“Fahrenheit 9/11” is an exercise in propaganda which presents a mostly sharp and trenchant analysis of the current political situation. As I was generally aligned with most of Moore’s positions beforehand, I cannot say how convincing the film might be to a neutral party. If nothing else it contains several deeply moving sequences. Despite what in the cold light of day outside the theater must be called cheap tactics—wailing mothers, Iraqi children playing in the shadow of rubble, selective use of press conference outtakes, occasional lapses into “where there’s smoke there’s fire” reasoning—Moore has found those extra few feet of rope with which the current administration may yet hang themselves.

To be sure, Moore isn’t fighting dirty. He is merely mirroring the tactics of his targets. In doing so he has struck a blow against the Bush Administration that will not easily be shaken off. If has merely gotten people to pay more attention to the news, he will have succeeded. Day by day the cracks in the Bush Administration grow wider, and even a compromised press won’t be able to keep that fact from wide acceptance.

But as gratified as I was to imagine that this film will make available to the American people a version of events closer to the truth than the one the nightly newscasts have been giving them, I also couldn’t shake a parallel sense of disillusionment. By bringing the left charging into the fray of town-hall pugilism, Moore’s movie heralds the full arrival of a bearpit atmosphere in which every tactic is allowed. One can easily point to Thomas Paine or “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, for example, to show that American history is full of low blows for high causes. Rabble-rousing is older than our Constitution, and favored by all factions. Nevertheless, there is something new and insidious about the ruthless manipulation of film, television, and cyberspace for political ends, forms of discourse in which verisimilitude is much stronger than in literature and moral and civic responsibility much weaker.

The difficulty of “Fahrenheit 9/11” is neatly contained in a single scene. Near the end of the film, Lila Lipscomb, the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan, visits Washington, D.C. She stops outside the White House, where she begins a friendly conversation about the war with a voluble peace protester camped on a public lawn. Before they get very far a nosy tourist interrupts. “This is all staged”, she flatly asserts, waving at Moore’s camera. Lipscomb can barely contain herself. Trembling with anger, she informs the tourist that her son had, in fact, died in Karbala. Chastened only partially, the tourist tosses out a robotic “Lots of people’s...sons and daughters have died...”  But by the time she finishes Lipscomb has already turned away in a fresh wave of grief over the woman’s incredulity.

Of all the sobering scenes in “Fahrenheit 9/11”, this one may offer the most telling commentary on politics and the media in contemporary America. In this exchange between strangers it’s easy to spot the trenches dug between “left” and “right”, “liberal” and “conservative”, “Blue State” and “Red State”. Moore accidentally caught on film the current level of civic discourse, so fraught with irrational, accusatory paranoia. Ideology is more valuable than truth, and anything and anyone may be questioned.

Oddly, it is an atmosphere at least partly created by the ancestors of the modern left, namely George Orwell. The problem with exposing the apparatus of disinformation is that in a society that self-consciously feeds on illusions, paranoia won’t be long in taking root. The clash between Lipscomb and the “patriotic” tourist is also, therefore, a clear view of the central epistemological problem facing Americans. Conservatives and liberals battle for our loyalty, and each side claims the other is lying. Nothing new in this, but now we are no longer dealing with the colorful lies germane to American politics celebrated by so many mirthful cartoonists over the centuries. This isn’t Boss Tweed or even Richard Nixon. Modern mass media have spawned and perpetuated a new kind of lie, one more expansive, evasive, and deadly, a postmodern web of fictions at once ubiquitous and transparent.

Moore would call this kind of lie the fabrication of the military/industrial complex. His finale snatches a quotation from Orwell to explain that “continuous” war is the goal of the rich and powerful, not protection of the nation. In such an environment, an corrupt administration can lie through its teeth to win support for a selfish, greedy, and unnecessary expenditure of blood and money overseas. But in the same vein, those loyal to the administration can attack films like “Fahrenheit 9/11” as sophomoric consipiracy fantasies cranked out by a shameless propagandist. Here are the culture wars we warned you about writ large, they say; choose a side. “This is all staged”: both sides may wield that charge to great effect because partisanship among the citizenry has reached a feverish zeal that lets everyone believe the facts aren’t being heard in the news outlets—all of which are, of course, run by the other guy.

This, really, is the darker, more disturbing message of “Fahrenheit 9/11”, the one it doesn’t know it’s making. As compelling as Moore’s film is—biased, certainly, but well-fed on facts so outrageous they need almost no seasoning—it points to the growing lack of meaning in American media. We have reached, and perhaps passed, a limit to our willingness to believe the news we see and hear. The discourse of the looking glass has taken over both sides of the debate. “Lies” and “liar” are two words found in almost every polemic, right and left. Both groups know that they can rely on a reader’s or viewer’s sense that he is being lied to and manipulated.

This is a common legacy, a legacy born of the Sixties counterculture as much as Watergate. That there exists no middle ground of sober debate in which the truth can be pursued vigorously and without bias is hardly surprising. Power is the only commodity that really matters in any civilization. Truth will always bend to its will. So it would be difficult to say that the Age of Moore is radically different than, say, the Age of Hearst. But certainly there has been a shift in degree. In the American popular media, anything can be said, by anyone, and almost anything will be believed, by everyone. If it is now acceptable to use a single clip of a weeping mother of a dead soldier to argue against the war, it is just as acceptable to use a clip of a devastated World Trade Center widow as a call for war.

This is soundbite morality, popular concensus rigged in the editing room. With the rise of Moore and other leftist pundits like Al Franken to counter bogeymen like Rush Limbaugh, the average American now faces two carnival barkers, as it were, each selling his own snake oil while denouncing the other’s as fake. On TV, on the radio, on the Internet, on C-SPAN call-in shows, when we find something we like we nod in agreement. But when our cherished opinions are proven false, the first impulse is not to revise our position, it’s to suspect a cabalistic attempt at forgery. Our own sense of media artifice helps further our alienation from the truth.

Messages come right, left, and center, but none is louder than the the Liar’s Paradox inherent in the media, that ancient no-riddle in which the liar states “Everything I say is a lie.” Armed with the freedom of choosing who is lying and who is truthful, there is merely the choice between which story flatters each citizen’s petty tribalism. Validation is out there if you want it. If the answers don’t mesh with your prejudicial grasp of reality, just keep Googling.