Stupid White Men

by Michael Moore

Regan Books

 
It must be the current mood of the country -- us being at war and all -- but the top two bestsellers on the New York Times non-fiction list are this book and Bias by Bernard Goldberg, both political in nature. While Bias is a newsman's careful look at media distortion, Michael Moore's latest is more of shotgun blast rant against what he feels is wrong with America. Given his incredible liberal slant, most of what he proposes as our nations ills revolves around George W. Bush (although Bill Clinton gets his due spanking, as well) and the greed of large corporations. For those familiar with his previous works -- such as the film Roger And Me, about the loss of jobs in his hometown of Flint, Michigan -- will find this material rather repetitive, but in many cases, it bears repeating.

Moore correctly articulates that many in this country feel ill at ease, disgusted or saddened by the state of our union. From a political system completely out of touch with those it claims to serve to overpriced material goods that only work for ten minutes (his account of purchasing a new Volkswagen Beetle, only to find it wouldn't start if not started every day, is hilarious), to be purchased with ever-decreasing amounts of money, quite a few of us look around and say why. Moore gives us many reasons why, and sometimes he hits, sometimes he misses.

When he focuses his attention on Bush, he is at his best. The chapter "Dear George" is a laundry list of the offenses of our current President, a man who can charitably called "ill-suited" for the job he finds himself in. A failed businessman -- in the sense that most of the companies he was connected with went under, though of course, not before Bush and his buddies first picked the corpse clean -- a trigger-happy governor of the leading advocate of government murder in the nation, a man who has lied about his military record, arrest record, and dozens of other similar issues, yet has one of the higher approval ratings in Presidential history. Bombing foreigners has a way of doing that. Moore takes Dubya to task for these and many other issues, and makes you grin while doing it. When he falters -- his feelings of white guilt, for example -- he sounds like a clone of Teddy Kennedy or some other vile personage, but in the final accounting, Michael Moore has done a brave and necessary service to a nation he still feels proud to call home. By showing that our emperor has no clothes -- and if he does, he probably scammed them off a voter -- he fights what he knows to be an uphill battle. To have a number one bestseller out of it bodes well for our nation's mental health.

Michael Moore: http://www.michaelmoore.com

James Mann