Was in Dallas’s first showing of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 this afternoon. I was surprised that in our very conservative village, there wasn’t more hoopla on its opening day. There was no line when we bought our tickets just less than an hour before show time. However, after walking around West Village for about twenty minutes, the press was beginning to arrive, interviewing ticket buyers in the lobby. The auditorium was crowded; the show was very nearly, if not completely, sold-out.

Throughout the next two hours, Moore convincingly argued the obvious. The most damning evidence against Bush was unedited footage of Bush speaking without Moore’s commentary. Or when Moore let the soldiers or the veterans of the war speak for themselves. Their words underscored their lack of experience and insight as well as their deplorable naïveté. However, Moore, although indicting not just President Bush and his warmongering cabal but the Democratic Party, the media, and corporate America as well, expresses great sympathy for our servicemen and women who are actually carrying out this administration’s seriously flawed policy.

The cuts and shifts in narrative were very well done and worked well to advance Moore’s gadfly politicking (of which I am a fan). I, however, would have preferred a bit more cinematic touch to the scene when Bush hears of the planes slamming into the World Trade Center while Moore ponders just what was going on in the president’s mind. Instead, a more compelling scene would have been footage of Bush reading with the children in Florida with audio from New York, or even vice-versa: minute-by-minute footage of New York/Washington with the children’s voices reading My Pet Goat.

Moore showed an amazing amount of restraint in both the footage he used and well as the issues he addressed. But, of course, he had the herculean task of sifting through what must have been thousands of hours of footage that could have been used to make his case. For example, there was no mention whatsoever of the many protests against the invasion of Iraq.

The story of self-professed patriot Lila Lipscomb struck a nerve. We first meet her raising a flag on her house in Flint, Michigan, and listing the family members (daughter, father, uncles, cousins, etc.) who have served in the military of the United States. Later, she reads the last letter her son wrote from Iraq, arriving just a week before she receives a call from the Defense Department with the news of his death. At the end of the film, she has traveled to D.C., where a witless woman accosts her, complaining that the protest in front of the White House is staged. “My son,” she starts, and then in tears, “My son was killed in Iraq.” All I could think of was my own poor grandmother who suffered through the loss of her youngest son in that other illegal and immoral war in Viet Nam. My family never survived his death, so much so that when I was a child—a few years after the fact—I had nightmares about my uncle’s death, and I never even knew him. I grew up certain that I wouldn’t live to be twenty because my namesake didn’t either.

Bush has lost the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he has lost the war in America. My hope is that this film will help us regain the government of this great country.