Sun, Jan 25/04
Questions: the new answers

Michael Moore has always rubbed me the wrong way… something about championing the little guy by berating minimum wage security guards who happen to work for heartless multinationals. He's managed to eke out a modicum of success despite my misgivings, and these days he has bigger fish to deep fry in batter than the plight of autoworkers and sundry deranged Michiganders, which is not to say that he makes sense with any consistency. As far as I'm concerned, he finally lost his spoon at the exact moment he unleashed the following:

Has anyone seen one single piece of footage of that plane hitting the [Pentagon]? I'm not saying it didn't hit the building, it hit the building, but I'm just saying. Where's the footage? It's gotta exist, right? Show us the footage. Because you know, I think most of us, those of us who aren't pilots, would like to know how you fly something at 400 or 500 miles per hour and score a direct hit when you just learned a little flight training at some dipshit training school down in Florida. Just a question. Is that how they learned how to do that? Or was this a military operation? Was it somebody who knew what they were doing? I don't know. I'm just asking a question, not drawing any conclusions, you know.

Considering the awesome number of nuts out there, I find it almost disappointing that Moore buys into the official "theory" of the Pentagon crash. He doesn't believe, for instance, that it was an American F-16 that crashed into the building, and that, at the precise moment of impact, American Airlines Flight 77 sailed just over the Pentagon and landed, graceful as a swan, at Reagan National Airport. (Under this theory, Barbara Olson and her fellow passengers were assigned numbers and sent to The Island.) Still, this line of inquiry is hilarious. What is the government hiding, exactly? Did a Japanese tourist's Handycam capture Chuck Yeager at the yoke? Were the details of the conspiracy spelled out in giant type on the fuselage?

No, of course not. He's not drawing any conclusions. He's just asking a question, like if I were to ask, "Is it raining?" or, "Is Tony Blair smarmy?" This interrogation-as-risk-free-insinuation tactic is both fun and profitable, and a real time-saver to boot: finally the pundits can be liberated from the thankless drudgery of forging coherent arguments.

Moore is harmless when taken as entertainment, I realize — I just think of him as Oliver Stone with a book deal. I'd sooner sit through a thousand of Moore's shit-eating rhetorical questions than Noam Chomsky's endless tales of American baby eating in Latin American jungles primeval. What unsettles me is the number of bookshelves Moore shares with Chomsky — the number of people, in other words, who apparently think that entertainment and academia can co-exist in the same bibliography.

The Mad Professor's writing is still based on relatively sound history, after all; he's just completely lost the plot with regard to what it has to do with the present. He knows his shit, but he's smearing it all over the walls of his office. Anyone mistaking Moore's ranting and raving for learned opinion, on the other hand, is doing for intellectualism what diehard fans of "8 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter" are doing for comedy.

And speaking of comedy, Conan O'Brien is filming at Toronto's Elgin Theatre from February 10-13. Only in Canada could this be controversial. While Palestinian women blow themselves to atoms and Inuit newborns stagger forth from the womb already clutching gasoline-filled freezer bags, Canadian politicians have managed to work themselves into a lather over the million government dollars earmarked to subsidize Conan's sojourn in Hogtown.

The Toronto tourism people behind the event say it will pump some ludicrous sum of money back into the economy. If they're right, and assuming governments have any role to play in the promotion of their tourist industry, then a million bucks strikes me as not-all-that-much money well spent. The counterarguments I expected to hear were that a million dollars is a lot of money, or that it would not result in an increase in tourism to Toronto, or both.

Instead I got Peter Kormos, Ontario NDP House Leader, who weighed in with this: "One has to question whether this makes economic sense." That's it. One has to, but he isn't going to. Hardly what I'd expect from this "maverick, firebrand and… all-around going concern."

Well, he's got trees to hug, I suppose. No matter, I know whom to call when I want a party pooped: the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation. David Hanley weighs in on their behalf… sorry, on our behalf: "If the feds are going to be playing these types of games, what does that say about their priorities? Are they going to bring him out west next because of the mad cow crisis?" And that's how the right wing poses shit-eating rhetorical questions, kids.

But it gets better: "It's really hard to piss all over things that are for good causes, but it's one of those uncomfortable kind of things that doesn't sit well … To think that's the quick and easy answer is not creative thinking in any way." Is this guy new or what? I didn't think the CTF's stated mission was to piss on good causes, and besides, "pooping" would have been far more topical.

All this information comes from the National Post, of course, your best source for anti-Conan news. The NP managed to get its own editorial board embroiled in the controversy, just to spice things up. In a brilliant bit of PR, Conan In Toronto organizer Peter Soumalias barred Post reporters and columnists from the festivities for their parsimonious naysayery. Editor-in-Chief Matthew Fraser bit hook, line and sinker, unleashing this torrent of declarative statements: "At the Post, we are opposed to government subsidies, particularly when they apply to indefensibly whimsical or ludicrous projects such as luring American talk-show hosts to Toronto."

Blistering, no? Nah, they might be wrong: "We are not convinced that Conan O'Brien's chat show is a sensible way to boost tourism in Toronto. Neither are we convinced that Canadian taxpayers, especially those who do not live in the city, should subsidize tourism in Toronto."

If posing a question is now as good as answering it, only without the obligation to know a damn thing about the subject at hand, then it really is no wonder we can't get anything done in this country. You know you're at an impasse when the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation freely admits that the causes it "pisses all over" are good ones and the best line our official opposition has ever dropped in the House of Commons is "When will the minister resign?"