AL FRANKEN: GOD SPOKE Early on in the documentary Al Franken: God Spoke, a Harvard undergrad asks the visiting Franken if he claims that there’s no such thing as left-wing propaganda. She’s the type of smug little wart everyone who goes to college encounters, playing at an ideological version of Stump the Band. Franken answers that it’s his job to point out and ridicule the lies spouted by the right wing. And when he calmly and devastatingly demonstrates the fallacy in Brit Hume’s claim that an American soldier in Iraq has the same chance of being killed as an average California citizen, or when he annotates the factual sleight of hand in Zell Miller’s claims of John Kerry being anti-defense, Franken does just what he claims. Throughout God Spoke, Franken comes off as passionate and funny, with an impressive ability to muster facts and an absence of smugness. His brand of liberalism, grounded in his middle-class Midwestern upbringing, seems just the sort that could renew liberalism’s once wide appeal. But that student’s smart-ass question is a fair one, and it’s just the one that God Spoke avoids as it follows Franken from the shaky inauguration of the Air America radio network to his fairly recent announcement that he’s thinking of moving back to Minnesota and running against Republican Senator Norm Coleman. Directed by Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus and executive-produced by D.A. Pennebaker, the movie, with its dedication to cinéma vérité, is one more example that the technique is useless when examining questions of politics or history. Existing in the moment without inquiry or challenge, cinéma vérité fosters exactly the sort of refusal to think beyond the immediate that this film criticizes in right-wing dittoheads. Franken seems like too much of a good guy to be long satisfied with preaching to the choir on Air America. Having spent time in the back of cabs with their radios tuned to both Rush Limbaugh and Randi Rhodes, I can say that it doesn’t matter what the loudmouth haranguing you believes. Neither political discourse nor politics itself can withstand that sort of intellectual d... More >>>