose. This filmmaker has nothing but disdain for his home state of Michigan, nothing but bile for his nation, and nothing but derision for those who share his skin color. Bowling for Columbine is not a documentary. It is a profile of an individual’s inner-hate projected upon the world around him.

Bernard Chapin

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Bernard Chapin is a writer in Chicago.