Posted on 03/29/2003 4:54:22 PM PST by MadIvan
We should all be grateful to Michael Moore for livening up the lowest-rated Oscars in history. For those brave few who hadn't yet tuned out or fallen into a coma, the voluminous star of Bowling for Columbine picked up his Oscar for Best Documentary and launched into a tirade against America's "fictitious election", its "fictitious President" and his "fictitious reasons" for war with Iraq.
He was greeted with a few cheers and more boos, but took both as evidence of his popularity. After all, most of the booers were only booing the other booers. As he explained afterwards, "The booing that started was way up in the balcony" - that is the nobodies in the cheap seats - "and then the people supporting what I was saying started booing them." If memory serves, that's what Elena Ceausescu told Nicolae as they came in through the French windows.
No one who was seriously interested in using his 45 seconds on worldwide television to recruit new members to the anti-war movement would seek to do so by dredging up Palm Beach County and its rusting Votamatics, neither of which anybody except a dwindling but increasingly deranged bunch of chad-obsessives wants to hear about ever again.
But, if you're interested in using the war, the economy or anything else to hand to promote the Michael Moore global corporate brand, it makes perfect sense. Moore's Oscar showboating was rewarded later in the week when he came in at Number Three on The New York Press's list of the 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers.
To his detractors, it is hard to believe that there are two New Yorkers more loathsome than Michael Moore. To his fans, it is embarrassing to be reminded that, whatever his origins, Mister Blue-Collar Rust-Belt Regular Guy is, in fact, a resident of Manhattan's Upper West Side, where his daughter attends a ritzy private school. Nothing wrong with that, of course: as Moore himself has said, "I'm a millionaire, I'm a multi-millionaire. I'm filthy rich. You know why I'm a multi-millionaire? 'Cause multi-millions like what I do. That's pretty good, isn't it?"
Absolutely. But one of the agreeable features of America (in contrast to Britain's more centralised elite) is that gazillions of multi-millionaires choose to go on living out there in the heartland, in their home states, albeit on the right side of the tracks. For a guy who has made a career out of promoting himself as a working-class denizen of his home town of Flint, Michigan, it seems a little bizarre to choose to live in a neighbourhood so exquisitely refined even the middle-class can't get in.
Moore hit the jackpot 14 years ago with his first film, Roger and Me, nominally about his attempt to interview General Motors' head honcho, Roger Smith. Nobody's heard a peep from Roger since, but the Big Me - Moore - has never looked back. The routine never varies: in his usual disguise as all-American schlub - baseball cap, meticulously uncoiffed hair, shirt untucked, bluejean gusset hanging somewhere round his kneecaps - the multi-millionaire turns up unannounced in the lobby of some wicked multinational or other and demands to see the chairman.
Cindy-Lou says politely he's not available, Moore asks when he'll be available, Cindy-Lou says she can't really say, it might be better if he spoke to someone from Customer Relations, he says he doesn't want to speak to Customer Relations, etc, etc - and all the while the cameras are running until Moore's got enough footage to make Cindy-Lou look like an idiot.
Why bother digging deep when you can get rich skating contemptuously across the surface of American life? The perky receptionist, the bored security guard, the gun nut in the pool hall. In Moore's America, the little people are either squeaky-clean bland or stump-toothed crazy. It is an unsubtle approach but it has them rolling in the aisles abroad. "Moore's latest documentary, a searing look at America's rampant guns and weapons culture, took this year's Cannes film festival by storm, earning the political satirist a 10-minute standing ovation," cooed Caroline Graham in The Sunday Telegraph of Sydney. "Many believe that with Bowling for Columbine, Moore could singlehandedly achieve what tragedies such as the Columbine school shootings, the assassination of John Lennon and the attack on President Ronald Reagan failed to do: end America's obsession with guns."
Well, "many" may believe that, if they happen to be Cannes festival judges or BBC producers. But in America, I'm happy to report, guns are booming: sales are up, and no political aspirant in a competitive election wants to say a word in favour of gun control. Last November, anti-gun Democrats like Kathleen Kennedy Townsend flopped, and the only good news for the party came from the likes of Arkansas Senate candidate Mark Pryor, whose campaign ads made a point of showing him with either his gun or his Bible in his hand, and preferably both. In other words, running as the butt of a Cannes-pandering Michael Moore satire is pretty much a guarantee of victory.
Yet somehow the notion persists that an Upper West Sider adored on the Cote d'Azur is the authentic voice of blue-collar America. The vast bulk of his credibility in this regard derives from his vast bulk. Less of Moore would be a career disaster; he would be just another cadaverous limousine liberal nibbling on his curly endive.
Even in Flint, he was never a regular workin' stiff. He lasted one day on the assembly line. Other than that, he worked his way up through alternative radio shows and progressive magazines. Today, pushing 50 and working on a new film about the links between the Bush and bin Laden families, Moore knows there will always be a market for his shtick. He's a big whale in a small pond: the token funny man in an increasingly humourless Left. Off-camera, the act's not so funny. Here is his initial reaction to September 11, as posted on his website: "Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California - these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!" So Mohammed Atta should have dive-bombed his jet into New Hampshire or Alabama?
September 11 was a great clarifying event - within two or three days, we had adjusted to it and absorbed it, but for a few hours that Tuesday what we said and did as we watched office workers jump to their deaths offered a definitive glimpse into who we really are. It's not the politics - in the heat of the moment, to ascribe the event to Bush's rejection of Kyoto is perfectly understandable - but the stunted ugliness of measuring the justness or otherwise of murder according to how one filled in one's ballot. That's the real Michael Moore.
That may be why increasingly the most trenchant rejections of the bloated narcissist come from his ideological comrades on the Left. Sometimes, indeed, they come from his former colleagues. Alan Edelstein, a producer of Moore's television show The Awful Truth, was suddenly downsized out of a job, just like those General Motors workers in Flint. So, just like Moore, he decided to stalk the boss for a turning-the-tables documentary on why the television star had put him out on the street.
Moore was not amused. He complained to the NYPD, got Edelstein thrown in jail for a day, and had a restraining order slapped on him. Here's how it read: "The defendant knowingly entered and remained unlawfully in a building with intent to harass, annoy and harm … a course of conduct which alarmed and seriously annoyed another person."
Hang on. Isn't that Michael Moore's biographical entry from The Encyclopedia of Motion Pictures? Ah, well. In the journey from Flint to the Upper West Side, people evolve. If they ever remake Roger and Me, he'll make a great Roger.
PUSHING 50?????!!!!!!!!!!
Of all the lies the Stupid White Man who is Michael Moore has perpetrated, this one takes the cake!!!
Well....what can you say about a guy who gets fired from Mother Jones magazine for being too far to the left?
It was a thank you, very pleased to read your stuff and keep up the great work compliment.
This is something that I have done very few times, and the first Canadian.
He is in good company with Ronald Regan and Ollie North.
What intuitive and factual writing. what a difference from the common crud that is so pervasive.
And thank you Ivan for posting his writings.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
