WITH "Fahrenheit 9/11" still riding high at the box office and a new book titled "Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man" soaring to the best-seller lists, Michael Moore continues to be at the center of public debate. (So much the worse for public debate.) While many agree that Moore traffics in one-sided, nasty agitprop and factually shaky innuendo, quite a few people are willing to recognize him as a scrappy David battling the Goliath of the Bush propaganda machine, a hero who may bend or stretch a few facts but is right about the larger truths. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott even called him "a credit to the Republic."
So who, exactly, is this populist hero? Moore isn't just antiwar and anti-Bush; he is also virulently anti-American. That's a label some right-wing pundits tend to slap on anyone critical of the war and of President Bush. In Moore's case, however, the label fits.
Moore, the 50-year-old filmmaker and author of several books, has made a career of traveling round the world talking about how stupid, brainwashed, selfish, greedy, and otherwise rotten Americans are. He regales British audiences with tales of a National Geographic survey which found that many young Americans cannot find Iraq or England on the map -- neglecting to mention that the survey results for British youth were quite woeful as well. Inviting an audience at Cambridge University to share some packs of Doritos, he comments, according to an account in The New Yorker, "It's still your way, right, to share? You don't want to turn into us -- a society where the ethic is me me me me me me me, [expletive] you." |