Stoopid White Men indeed...

Telegraph

Only stupid white men would believe Michael Moore
By Damian Thompson
(Filed: 01/01/2004)

If the title Stupid White Men doesn't mean anything to you, then you can't
have been anywhere near a bookshop in 2003. Either that, or you are so used
to picking your way through the piles of Michael Moore books that you no
longer notice them, or the accompanying recommendation: "Staff pick! Really
cool - the book that exposes Dubya as a fascist."
Moore is the American slob in a baseball cap who likes to hint - only hint,
mind - that President Bush had a hand in September 11. He has a huge
following on campuses on both sides of the Atlantic: he, more than anyone
else, has persuaded British students that the current occupant of the White
House is, like, just such a moron.
Stupid White Men was the bestselling non-fiction hardback in Britain last
year, after the Atkins New Diet Revolution; it's now top of the paperback
list. Bowling for Columbine, the feature-length documentary in which Moore
blames a high school massacre on the Republicans, won an Oscar.
Moore's new book, Dude, Where's My Country?, offers his most sophisticated
critique to date of American foreign policy: "We like dictators! They help
us get what we want and they do a great job of keeping their nations
subservient to our galloping global corporate interests."
It takes Moore just a couple of paragraphs to absolve Osama bin Laden of the
destruction of the World Trade Centre. "How could a guy sitting in a cave in
Afghanistan, have . plotted so perfectly the hijacking of four planes and
then guaranteed that three of them would end up precisely on their targets?"
he asks.
Viewers of Bowling for Columbine may find this puzzling, remembering the
film's insistence that "Osama bin Laden used his expert CIA training to
murder 3,000 people"; but Moore regards consistency as the hobgoblin of
little minds. And, besides, his fast-morphing conspiracy theories are all
built on the same, unshakeable foundation. Everything in the world is the
fault of stupid white Americans - in which category he apparently includes
the September 11 plane passengers: he has a stand-up routine in which he
suggests that if the victims had been black, rather than white
"scaredy-cats", they would have had no trouble overpowering the hijackers.
The American Right used to dismiss Moore's material as unfunny agitprop,
unworthy of attention. That is not quite fair. Bowling for Columbine is a
brilliantly constructed documentary; it's hard not to cheer when Moore
embarrasses the K-Mart chain into banning the sale of live ammunition to
teenagers. The books are dismal by comparison, but even they evince the odd
chuckle.
With sales of Stupid White Men creeping up towards four million, the Right
has changed tactics. Its new approach is to denounce Moore as a liar - a
more promising line of attack. And it is certainly true that Bowling for
Columbine turns out to contain more half-truths than an Enron corporate
video.
For example, Moore says that Lockheed Martin manufactures "weapons of mass
destruction" in Littleton, Colorado, the town where the Columbine killings
occurred; he even grills a company executive in front of a scary-looking
rocket in the local factory. In fact, Lockheed Martin doesn't make weapons
in Littleton; it makes weather and communications satellites that are
launched by rocket.
Then there's the scene in which Moore opens an account in a rural bank and
is given the free shotgun offered to new customers. "Don't you think it's a
little dangerous handing out guns in a bank?" he asks. It's a good question.
And the answer is: the bank doesn't normally do anything of the sort.
Customers have to wait six weeks for background checks. According to the
bank, the scene was staged at Moore's request.
Even the documentary's title is dodgy. It's based on reports that the
Columbine killers went bowling on the morning of the massacre. Police
investigators later concluded that the reports were untrue. The film makes
no mention of this.
So generous is Moore's notion of artistic licence that the internet is now
crawling with websites exposing his "lies". Some of his critics have gone
further, and attempted to turn his own methods on himself. A
documentary-maker called Michael Wilson has been following him around,
badgering him for an interview - just as Moore used to do to bloated chief
executives. But Moore isn't talking. (Here's a tip for Wilson: if you want
to catch up with Moore's entourage on one of his British visits, check out
the Ritz.)
Meanwhile, Dude, Where's My Country? is sitting happily in the bestseller
lists. Moore's fans don't care how many fast ones he pulls because, hey,
he's a funny guy. There is nothing the Right can do to dent his popularity.
And perhaps it shouldn't even try.
The truth is that George W Bush owes Moore a debt of gratitude. He wouldn't
be president today if it weren't for the Green candidate, Ralph Nader, who
vacuumed up votes that would otherwise have gone to Al Gore. Moore was
Nader's biggest celebrity backer. So we can be reasonably sure that at least
538 Florida students voted Green because Mike told them to, thereby handing
Dubya his winning margin.
And next time? Strange though it might seem, Moore could help the President
achieve a second term. There he stands, inciting his audience to ever
greater heights of Bush-hatred. The snag is that, although this goes down a
treat in cappuccino-sipping Berkeley, it doesn't play so well among
blue-collar voters who think Saddam deserved to get his ass kicked.
Histrionic invective directed against relatively popular sitting presidents
rarely pays off, as the McGovernites discovered in 1972 and the
Clinton-haters did in 1996. The sheer incontinence of the attacks on Bush by
Moore and his Hollywood friends could help deliver the Midwest to Bush.
And Bush knows it, too. There's a curious passage in Stupid White Men in
which Moore confesses that, on the rare occasions he has met George W or Jeb
Bush, they have teased him in an almost affectionate fashion.
Indeed, the more vigorously Moore attacks the President, the better Bush's
approval ratings. Funny, that. And Moore's lifestyle has been awfully lavish
of late. One doesn't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it makes
you think, doesn't it?







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