Posted on 11/03/2003 3:39:56 AM PST by ejdrapes
MICHAEL Moore sits in a Santa Cruz hotel room outlining his dream to parade a hand-cuffed George Bush before the world as a two-bit crook when word comes in that yet another American soldier has been killed in Iraq. The scatter-gun humour and throaty laughter fade as the grizzly bear in the baseball cap falls silent. Then in slow, deliberate tones, he spits out his anger: "So what do you tell his parents, hmm? What did he die for? To protect America? No. So what's the reason? What would Haliburton (the US oil giant formerly run by Vice-President Dick Cheney and now helping to rebuild Iraq) say if they knocked at the door? 'Sorry your son died, but I think we're going to get that oil as a result of it. So hey, come on, cheer up. At least Arnie can fill up his Hummer now.' "It's so disgraceful and so disgusting." If you think you know someone who loathes Bush, American imperialism, big business, right-wingers, oh, and Tony Blair's poodle act, then multiply their hatred by a hundred and you get close to Moore's level of contempt. The film-maker, author and Washington's No 1 pain in the jacksie may be a year off 50 but has the energy and anger, not to mention dress sense, of a student. Toss an opinion at him and he bombards you with facts and anecdotes which rarely fail to hit the mark. He's like the pub bore you always wish you'd met. Take his description of his fellow countrymen and their blind pursuit of the American Dream: "They are possibly the dumbest people on the planet... in thrall to conniving, thieving, smug pricks. "We Americans suffer from an enforced ignorance. We don't know about anything that's happening outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing. National Geographic produced a survey which showed that 60 per cent of 18-25 year olds don't know where Great Britain is on a map. And 92 per cent of us don't own a passport." When I tell him his new book Dude, Where's My Country? has gone straight in at No 1 in our bestseller list, he's almost as astonished as I am that I've managed to halt his spleen: "Oh my God, I didn't know that. Wow that's like, amazing. Phew!" He is genuinely moved. Just as he was when he heard the book was heading straight into 1 in the US. But thoughts of his beloved mum, who died in his home town of Flint, Michigan, last summer, overshadowed his success. "I was overjoyed when my publishers told me," he sa`ys. "But it only lasted a few minutes and then I was in tears, thinking I just wish so much that she were here to see it. "I think of her every day. Every day I wish she were alive. It causes me pain. It has been a very difficult year on that level. So many good things have happened, but..." he trails off. Veronica, 81 died after emergency surgery for heart and kidney complications. At the time her son's book Stupid White Men was on its way to being America's best-selling non-fiction book of the year and his film Bowling For Columbine was judged worthy of a best documentary Academy Award. But the acclaim meant nothing to him. His mother, a devout Catholic, was the inspiration for Moore to briefly train to be a priest, and ultimately to take on corporate America and seek justice for the small guy. When he was a boy she would take him and his younger sisters Anna and Veronica to Washington to show them how the government worked. "She inspired me on so many levels. I'm just a high-school boy. She was the one who educated me. She was taking me to the library when I was four. She taught me and my sisters to read and write before we went to school," says Moore who lives in New York with his wife and producer Kathleen Glynn. "She taught us from an early age that knowledge was the dragon-slayer. And the dragon is ignorance and fear, all those things that are caused by a lack of knowledge and information." That thirst for slaying dragons has made Moore the scourge of the American establishment, on a mission to convince his compatriots to wake up, smell the coffee and reclaim their country from the dangerous right-wing shysters who run it. His acceptance speech at this year's Oscars, just after the war in Iraq had started, stunned Americans. "We live in a time when fictitious election results elect a fictitious president. We live in a time when we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons," he said, evoking both applause and outrage. "Really I had no choice other than to follow my conscience," he says. "I'd made a film about American violence and here we were on the fifth day of yet another war, shooting people all over again." Moore made his name with the documentary Roger and Me, showing how his home town was devastated when General Motors closed the factory that employed most of the locals (including his Irish-American father Frank). But in Bowling for Columbine the activist truly came into his own, allying courage and humour to dogged investigative journalism in a remarkable documentary. He marched two survivors of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre to the Michigan HQ of K-Mart supermarkets. Both had bullets, bought at K-Mart, lodged in their bodies. Moore asks for a refund. The next day a petrified K-Mart slapped a national ban on sales of hand-gun ammunition. After the Oscar speech he took a huge amount of personal abuse for denouncing his government while Americans were in battle. "Hardly a day goes by when my character's not getting assassinated," he says. "Switch on your set any day and you'll hear (he puts on a pompous, state-of-the-nation voice) tonight at 10pm...why Michael Moore hates America." He has just finished a sell-out stand-up tour across the States. The chant that goes up when Moore gets on a roll is: "Impeach Bush." But that's too lenient: "I want him paraded in handcuffs outside a police house as a common criminal because I don't know if there's a greater crime than taking people to war based on a lie. I've never seen anything like Bush and his people. They truly hate our constitution, our rights and liberties. They have no shame in fighting for their corporate sponsors. "I honestly believe they are putting their toe in the water to see if people will go for martial law. After 9/11 we had hundreds of Arab-Americans rounded up and put in prison with no charges. You know, there's an undercurrent of feeling that we may not even have an election next year. If there is another 9/11 a justification may be used to call it off and instal martial law." We British have no room to talk, as Moore will remind us when he launches his UK tour on Sunday at the London Palladium. "What is your excuse for going to war? You have none. Your Prime Minister gave Bush the cover he needed. Well, thank you, Mr Blair. YOU are the one who gave us the Iraq war. I hold you more responsible for this mess than little Georgie. You see, Georgie is an idiot, but you, sir, are not." Dude, Where's My Country? is a call to arms, a guide book on how to win the debate with right-wingers and generally a good laugh. It starts with Moore probing the remarkable family links between the Bushes and the bin Ladens. "How would the British public feel to know that Blair and his family have had financial dealings with bin Ladens for the last 25 years?" he asks. "That after Parliament commissioned a report on a terrorist incident in London 28 pages went missing because they referred to the Saudi royal family? "What if it turned out Blair was so concerned for the safety of the bin Ladens in the UK after one of them had blown up London office blocks he made sure a private plane went round the country picking them all up and flying them out? Just imagine the row. Yet over here it was silence." I ask Moore if money and success has gone to his head. "You don't know me. I have few material needs. So putting money in my hand is like handing me a Molotov cocktail. "I'm going to do damage with it. I'll make sure that my work gets out. That no publisher will ever be able to tell me to take things out. Because I'll put it out myself. The more money I earn, the less they can stop me. Where I come from it's called f*** you money because I don't have to take an ounce of s**t from anybody." Words that, I'm sure, will make Veronica proud. TOMORROW: Michael Moore puts George Bush in the firing lineTHE AWKWARD CONSCIENCE OF A NATION
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