Michael Moore's new,
best-selling book, Stupid White Men, is a sometimes funny, liberal-left rant
against the Bush administration and the political and social status quo in the
US. Stupid White Men (he mostly means those 'stupid white men' in power) is a book
written before 9/11.
The release of the book was
supposed to be on 9/12 of last year, and Moore was going to start a book
promotional tour on that day as well. Both the publisher and Moore decided to
postpone the release of the book and the tour for a few weeks.
Then HarperCollins suddenly
demanded that Moore re-write big chunks of his book to conform to what the
"Suits" at HarperCollins saw as post-9/11 patriotism. HarperCollins
wanted to become "The 9/11 publisher," and, well, Moore's anti-corporate
and anti-Bush diatribe no longer fit into the strategic plan. Moore refused to
change a word of his book, so HarperCollins threatened to shred all 50,000
copies already printed and to prevent anyone from publishing the book for at
least a year. It was a stalemate, and Moore wasn't sure how to fight the
censorship he was facing.
In January, Moore spoke at a New
Jersey meeting of "Citizen Action" where he told the story of his
book being censored by HarperCollins. A librarian in the audience got angry and
contacted other librarians, and they started raising hell on the Internet
pressuring HarperCollins to release the book. This got Moore's confidence up
and finally HarperCollins "blinked".
Although HarperCollins was not
enthusiastic about the whole thing, Moore began his book tour in February.
Suddenly, Moore had a best-seller on his hands: number one at Amazon, four
weeks at number one on the New York Times Best Sellers List, and number one on
the Best Sellers Lists in England, Ireland and Canada. All this despite the
fact that the corporate media pretty much ignored the book.
The fact that Stupid White Men
is so popular shows that the mood of Americans is far more complex than the
impression the media tries to create through their ad nauseum repetition of
Bush's approval ratings being 70-80%. Moore makes this point in public
speeches, explaining that there is a hunger for the truth – about the stolen
Presidential elections, the recession, social inequality, etc. – in the US
despite the corporate media's relentless drumbeat of patriotism, war and
corporate values.
The reason that Stupid White
Men's becoming a popular book might make the powers-that-be nervous is not that
it is a very radical book, but that it contains just enough questions, observations,
interesting facts, and righteous outrage that it just might get some of us
working folks thinking about what Moore's jokes and facts all add up to.
Picking a fairly random statistic from Stupid White Men: "The starting pay
for a pilot at American Eagle is $16,800 a year. Never let someone fly you up
in the air who's making less than the kid at Taco Bell." Funny stuff, but
some of us may also think: never let a private corporation run an airline.
Unfortunately, Moore pulls a lot
of punches throughout the book. For example, he targets the theft of the
Presidential elections by Bush, the Supreme Court, and the big business media
("A Very American Coup") – but in doing so, Moore doesn't attempt a
deeper critique (or satire) of the undemocratic electoral college, the
inevitability of big business money running the show, or the need for a mass
workers' party.
When Moore criticizes Enron
(writing before the Enron scandal exploded onto the scene) and corporate greed
in a chapter called "Dow Wow Wow," he doesn't go further, even in a
joking way, to show the inevitability of corporate greed in a capitalist
system. Nor does he explain how capitalism creates many of the problems he
attacks throughout the book.
Another example of Moore pulling
up short is in the best and funniest chapter of the book, the chapter on racism
called "Kill Whitey." Moore uses some clever angles and "in your
face" provocations to show the liberal hypocrisy regarding racism, and
also how racism is horribly alive and well in the US. But, as in the rest of
the book, Moore says that any solutions are to be achieved by convincing those
in power, like corporate executives and the government, rather than taking
power away from them.
The weakest part of Moore's book
is where he deals with the Democrats. Moore is constantly waffling on the
question of breaking with the big business Democratic Party. He claims that the
Democrats don't have any guts – but what about a guy (Moore) who used to
promote the Labor Party, who one minute declares that the Democrats should fuse
with the Republicans and be done with it, and in the next minute urges
"real" Democrats to find their "roots".
He advises people to "vote
for the Democratic or Green candidates for congress in 2002," and later in
the book lists Democrats he would like to see removed from office who he says
have been soft on Republicans. Well, it's a pretty short list of bad Democrats
- what about the rest of them? All but one of the Democrats in Congress
supported the war in Afghanistan. Kennedy and Kerry, who both voted for NAFTA,
are missing from the list of bad Democrats. Moore doesn't have the guts to say
they're all bad, i.e. tools of big business, even though Moore endorsed Nader
in the last election (although he even back slided on that in the end).
When all is said and done,
Stupid White Men is pretty funny and somewhat insightful. It reminds people
that before all the flag-waving, there was a lot to be pissed off about – like
the "Bush Coup", rising inequality, "globalization", police
brutality, the death penalty, the state of education and health care, etc.
Moore touches on a lot of these issues that the big business media and the
government have tried to smother under all those American flags.
However, Stupid White Men is pretty tame and shallow as a political critique of the current political and economic system. Nowhere does Moore use the "S" word (socialism), to at least acknowledge that there are alternatives to capitalism. In fact, Stupid White Men can't even be described as anti-capitalist at all, so it makes you wonder why HarperCollins was so bent on censoring it. And if relatively mild stuff like Stupid White Men barely makes it past the shredder, we can assume that while "the truth is out there," corporations are doing their best to turn it into confetti.
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and film reviews, check out the SP sitemap.