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No Fahrenheit 9/11 at the Shrine of Democracy
Dr. Gerry Lower, Keystone, South Dakota
OpEdNews.com
Given religious, right wing capitalistic dominion in western South Dakota,
I mentioned to my son and daughter, almost facetiously, that it would
surprise me if Michael Moore's film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," would
even run in local theaters.
Sure enough, the headlines in the Rapid City Journal the next day read
"Fahrenheit Not Hot Enough" (June 24, 2004). In the home
of Mount Rushmore, the Shrine of Democracy, "Black Hills residents
awaiting Friday's nationwide release of Michael Moore's controversial
film, "Fahrenheit 9/11" will need to go somewhere else in the
nation to watch the movie ... the closest theaters playing the movie are
in Denver and Sioux Falls."
One local theater owner claimed to be simply more interested in making
money. "You think I'm going to play a documentary [instead of]
'Spider-Man'? I'm not so sure that [Moore's movie] has commercial appeal
compared to 'Spider-Man." The Journal went on to quote Carmike
president Mike Patrick as saying, "the call not to show the movie was
a business decision," and another Carmike representative claimed,
"There's no political agenda [to this] at all." Carmike senior
vice president for film, Tony Rhead, took another approach, claiming the
movie to be in short supply and unavailable, that "the 700 prints of
the movie left the chain out in the cold."
An accompanying article in the Rapid City Journal, however (reprinted from
the LA Times), pointed out that Moore's documentary "will be in 868
theaters nationwide Friday" ("No to PG-13, LA Times, June 24,
2004)." Apparently none of those extra 168 prints were available to
South Dakota theaters. At the same time, Kai Segrud, a theater employee in
Rapid City, claims that local theaters have been "inundated"
with phone calls. "We're getting about a hundred calls a day."
This is, no doubt, an example of Bush's newly religious
"democracy" at work in the shadow of Mount Rushmore.
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Dr. Gerry Lower lives in the shadow of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills
of South Dakota. He has a website at www.jeffersonseyes.com and a book
entitled "Jefferson's Eyes" which provides a logical derivation
of the values of natural philosophy, democracy and nascent Christianity.
He can be reached at tisland@blackhills.com.
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