A Critical Look at Michael Moore

Posted to www.marxmail.org on July 26, 2004

In some ways, Michael Moore's rise to fame and fortune is a classic Horatio Alger story. Starting out as the son of a General Motors assembly line worker who lived in blue-collar Flint, Michigan, Moore now sits at the top of the mountain. With his face on the cover of Time Magazine and ticket sales for "Fahrenheit 9/11" breaking all sorts of records, one can say that he has really made it. Since this meteoric rise has been the subject of some debate on the left, we are obligated to come to terms with the Michael Moore phenomenon. Whatever one says about Moore, he is like the proverbial 800 pound gorilla sitting in the doorway demanding our attention: too big to be ignored--both figuratively and literally.

From a lengthy and invaluable New Yorker Magazine profile that ran in the Feb. 16, 2004 issue (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040216fa_fact7), we learn that Moore was born in 1954, educated in a Catholic school and enjoyed a happy and conventional childhood. Like so many people a little too young to have participated directly in the 1960s revolt, he was still affected by lingering cultural and political themes that persisted into the late 1970s at least. Affecting the shaggy look of the "hippies", Moore launched a radio show called "Radio Free Flint" and participated in anti-nuclear rallies. His next step was to publish an "underground" newspaper called the Flint Voice. One contributor was an assembly-line worker named Ben Hamper who went on to write a much-acclaimed memoir titled "Rivethead". Hamper and Moore eventually had a falling out that can only be understood in terms of the latter's transformation into a big-time entrepreneur on the left and the abuse of power that tends to go with it. When Hamper's complaints about Moore's imperiousness were brought up in a May 23, 2004 Guardian interview, the film-maker attributed them to alcohol and drug abuse.

In 1986, Moore was invited to edit Mother Jones magazine, a magazine catering to Birkenstock-wearing, Sierra Club-donating, brie-eating liberals. Before the year was up, Moore was fired by Adam Hochschild, the magazine's publisher who was left a fortune by his father. He was the owner of American Metals, a mining company that did business in Zambia. To Moore's ever-lasting credit, he refused to print an article by Paul Berman, a self-styled anarchist who used to attack the FSLN from the pages of the Village Voice, a New York "alternative" weekly. As Alexander Cockburn put it in a Nation Magazine article, "It turned out that the working-class boy from Flint had ideas of his own. This was never the game plan of the rich boy in San Francisco."

A settlement from Mother Jones over wrongful firing and proceeds from the sale of his house in Flint allowed Moore to make "Roger and Me", a film that was successful beyond his wildest imagination. Originally expecting to show it in church basements for movement groups, he found that it was considered to be a highly marketable item by the Disney corporation, the same company that refused to market "Fahrenheit 9/11" for fear of alienating the Bush administration. Moore instead went with Warner Brothers who paid him three million dollars, an unprecedented sum for a documentary.

It is no surprise that they would pay top dollar for the film, since Moore was and is a consummate entertainer. Although there's hardly been any attention paid to this in the vast amount of literature around Michael Moore, it seems obvious to me that he has been strongly influenced by the early David Letterman, another affable Midwesterner who made a career out of thumbing his nose at the establishment. In Letterman's case, the jokes were always fairly harmless--usually having something to do with the cluelessness of NBC executives. (When comic strip author and radical Harvey Pekar attacked parent company GE's dangerous nuclear plants and Hudson River pollution on Letterman's show, he was never invited back.)

What Moore shares with Letterman is an affinity for college pranks raised to the level of art. For example, Letterman was fond of blaring goofy messages to bemused suburbanites while driving around in a sound-truck. Moore pulls the same stunt in "Fahrenheit 9/11", in this instance using an ice-cream truck loudspeaker to invite members of Congress to read the Patriot Act, something they evidently voted in favor of without having read in advance.

From the New Yorker profile, we discover that Letterman's ex-girlfriend (and source of much of his distinctive wit) Merrill Markoe worked on Moore's short-lived “TV Nation” show. Another Letterman alumnus who worked on the show was Randy Cohen who invented the “monkey cam”--a Letterman show stunt involving a monkey who ran around the studio with a camera strapped to his back. If you mix this sort of irreverence with left-leaning politics, you end up with a formula for success. Key to all this, needless to say, is Moore's on-camera persona which is about as distinctive in popular culture as Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp or Woody Allen's neurotic Jewish New Yorker.

Turning now to the question of Moore's politics, there's no better source for this than a Nov. 17, 1997 article he wrote for the Nation Magazine, posing the question "Is the Left Nuts?" In it, he complains that the left ignores anything that "really matters to the American public." He is also convinced that "there's a good number of you who are simply addicted to listening to yourselves talk and talk and talk-MUMIA! PACIFICA! CUBA! ENOUGH ALREADY!" Against this kind of purist isolationism, Moore urges an orientation to the "bus driver at the airport who told me he's been cut back to a thirty-hour week so the airport commission won't have to pay the health insurance for his asthmatic daughter" or the woman at Sears who sells blouses by day and then waitresses at Denny's from 8 PM. to midnight". In other words, the left should focus on economic issues that were always the stock-in-trade of the Democratic Party and the trade union movement before things got nuts in the 1960s.

This, of course, is a common complaint among others who are trying to "fix" a dysfunctional left. In "Achieving Our Country," Richard Rorty, the celebrated philosopher, wrote that the New Left forsook concerns over health-care and unemployment in favor of protesting the war in Vietnam and "cultural" issues such as abortion rights. In a newly published best-seller titled "What's Wrong With Kansas," Thomas Frank blames Democratic Party losses on the failure to put forward a populist economic program and identifying itself with divisive "cultural" issues.

Key to all of these strategies is a belief that working people in the USA (especially whites) will never be won over to gay rights or a fair trial for Mumia. In an earlier epoch, socialists were never afraid to push for such seemingly "peripheral" concerns. In "What is to Be Done," Lenin would appear to be exactly one of those leftists who Rorty, Frank and Moore are complaining about. In giving an example of how socialists should serve as a "tribune of the people," Lenin cites the German Socialist Party that took up the right of artists to create works that were considered "obscene." Moving forward to the 1960s, it is important to recall that many of the blue-collar workers, such as Ben Hamper, that came to Michael Moore's attention were cultural rebels before they became radicals.

Perhaps the desire to idealize an American working class that has stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting owes more to fantasy than reality. In Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11", we are introduced to Lila Lipscomb, a conservative white woman who flew the American flag every day and who turned against the war after her son was killed in Iraq. Although it goes by without comment in the film, she is married to a black man. Before the "cultural" changes that shook up American society in the 1960s, this would have practically been considered un-American. Social progress is measured in many different ways and the left should not be afraid to embrace it no matter how many feathers are ruffled.

Turning now to "Fahrenheit 9/11," the film that has effectively catapulted him to a level of fame and success that is unparalleled in left circles, we should say at the outset that the film is both a failure and a success. It fails to put forward a coherent explanation of why the USA is in Iraq. It successfully, however, drives a wedge between the ordinary Americans he cares so much about and the government that is killing their sons and daughters--as well as the Iraqis themselves. Although Moore obviously made the film with the intention of removing Bush from the White House--the ostensible reason we are in Iraq--it will make it that much more difficult for Kerry to sustain the war effort. In the final analysis, putting people like Lila Lipscomb and antiwar veterans of the Iraq war on the big screen undermines support for the war whether it is prosecuted by an inept Republican president or a more adroit Democrat who will likely be more successful in broadening the forces arrayed against the Iraqi people.

Turning to the film's analysis of why we are in Iraq, much of it hinges on the analysis of Craig Unger's "House of Bush, House of Saud." Unger is featured prominently in the film and a chapter of his book appears on MichaelMoore.com. In Unger's view, the Saudis exercise an enormous influence on U.S. foreign policy due to their sizable investment in the American economy and their oil supplies. One nearly gets the impression that the USA is a kind of colony in thrall to Saudi power. If they pulled their money out of the country, the USA economy might collapse like a house of cards.

To make things worse, the Bush family is supposedly very intimate with the Saudi monarchs through their Carlyle Group business ties. This case is made in Dan Briody's "The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group," also excerpted on Moore's website. Thus, the failure to successfully prosecute a war on Osama bin-Laden is a function of a secret relationship between the President of the USA and oil sheikhs. This lament about wasting resources on Iraq that could have been better utilized in Afghanistan is, of course, heard prominently in Democratic Party circles, especially from former anti-terrorism czar Richard Clarke. Obviously, Moore does not challenge the prevailing wisdom that the USA has the right to invade a country in pursuit of such a dubious mission. Missing entirely from "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a consideration of what is fuelling Islamic radicalism and why it would resort to such desperate measures such as flying airplanes into the WTC. The road to world peace would seem to line in resolving such grievances.

Taking this one step further, it would require Moore to say something about the occupation of Palestinian land, something that is bitterly resented throughout the Arab and Islamic world. It would also require him to say something about the ties between both the Republican and Democratic Parties on one side and the Israeli government on the other. Any criticisms of Israel half as sharp as his assault on Saudi princes would clearly have condemned the film to inadequate distribution. In the final analysis, Arabs are the one ethnic group that it is permissible to demonize today without restraint.

Running like a blue thread throughout "Fahrenheit 9/11" and all of Moore's films is a hope that the USA can once again return to the values that made it great. In "Roger and Me," he urges GM to respect its employees once again. In "Bowling for Columbine," he hopes that the hatred that has infected American society and led to attacks by rifle-toting youths on fellow students, can be purged from our system and that we can be more like Canada, where gun ownership and a low homicide rate go hand in hand.

The New Yorker profile provides some insights:

"Moore wishes that America would become more like other, gentler countries--'a little bit of Norway, a little bit of Costa Rica,' as he puts it. He believes that the government should regulate companies to prevent them from making an excessive profit. If a company wants to move a factory abroad after American workers have made it profitable, he believes that the company should have to pay reparations to its former employees, just as a husband whose wife has put him through medical school is obliged to pay alimony if he leaves her."

Clearly, what is missing here is an understanding of why the USA has become so committed to downsizing at home and wars abroad. This is not a function of Evil Rulers as much as it is of a need to compete with rival capitalist powers. Something of that message was conveyed in "Roger and Me," but it is entirely dispensed with in "Fahrenheit 9/11." In order to make a film that explained war and economic exploitation in systemic terms, commercial considerations would have to be secondary. Who knows, if Michael Moore someday achieves the wealth and power of Mel Gibson, he might decide to make a film that went against conventional political views as much as "The Passion" went against the religious establishment. Considering the fact that Gibson had plans at one point to bankroll "Fahrenheit 9/11," this does not seem so far-fetched. Moore's next project will deal with the health-care crisis in the USA. One can only hope that he zeros in on the corporate greed of the pharmaceutical industry. That would be a useful metaphor for the crisis of the system as a whole. Such hopes may not be in vain, for in the final analysis Moore--despite all his flaws--is one of us.