Posted on 04/12/2002 11:42:58 PM PDT by Timesink
Sunday, April 7, 2002 12:00AM EST
Please, a little less of Moore
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By J. PEDER ZANE
It is easy to dismiss Michael Moore as a self-aggrandizing, intellectually lazy gasbag. He is all that and less.
But the provocateur best known for the documentary "Roger and Me" is now the author of a sporadically funny populist rant that is the best-selling book in America, "Stupid White Men ... and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation" (ReganBooks, $24.95, 277 pages).
And as we learned in the 1990s, when a flurry of vicious best sellers from strident right-wingers helped paralyze a presidency, inanity is no bar to influence. Over-the-top screeds -- written in a highly charged narco-prose that stimulates sensations rather than thoughts -- often influence our political and cultural life.
In "Stupid White Men," Moore casts himself as the only person bold enough to express "the truth" about America -- that the United States is a racist, sexist, corrupt nation of moronic consumers (like we haven't heard that before). Writing in the voice of an angry teenager going off on his parents, Moore finds a thousand different ways to say AMERICA STINKS!
"It has become maddeningly clear" Moore writes, "that nothing seems to work [in America]."
"Confusion reigns" in the USA, he continues, the "Dumbest Country on Earth." Our nation "not only churns out illiterate students BUT GOES OUT OF ITS WAY TO REMAIN IGNORANT AND STUPID." Our high schools are breeding grounds of anesthetized mediocrity, "packed with burned-out teenagers shuffling from class to class, dazed and confused, wondering what the hell they're doing there."
How then, has the United States become the richest, most powerful and technologically advanced nation in the world, a land that draws millions of immigrants each year seeking prosperity and freedom? Is ignorance bliss?
Moore doesn't engage such questions in a book which offers little info and even less tainment. Despite his frequent wisecracks, he wants his book to be taken seriously. However, "Stupid White Men" is less manifesto than shtick-fueled rage. Rather than bore his readers with complicated ideas, he provides them frissons of subversive delight by declaring that President Bush is "an idiot leader of an idiot nation." (He also calls Bush the "Thief-in-Chief" because the "President" -- Moore always puts the title in quotes -- "stole" the 2000 election.)
Instead of examining the complex issues that have shaped our criminal justice system, Moore finds it more convenient to proclaim that "our judges and lawyers are more like glorified garbage men, rounding up and disposing of society's refuse -- ethnic cleansing, American society."
Rather than exploring the dynamics of democracy, he asserts that America is corrupt to the bone. Our government does not act in the public interest because the Democrats and Republicans are bag men for monied elite. "We don't pay their bills -- the top 10 percent do, and it is their will that will always be done."
How did it all go awry?
Moore hasn't a clue. Besides, true cultural analysis requires hard work and nuanced thought -- and that's no way to sell books. Better to blame the South for our current political climate. "The South is a place where you can go home at night to your air-conditioned house to plan the weekend's cross-burning and block club barbecue. ... Today the conservative ideology that was born in the Confederate South has the nation in its grip."
Moore might have written a better book had he paid closer attention to his own words. For example, a section on global warming notes that cars account for "almost half the pollutants in our air." Then Moore tells us that although he lives in Manhattan, he owns two cars, including a minivan that gets 15 miles to the gallon.
He drinks bottled water because he doesn't trust his tap and defies New York's recycling laws because he believes his newspapers and cans wind up in the dump anyway. Moore is a portly fellow, but that doesn't stop him from advising us to "lighten up on the food and drink. ... If you and I would eat less and drink less we'd live a lot longer."
These choices, so at odds with Moore's political message, do not make the author a hypocrite. Everybody's life is full of contradictions. But they should have led him to appreciate how many of the problems he bemoans are caused by individuals pursuing their self-interest. America has been shaped far more by freedom than fiat. Greedy fat-cats make the mark, but it is the desires of average Americans that have forged our gas-guzzling consumer society. Nobody makes us eat fast food all day and watch TV all night. We aren't forced to allow racism to endure or to overflow our jails and landfills. For complicated reasons, that is what most Americans want.
These choices are ripe for criticism. The problem is not Moore's legitimate targets, but his lazy method of assault. He finds it easier to decry them than to illuminate the series of seemingly rational choices behind them (only by understanding why, can you make the case for why not). He allows himself and his readers to deny their complicity in the state of the nation by deploying the best friend of lazy minds: conspiracy thinking. THEY -- the stupid white men -- have ruined us. In one of his wackier moments he claims that the recent economic downturn was a fraud concocted by the superrich to prevent ordinary Americans from demanding their "share of the excessive wealth that has been generated in the past ten years."
Despite -- or because of -- its egregious flaws, "Stupid White Men" has struck a nerve. It is hard to tell how many of Moore's readers share his dark vision, and how many enjoy the jolt of reading someone in full lather. But as the Clinton years taught us, passion often trumps thought in modern America, where the weakest books often speak volumes. We dismiss drivel at our peril.
He drinks bottled water because he doesn't trust his tap and defies New York's recycling laws because he believes his newspapers and cans wind up in the dump anyway. Moore is a portly fellow, but that doesn't stop him from advising us to "lighten up on the food and drink. ... If you and I would eat less and drink less we'd live a lot longer."
I see, thanks for clarifying........
........Moore is one of the pigs in "Animal Farm"
The idiot congressperson from Georgia who accused the Administration of having prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attack likely got her ideas from him if the assertions he made on "Moneyline" about the Administration's collusion with the Taliban are contained in his book.
The fact that it apparently is a best seller says acres about what we are dealing with in the country.
First off, fatass, what's that "we" crapola? Everyone knows you're a millionaire, in the top one percent. Give us a break the size of your butt.
Second, You're absolutely damn right that only the top ten percent pay. Because that's exactly what you socialists want. But you then have the total idiocy to then whine about it? Somebody call the WAAAAAHHmbulence!!!!
Sort of like the obese welfare mother who complains she can't feed her children on the amount of food stamps she gets.
This is all a result of left-wing influence on the family and education. His solution would be more left-wing nonsense. Stick a fork in him, he's done!
In this season of awards, I annually bestow my own. These are the Haneys, named for the character played by Pat Buttram on television's "Green Acres."
Mr. Haney was easily the most annoying member of that cast and quite possibly all casts from all programs. He was the wheedling, whining, always manipulative entrepreneur of misfortune, and his appearance at the farm of Oliver Wendall Douglas would quickly drive Douglas to distraction.
The Haneys are a sort of reverse MacArthur Fellowship. The MacArthur Foundation emerges each year to dump great sums of money on various "geniuses" so that those "geniuses" are free to pursue their callings with as much vigor as a lack of concern over funding will allow. If I ever secure full funding for the Haneys, these too will come with wheelbarrows full of gold, but with one condition attached: The winners must agree to stop doing what they have been doing completely and to exit the public stage. The Haneys would be, in short, a bribe designed to encourage those who annoy the country most to simply go away.
Here then, the 2002 Haneys:
Michael Moore. He continues to make movies that very few people who do not subscribe to the Nation watch, and now he's taken to publishing books that very few people who do not subscribe to the Nation read. He has flogged his one interesting achievement, "Roger and Me," into a career of intellectual slapstick for the humorless left. . .
Sounds like a freeper to me.
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