A group of us went to Fahrenheit 9/11 last night, not to be wowed, but to merely watch a fire burn. Like my recent link to a P.J. O'Rourke essay, few in the theater were swayed by the arguments; it was a choir in the face of preaching.

The film itself is typical Moore. Heavy-handed, self-focused "everyman" documentary interspersed with an occasional powerful image, perfect metaphor, and powerful truth. Near the beginning, the screen goes black and the sounds of September 11th are more powerful. We all have the images burning in our minds (yes, the tense is intentionally present) so that we all can see in our mind's eye the horrors of the day.

As the screen comes back - long enough that we wonder "is the projector broken" in an uncomfortable yet powerful way - it is to people looking up and papers coming down. In a sequence disquietingly similar to American Beauty there is a simplistic yet beautiful sequence of papers floating down. While this was seen in Blue Man Group's amazing Episode 13, the image is still sledgehammer powerful.

Moore lets the tomfoolery of Bush make his case. This is not "fair and balanced," but it makes no hypocritical facade that it is. He intercuts facts on the Saudis, the flight (in both sense of the word) of the Saudis in the days just after September 11th, and the strange career of George W. Bush. The image of Paul Wolfowitz doing his hair will stick with me for a while.

The film then shifts abruptly as we move from Bush to Iraq. Instead of the heavy-handed polemics we expect from Moore, it moves to a rushed, near-Winchellian mode with a heavy dose of Orwell. There are views of boys playing Army - real Army, feeding heavy metal through a tank's comm system, and only after, realizing this is no game. There is blood and gore, perhaps too much for some, but much less than war. We see the stares of those that cannot handle killing and violence, but have seen it anyway. Those faces always make me wonder how the rest make it through unscathed.

It ends quickly. Moore obviously rushed contemporary footage in, but it holds together, especially in following a mother from Flint as she deals with her son's death in Iraq. Her stand near the White House is heartbreaking and true. Moore goes back to Orwell, quoting out the views on War that Orwell saw a half-century ago and that a royalist government has brought to pass.

As we left, I looked out to the streets. I was heartened to see the crowd skewed young, but I didn't see something I hoped. Where was the sign for Kerry? The people ready to help people register to vote? Heck, where were the protesters? The Kerry "campaign" needs to understand that Moore holds a grasp of the everyman metaphors that a patrician senator needs to reach America. Instead of hiding from fire, it's time that America needs to light a match.

"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical." - Jefferson