The Left's Weeping Clown

Michael Moore's comedy reveals the depression at the heart of the progressive left.

Brian Doherty | October 18, 2002

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Heston stumbles toward mentioning our ethnic composition, then realizes he'd better stop. He doesn't have a good answer. Moore tries to show him a photo of a 6-year-old gunned down by another 6-year-old. Moses stumbles imperiously away, and doesn't look back. Moore's action is not meaningless cruelty. The head of an organization standing for gun rights should damn well be prepared to address emotional anecdotal arguments about the tragedies that guns can cause. Heston failed here, not Moore.

But Moore, like Heston, ultimately has to walk away from his toughest question without answers. Because the only thing that ultimately explains each individual gun death is an individual's choice to pull a trigger. Sociology can't provide the thousands of separate answers to why thousands of individuals made that choice. Any pressures of background or culture or poverty that weighed on the shooters weighed similarly on thousands of other non-shooters.

In the end, Moore, like the progressive left he stands for, has no valid solutions. Gun control laws won't stop gun crimes; Canadians also have plenty of guns and not many gun deaths. No one thinks that a life on welfare is a better option in the long term than trying to work for a living. Grander socialist dreams died with the Soviet Union. All the progressive left has are laments, tears, and tragedies. That suffices to sell movie tickets—moviegoers have always loved tragedy. It isn't enough for a lively and effective political movement.