Any enemy of George W Bush is a friend of mine. Except for Michael Moore.
OK, so he has his heart in the right place: he opposes Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, corporate greed, Wall Street, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the National Rifle Association. He is also the guy who’s made films like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine, and written books like Stupid White Men and Dude, Where’s My Country, all of which I have enjoyed. But he is such a pain. Someone once referred to him as “America’s answer to Arundhati Roy” — and there are actually some similarities, although Roy is admittedly less obnoxious and doesn’t habitually wear a greasy baseball cap.
Books about Moore, like Roger Rapoport’s Citizen Moore and Jesse Larner’s Forgive Us Our Spins, have described his uniquely abrasive personality in detail. One quick example: when he was editor of the left-leaning Mother Jones magazine (named, tellingly, after Mary Harris Jones, trade union activist and self-described “hell-raiser”) he lasted just a few months, before being sacked. That was because he wanted to pursue a long-time personal vendetta against General Motors through the magazine. The magazine asked him not to. So on the cover of the next issue, in an act of childish defiance, Moore featured a laid-off General Motors worker. After being sacked, Moore sued for unfair dismissal, demanding $22 million in compensation. (He didn’t get it.)
So that is Michael Moore. And Here Comes Trouble is his memoir. Or rather, his “not-a-memoir”, because, as he informs us right in the beginning, it’s “a book of short stories based on events that took place in the formative years of my life”. Great! So it’s just a book of “short stories”. Which presumably means that Moore gets the licence to exaggerate reality, tweak it to his own purpose and, perhaps, where necessary, invent a detail or three. In other words – as some would point out – the book becomes a production that’s not too different from Moore’s documentary films, where the intention is, always, to make an entertainingly barbed point, rather than to necessarily tell the truth. As film critic Richard Schickel once put it, Moore is “the very definition of the unreliable narrator”.
The objective of this book seems to be to build the Michael Moore legend, and his famous ego sprawls, fat and heavy, across its pages. Thus we are treated to stories about what a prodigy he was as a child. How he learned to read and write when he was just four. How by age five he was borrowing ten books at a time from the library. How, as a kid, he not only wrote poems and plays, but also started a magazine. How he even created his own pretend TV show, with his classmates as characters (telling them there were hidden cameras in the school).
This child prodigy, instead of going on to win Nobel Prizes, grew up to develop a Social Conscience approximately the size of Detroit City. We are treated to more stories about his teenage angst for the victims of homophobia and backstreet abortions in a brainlessly conservative American society. And then, before he’s out of his teens, there’s the Coming of Age. Young Michael becomes the youngest elected official in the US, as a member of his school board, fighting fascist teachers. Young Michael starts a crisis centre for troubled teenagers. Young Michael single-handedly shames the Elks association into admitting its first black members. Young Michael drops out of college to start an investigative newspaper, defying the corrupt local mayor and helping to change American laws to protect journalists against police harassment. The attempts at humorous self-deprecation don’t fool anyone: if you want to find Here Comes Trouble in your library, just look in the “autohagiography” section.
Moore is a complex character. He has always campaigned against the rich, but he himself is, now, a multi-millionaire. He loathes the military, yet takes pride in his private army of nine – yes, nine! – ex-Navy SEALS, who he’s hired as bodyguards. He even, despite his famously anti-war philosophy, appears to take unseemly pleasure in describing the bodily damage done by his SEAL bodyguards to would-be assailants. When, for example, a man once jumped on to the stage while he was giving a speech, Moore informs us with relish, “The SEAL grabbed him behind by his belt and collar and slung him off the stage onto the cement floor below. Someone had to mop up all the blood after the SEALs took him away”. Or, when a man tried to attack him with a pencil, he gloats, “The pencil went right into the SEAL’s hand. You ever see a Navy SEAL get stabbed? … The pencil stabber probably became a member of the paper-less society that day, once the SEAL was done with him and his writing instrument”. There are six such bloodthirsty anecdotes that Moore tells in quick succession in the first chapter itself.
No, Michael Moore is not a man I admire. And nor is this a book I’d recommend to anyone. Please read something else instead.
HERE COMES TROUBLE
Michael Moore
Allen Lane
427 pages; Rs 550
