With his documentary, Roger
& Me, Michael Moore first
demonstrated his talent for crying "no
clothes" in the presence (or absence in the case
of Roger Smith of General Motors, who would not meet
with Moore) of the representatives of America's new
imperial class. In print and on the screen, he has
since continued to sharpen his critical skills. (His
film documentary on guns in America, Bowling
for Columbine, is just appearing
as I write.) As Stupid White Men shows,
he mixes muckraking outrage with slapstick humor. It
is as if the feisty editorial Sage of Baltimore, H.
L. Mencken, had come back to life and found himself
on the set of Saturday Night Live.
He is a reincarnated knight-errant, riding full tilt
against the mighty who mislead and exploit ordinary
Americans.
Stupid White
Men was on the New
York Times bestseller list but
received scant attention from critics and reviewers.
Perhaps that is because most of the critics and
reviewers now receive their paychecks from the
mega-corporations that Moore ridicules. He suspected
as much in a TV interview by Donahue that somehow got
past the company censors.
Perhaps the
establishment ignored it because ordinary reviewers
did not know how to categorize the book. It is a
peculiar mix of slashing criticism of the
powers-that-be--sometimes responsibly
documented--with really crappy satirical humor that
tends to go over the top.
HE
SEES A "NIGHTMARE" CENTURY
For Moore, the 21st
century is already the "Nightmare"
century--and 9-11 had not happened yet when he wrote.
Nothing seems to him to be working. Witness the
ballot fiasco in Florida, the health care mess, the
California energy impasse, and so on. (xiii)
Corporate consolidation has made freedom of choice
"a thing of the past." (xiv)
Why, he asks,
has everything gone to pot in America? Because of the
decisions of "Stupid White Men" intoxicated
by the ''sweet stench" (xv) of money and power.
Moore is beside
himself with rage at the way business and government
have combined to spoil the dream of the American
common man and the ideal of the dignity of labor. He
needs to express that rage with humor to keep it from
choking him. To appreciate the resulting mish-mash of
a text, you have to share something of Moore's sense
of betrayal. At least you have to feel regret that
the goal of social and economic equilibrium that
America sought between 1945 and the mid-1970s no
longer seems officially to matter. Then you'll
understand:
YOU DO NOT
COUNT!...you and your fellow
Americans have just been declared irrelevant. Your
services as a citizen, we regret to inform you,
are no longer required. (xvii-xviii)
You might jump
to the conclusion that the Stupid White Men wrecking
America are just the incumbent President and his
circle of corporate friends. Moore begins by
explaining how Bush stole the election to become the
"President" (sic), a.k.a. "The Thief
in Chief." (2) He recounts how Florida's
secretary of state, Katherine Harris, winnowed the
black (mostly Democrat) voting list in Florida long
before the 2000 election. Florida law prohibits
ex-felons from voting. Thirty-one percent of all
black men in Florida have a felony on their record.
(4) Most blacks in Florida are Democrats. Harris
hired a database management firm to remove the names
of all ex-felons from the voting rolls.
But the firm,
instructed by Harris, "also removed thousands of
black citizens who had never
committed a crime in their lives--along
with thousands of eligible voters who had committed
only misdemeanors." (4) Their names were trapped
by a widely cast computer search that went beyond the
category of felon. The search criteria included
"'similar' names to those of the actual
felons," same birth dates as known felons or
similar Social Security numbers.
Additionally,
Moore reports that Harris directed the firm to purge
the names of former Texas residents, all convicted of
felonies in Texas, who had subsequently moved to
Florida. The felons on that list, says Moore,
"had served their time and had all their voting
privileges reinstated" in Texas. (5)
Had this
maneuvering not occurred, says Moore, Gore would have
received enough black votes to beat Bush. (13) Alas,
thanks to brother Jeb and his minion Harris, plus the
support of the conservative Supreme Court, Bush
swiped the Oval Office; so Moore wrote him a
"Dear George" letter impugning his basic
ability to govern. (29-46)
While Republican
Stupid White Men (and their honorary female
co-conspirators) now hold sway in Washington, they
are not alone responsible for wreaking havoc on the
American Dream. Clinton did no better for the little
guy, as Moore sees it--he just knew how to stiff him
with a big dawg smile instead of the squinty scowl
now in vogue.
HE
SWINGS A MACE AT CORPORATE BALONEY
Moreover, Stupid White Men
managing corporations are in cahoots with the
government SWM. Moore was writing before the Enron
and similar corporate scandals. Even then, his view
was that the guys at the top were ripping off the
companies while laying off the workers by the
thousands and pretending that the economy was
tanking. Baloney, Moore said. They were just keeping
the workers "in a constant state of stress,
suspicion, and fear" so that they didn't
question what was really going on. (51) His "Dow
Wow Wow" chapter might have sounded a little
extreme in its criticism of corporate moguls and the
growing gap in income between corporate leaders and
workers when it first appeared. Now that even the
"President" has become a scold of corporate
misbehavior, Moore's accusations do not sound all
that far from the mark.
Stupid White
Men includes chapters on the
evils of white hegemony in America ("Kill
Whitey"); on the degradation of American
educational quality ("Idiot Nation"); on
the decline of ecological quality ("Nice Planet,
Nobody Home"); on the natural superiority of
women ("The End of Men"); and on the
American campaign to blame the poor for our social
ills ("One Big Happy Prison").
The
unilateralist, in-your-face posture of the Bush
administration evokes from Moore a yelp--"We're
Number One!" He has fun constructing a mock
"day in the life of 'President' George W.
Bush," the number one man in the number one
nation. This is mostly Saturday
Night Live slapstick stuff but
the satire bites. We're Number One in military
spending, firearm deaths, recorded rapes, lowest
eighth-grade math scores, millionaires, billionaires,
among other things.
Moore winds up
his expose with a satirical "people's
prayer" to afflict the comfortable. He has
observed that as soon as disease or misfortune
afflicts well-heeled Stupid White types, they abandon
their callous disregard for human welfare and demand
programmatic aid. He figures that the great majority
of Americans in need then will be able to tailgate on
the programs that otherwise never would come into
being.
HE TAPS OLD POPULIST
ROOTS
Moore is one of the few
popular voices today interested in recalling the
virtues of an equalitarian vision that disappeared
with the end of the industrial era. Even fewer seem
interested in correctives that would rescue
"ordinary Americans" from their new place
at the margin, where they get little respect and less
medical coverage.
With Congress
failing to address health insurance and other social
policies, no one can feel confident that our
political system has any inclination to respond to
the needs of ordinary Americans. Just as Congress
preoccupied itself in the late '90s with Bill
Clinton's sexual adventures, it now preoccupies
itself with George W. Bush's military adventures.
Expenditures on welfare for the wealthy (through tax
cuts) and on a military budget with no upper limits
will never allow Congress to serve the vast public
that Moore champions. A change in leadership from one
party to the other will have a negligible effect.
All the more,
then, America needs voices like Moore's, ranting and
raunchy and full of righteous anger. The
corporate-military-governmental solidarity of our
society will lose all capacity to choose alternative
paths without them. Is Moore outrageous? Extreme?
Sure. So is the state of the nation. Ralph Nader and
others will continue to propose specific remedies for
the social and economic ills that accompany
ideological globalism. Moore offers something closer
to the heart and soul of America. He is where the
folk singers are. He may be shouting about current
political and corporate problems, but he is really
tapping our old populist roots. He is speaking for
the 21st century descendants of Walt Whitman's
mechanic and tradesman and farmer and
boatman--America's lively democratic individual. I
wish his book were less Saturday
Night Live and more H. L.
Mencken. But, hey, this knight-errant is on to
something and deserves a cheer.
"GLOBALIZATION
" 