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Found this on WSJ, good clear truth.
STUPID WHITE LIES
Michael Moore, Humbug
He's mendacious and obnoxious, so what accounts for his appeal?
BY KAY S. HYMOWITZ
Monday, July 28, 2003 12:01 a.m.
Recently a wealthy Chicago couple named Drobney announced their plan to bankroll a left-wing talk radio station. They needn't bother. The left already has a multimedia star--and even without a radio station, he's bigger than Rush, has more fans than O'Reilly, and sells books faster than Coulter. Followers plead with this "folk hero for the American people" to run for president. Reviewers compare him to Twain, Voltaire and Swift. Unlike Rush & Co., the appeal of this blue-collar megastar extends far beyond the hoi polloi. Hollywood and Manhattan agents wave gazillion-dollar contracts in front of his face. He wins prestigious awards that will never grace the Limbaugh or O'Reilly dens--Oscars, Emmys, Writers Guild Awards and jury prizes at Cannes (where his latest movie received a record 13-minute standing ovation). People stop him on the streets of Berlin, Paris and London--where, according to Andrew Collins of the Guardian, they consider him "the people's filmmaker."
He is, of course, Michael Moore, author of the best-selling "Downsize This!" and "Stupid White Men" and the director of "Roger and Me" and "Bowling for Columbine." Those unfamiliar with Mr. Moore probably learned about him during the Oscar ceremonies in March, when, a few days into the war in Iraq, he won the award for best documentary and came to the stage to speak--or so he said--for his fellow documentary nominees. "We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times," he intoned. "We live in a time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it is the fictition [sic] of duct tape or the fictition of orange alerts, we are against this war, Mr. Bush! Shame on you, Mr. Bush! Shame on you!"
Well, the speaker ought to know. As critics have pointed out repeatedly, Mr. Moore himself is a world-class expert on "fictition"; in fact, when it comes to truth telling, not to mention logic, you might say that less is Moore. But if the copious charges of lies and distortions don't make a dent, it's because Mr. Moore's fabrications are the very source of his appeal. Not only has he created an enormously clever fictional character whose name is Michael Moore--a contemporary Will Rogers, able to channel Noam Chomsky via Chevy Chase; a working-class, truth-telling schlub in a trucker's hat who shuffles out of his La-Z-Boy to seek answers to folksy questions from the high and mighty--he has also conjured up a fictional America that seductively taps into long familiar populist resentments that have their most recent incarnation in the rage of the antiglobalization left.
In May, I went to see Mr. Moore give a talk to graduating seniors at a liberal-arts college outside New York City, and it was easy to see why the kids went nuts. Mr. Moore recalled the left as I remembered it in the "you-can-change-the-world" 1960s--funny, confident, passionate, idealistic, full of possibility. As you might expect, he poked fun at conservatives, but also at liberals, those long-suffering targets of political satirists. "You must have a conservative in your family--an uncle or someone," he said confidingly. "That person never loses his car keys. He has every key marked: this SUV, that SUV. Our side goes"--he shifts to a timid, whiny voice--" 'Do you know where my car keys are? . . . Where do you want to go to dinner?' 'Gee, I don't know. Where do you want to go to dinner?' Right-wingers go"-he slams the podium and shouts--" Get in the car! We're going to Sizzler!' "
Mr. Moore was humble. He giggled disarmingly at his own jokes. He blushed and looked at his feet during the standing ovation. He told how he was so inexperienced when he made his first movie that, during an interview, Jesse Jackson had to show him how to use his sound equipment. He was also full of concern for the little guy. "Maybe I was raised the wrong way, but my parents taught me we'll be judged by how we treat the least among us." He promised truth in a world of corruption and lies. "When I got out of my seat, and they all rose in standing ovation [at the Oscars], I could just stand there and soak up all the love, blow them a kiss, and get the hell out of here. But there's a little voice, 'You have work to do.' " He was upbeat and inspirational. "Americans are far more progressive than you think. . . . Change this world. Make the playing fields level for everyone. One person can make a difference!"
It was a great act--the operative word here being act. It's best to think of Mr. Moore as always a performer, one who is not only the star of his own show but also its subject matter. And therefore any attempt to understand Mr. Moore or his intense appeal to an alienated left has to begin with the man himself.
Mr. Moore grew up in Flint, Mich., where his father assembled AC spark plugs at General Motors. It was in many respects an ordinary Midwestern working-class boyhood of the 1950s. The young Mr. Moore attended mass with his parents, joined the Eagle Scouts, and learned to shoot; he became a champion marksman, a fact he would mine decades later in "Bowling for Columbine." But Mr. Moore also took to activism at a young age. At 16, he gave a speech in a local contest, condemning the Elks for barring blacks. His speech won the prize, and attracted much media acclaim, including a call from CBS. According to Mr. Moore, it even prompted the Elks to change their policy. In his teens, Mr. Moore briefly joined a seminary, he says--he was a great admirer of the radical priests, the Berrigan brothers--but he soon opted for a more secular pursuit of politics. By 18, he had won a seat on the local school board.
Soon after freshman year, he quit college and started an alternative newspaper called the Flint Voice (later the Michigan Voice), and in 1986 he went to work for the national left-wing magazine Mother Jones. There--not for the first and certainly not for the last time in his life--he managed to alienate his admirers; after four months, he got fired. Mr. Moore claimed political differences, but those at the magazine said he had been utterly unprofessional: arbitrary, suspicious, and impervious to deadlines. In any case, he sued Mother Jones, eventually settling for $58,000, which he used as seed money for "Roger and Me." Though he'd never made a film before, "Roger and Me" was screened at the Telluride film festival, resulting in a distribution deal that made it the highest-grossing nonconcert documentary ever--until "Bowling for Columbine."
Yet for all his fame and achievement, the most important fact about Michael Moore--and the foundation of a populist philosophy that verges on the reactionary--remains his birthplace. Mr. Moore is from Flint the way Odysseus was from Ithaca; his home haunts his every thought and feeling. "This was Flint as I remembered it, where every day was a great day," he says in a voiceover in "Roger and Me," a movie in which he sets out to track down Roger Smith, the General Motors CEO who ordered the factory closings that turned Flint into a rust-belt disaster in the 1980s. The movie is a paean to his beloved birthplace, an evocation of the populist's lost golden age, an industrial counterpart to the agrarian Brigadoon, where life was whole, people were genuine, and everything felt secure. Mr. Moore has a wistful vision of Flint as the birthplace of the modern labor movement with the famous 1937 strike that culminated in the founding of the United Auto Workers, which he presents as a progressive union that integrated the assembly lines and secured its members health-care benefits and enough money to buy homes and cars of their own. He evokes a vanished time, when laborers and corporate elites joined in a mutual spirit of loyalty and honest exertion. "My dad didn't live with this kind of fear," he has said of contemporary job instability. "The social contract then was, if you worked hard and the company did well, he did well."
Mr. Moore's image of Flint makes him the ideal poet of the Naderite left. The city symbolizes the sadness and populist outrage over a world lost to the New Economy and its voracious global corporation. In "Roger and Me," the camera lingers on block after block of boarded-up houses, and Mr. Moore interviews desperate people, some being evicted from their homes. The fallen landscape is for Mr. Moore a symbol of a lost world, in which people like the laboring men of Flint made real stuff--steel, cars, trucks--before being swept away by the flabby and artificial postindustrial economy.
Though not without its appeal, Mr. Moore's vision oozes with more 1950s nostalgia than a Loretta Young fan club. There's hardly a hint of the mechanical repetition endured by the men and women who bolted thingamajigs to widgets on the assembly line; one of the workers interviewed in "Roger and Me" says he is happy to escape "the prison" of the GM factory floor, even though he's taken a cut in salary, but the director does not seem to notice. And while it is true that the UAW was integrated, Flint was hardly an Eden of racial harmony. As Jim Lawrence, a black labor activist at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, describes it, during the 1960s "the union gave foremen a blank check to mistreat blacks and keep them out of the high-rate machine jobs and the skilled trades."
More misleading still is the director's melodramatic narrative of corporate downsizing and Flint's decline. During Mr. Moore's golden childhood, when his father was assembling spark plugs, the U.S. was the world's pre-eminent manufacturer. But by the 1980s, that world was passing--and not because of black-mustachioed CEO villains. For the first time, as other industrial nations recovered fully from World War II, American companies were battling genuine competition from abroad; by 1980, the U.S. commanded only 25% of manufacturing output, down from 42% in 1962. Especially hard hit were the heavy industries of the rust belt like the automotive companies. As cheap, well-made foreign cars flooded the market, industries introduced ad campaigns to "buy American." But people were not easily dissuaded from purchasing Honda Civics when their last Impala had dropped its transmission and its muffler.
Faced with these realities, companies had no choice but to cut costs and improve quality and productivity. They laid off workers, and organized those who were left into teams that had to take responsibility for the quality of their product. It wasn't just blue-collar heads that rolled. Restructuring, aided by waves of computerization, meant wiping out entire layers of management, a process that was bloody and sometimes deeply unjust. Mr. Moore is right that CEOs often compensated themselves royally, while their downsized ex-employees worried about buying shoes for their kids. But the fact is that many industries emerged from the carnage more competitive and better equipped to avoid layoffs in future recessions. Back in 1988 Ross Perot, GM's most prominent critic before Mr. Moore, quipped that dealers complained that "when you step on the accelerator, a Cadillac needs to move." Today, as just one example of the success of the nation's industrial restructuring, the Cadillac is moving again, America's luxury competitor to the Lexus and BMW--and talk about Japan as No. 1 stopped years ago.
In "Downsize This!," Mr. Moore attempted to elaborate on the theme of the downsized economy where "Roger and Me" left off, but the book's description of a rust-belt dystopia of pink slips and unemployment checks was out of date long before it hit the bookstores. By 1996, the number of jobs and heft of paychecks in the Midwest had improved markedly. In 1998, the Department of Commerce was writing that "more flexible, market-oriented companies have generated hundreds of thousands of jobs" in Michigan. A 2001 Michigan Economic Development Corp. report noted that with the exception of still-depressed Flint, the state's metropolitan areas saw an increase in personal income between 1989 and 1998, with income rising more than 20% in places like Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids.
Stuck in the Walter Reuther past, Mr. Moore can make no sense of this. A while back, he was appalled when The Nation asked him to be part of a lecture cruise, "to hold seminars during the day and then dock at Saint Kitts at night!" he hissed derisively, as if it were still the era when plutocrats in tuxedos and women in gowns and diamonds dined on caviar and champagne with the ship's captain, while workingmen scrimped for a week's vacation at a dank lake bungalow. He seems not to know that plumbers from Milwaukee and secretaries from Akron fill Caribbean cruise ships these days (though probably not those sponsored by The Nation), and that factory workers often sport two cars--and a boat on a trailer--in their driveways. Our economic system has "got to go," he told Industry Central, before admitting, "Now don't ask me what to replace it with because I don't know." How convenient. He can dwell in his mythical land of Flint and never face the manifest truth that the system that downsized and restructured with such turmoil ultimately improved living standards for millions, while at the same time absorbing huge numbers of poor immigrants.
Mr. Moore is hardly the first to engage in a little nostalgic mythmaking. What makes him unique is his willingness to construct his myths on a scaffolding of calculated untruths. It's an irony worth savoring. Mr. Moore's chief conceit is that he is the lonely truth teller, seeking out the story no one else is brave enough to touch. He repeatedly blasts the media for ignoring issues that only he, a lowly college dropout, has the courage to bring before a hoodwinked public. "In the beginning there was a free press--well not really, but it sounded good," the announcer of his TV series, "The Awful Truth," would say as the show opened. But the awful truth is that Mr. Moore himself is a virtuoso of lying--which is the only way he can give the appearance of truth to his untenable theories.
Let's begin with his bold-faced lies. In an appearance on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" in March 2002, Mr. Moore announced that during the period that planes were grounded for two days after the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration allowed a Saudi jet to whisk away bin Laden family members over FBI objections. As Snopes.com, an Internet site devoted to tracking down urban legends, points out, the planes did pick up bin Laden family members--on Sept. 18 and 19, days after commercial flights had already begun flying again--and they did so only after the FBI had questioned the departing Saudis. At the college talk, I witnessed another stunner, when Mr. Moore announced--without so much as a blip on the polygraph line--that even though the media report that children in intact families are better off, "every study shows that's a big lie. Children of single mothers do better in life."
Then there are lies of omission, a genre that reaches its apogee in the movie "Bowling for Columbine." Prompted by the horrific murders by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999, "Bowling" is Mr. Moore's putative attempt to explore why America endures so much more gun violence than other industrialized countries. It seems to make sense when he interviews the punk singer Marilyn Manson, whose violent lyrics the Columbine killers favored. Yet Mr. Moore's point is not what you'd expect. Objecting that to "scapegoat" Mr. Manson for the murders makes as much sense as blaming bowling, since the killers supposedly bowled on the morning of the murders, Mr. Moore listens with reverence to Mr. Manson's theory--which happens to be Mr. Moore's own--that Americans are violent because we live in a "culture of fear." Never mind that the investigators at Columbine have concluded that the killers did not go bowling that morning; the larger point is that Marilyn Manson chose to name himself after Charles Manson, one of America's most infamous mass murderers. Mr. Moore says no word about any of this.
Michael Moore, Humbug
He's mendacious and obnoxious, so what accounts for his appeal?
BY KAY S. HYMOWITZ
Monday, July 28, 2003 12:01 a.m.
Recently a wealthy Chicago couple named Drobney announced their plan to bankroll a left-wing talk radio station. They needn't bother. The left already has a multimedia star--and even without a radio station, he's bigger than Rush, has more fans than O'Reilly, and sells books faster than Coulter. Followers plead with this "folk hero for the American people" to run for president. Reviewers compare him to Twain, Voltaire and Swift. Unlike Rush & Co., the appeal of this blue-collar megastar extends far beyond the hoi polloi. Hollywood and Manhattan agents wave gazillion-dollar contracts in front of his face. He wins prestigious awards that will never grace the Limbaugh or O'Reilly dens--Oscars, Emmys, Writers Guild Awards and jury prizes at Cannes (where his latest movie received a record 13-minute standing ovation). People stop him on the streets of Berlin, Paris and London--where, according to Andrew Collins of the Guardian, they consider him "the people's filmmaker."
He is, of course, Michael Moore, author of the best-selling "Downsize This!" and "Stupid White Men" and the director of "Roger and Me" and "Bowling for Columbine." Those unfamiliar with Mr. Moore probably learned about him during the Oscar ceremonies in March, when, a few days into the war in Iraq, he won the award for best documentary and came to the stage to speak--or so he said--for his fellow documentary nominees. "We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times," he intoned. "We live in a time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it is the fictition [sic] of duct tape or the fictition of orange alerts, we are against this war, Mr. Bush! Shame on you, Mr. Bush! Shame on you!"
Well, the speaker ought to know. As critics have pointed out repeatedly, Mr. Moore himself is a world-class expert on "fictition"; in fact, when it comes to truth telling, not to mention logic, you might say that less is Moore. But if the copious charges of lies and distortions don't make a dent, it's because Mr. Moore's fabrications are the very source of his appeal. Not only has he created an enormously clever fictional character whose name is Michael Moore--a contemporary Will Rogers, able to channel Noam Chomsky via Chevy Chase; a working-class, truth-telling schlub in a trucker's hat who shuffles out of his La-Z-Boy to seek answers to folksy questions from the high and mighty--he has also conjured up a fictional America that seductively taps into long familiar populist resentments that have their most recent incarnation in the rage of the antiglobalization left.
In May, I went to see Mr. Moore give a talk to graduating seniors at a liberal-arts college outside New York City, and it was easy to see why the kids went nuts. Mr. Moore recalled the left as I remembered it in the "you-can-change-the-world" 1960s--funny, confident, passionate, idealistic, full of possibility. As you might expect, he poked fun at conservatives, but also at liberals, those long-suffering targets of political satirists. "You must have a conservative in your family--an uncle or someone," he said confidingly. "That person never loses his car keys. He has every key marked: this SUV, that SUV. Our side goes"--he shifts to a timid, whiny voice--" 'Do you know where my car keys are? . . . Where do you want to go to dinner?' 'Gee, I don't know. Where do you want to go to dinner?' Right-wingers go"-he slams the podium and shouts--" Get in the car! We're going to Sizzler!' "
Mr. Moore was humble. He giggled disarmingly at his own jokes. He blushed and looked at his feet during the standing ovation. He told how he was so inexperienced when he made his first movie that, during an interview, Jesse Jackson had to show him how to use his sound equipment. He was also full of concern for the little guy. "Maybe I was raised the wrong way, but my parents taught me we'll be judged by how we treat the least among us." He promised truth in a world of corruption and lies. "When I got out of my seat, and they all rose in standing ovation [at the Oscars], I could just stand there and soak up all the love, blow them a kiss, and get the hell out of here. But there's a little voice, 'You have work to do.' " He was upbeat and inspirational. "Americans are far more progressive than you think. . . . Change this world. Make the playing fields level for everyone. One person can make a difference!"
It was a great act--the operative word here being act. It's best to think of Mr. Moore as always a performer, one who is not only the star of his own show but also its subject matter. And therefore any attempt to understand Mr. Moore or his intense appeal to an alienated left has to begin with the man himself.
Mr. Moore grew up in Flint, Mich., where his father assembled AC spark plugs at General Motors. It was in many respects an ordinary Midwestern working-class boyhood of the 1950s. The young Mr. Moore attended mass with his parents, joined the Eagle Scouts, and learned to shoot; he became a champion marksman, a fact he would mine decades later in "Bowling for Columbine." But Mr. Moore also took to activism at a young age. At 16, he gave a speech in a local contest, condemning the Elks for barring blacks. His speech won the prize, and attracted much media acclaim, including a call from CBS. According to Mr. Moore, it even prompted the Elks to change their policy. In his teens, Mr. Moore briefly joined a seminary, he says--he was a great admirer of the radical priests, the Berrigan brothers--but he soon opted for a more secular pursuit of politics. By 18, he had won a seat on the local school board.
Soon after freshman year, he quit college and started an alternative newspaper called the Flint Voice (later the Michigan Voice), and in 1986 he went to work for the national left-wing magazine Mother Jones. There--not for the first and certainly not for the last time in his life--he managed to alienate his admirers; after four months, he got fired. Mr. Moore claimed political differences, but those at the magazine said he had been utterly unprofessional: arbitrary, suspicious, and impervious to deadlines. In any case, he sued Mother Jones, eventually settling for $58,000, which he used as seed money for "Roger and Me." Though he'd never made a film before, "Roger and Me" was screened at the Telluride film festival, resulting in a distribution deal that made it the highest-grossing nonconcert documentary ever--until "Bowling for Columbine."
Yet for all his fame and achievement, the most important fact about Michael Moore--and the foundation of a populist philosophy that verges on the reactionary--remains his birthplace. Mr. Moore is from Flint the way Odysseus was from Ithaca; his home haunts his every thought and feeling. "This was Flint as I remembered it, where every day was a great day," he says in a voiceover in "Roger and Me," a movie in which he sets out to track down Roger Smith, the General Motors CEO who ordered the factory closings that turned Flint into a rust-belt disaster in the 1980s. The movie is a paean to his beloved birthplace, an evocation of the populist's lost golden age, an industrial counterpart to the agrarian Brigadoon, where life was whole, people were genuine, and everything felt secure. Mr. Moore has a wistful vision of Flint as the birthplace of the modern labor movement with the famous 1937 strike that culminated in the founding of the United Auto Workers, which he presents as a progressive union that integrated the assembly lines and secured its members health-care benefits and enough money to buy homes and cars of their own. He evokes a vanished time, when laborers and corporate elites joined in a mutual spirit of loyalty and honest exertion. "My dad didn't live with this kind of fear," he has said of contemporary job instability. "The social contract then was, if you worked hard and the company did well, he did well."
Mr. Moore's image of Flint makes him the ideal poet of the Naderite left. The city symbolizes the sadness and populist outrage over a world lost to the New Economy and its voracious global corporation. In "Roger and Me," the camera lingers on block after block of boarded-up houses, and Mr. Moore interviews desperate people, some being evicted from their homes. The fallen landscape is for Mr. Moore a symbol of a lost world, in which people like the laboring men of Flint made real stuff--steel, cars, trucks--before being swept away by the flabby and artificial postindustrial economy.
Though not without its appeal, Mr. Moore's vision oozes with more 1950s nostalgia than a Loretta Young fan club. There's hardly a hint of the mechanical repetition endured by the men and women who bolted thingamajigs to widgets on the assembly line; one of the workers interviewed in "Roger and Me" says he is happy to escape "the prison" of the GM factory floor, even though he's taken a cut in salary, but the director does not seem to notice. And while it is true that the UAW was integrated, Flint was hardly an Eden of racial harmony. As Jim Lawrence, a black labor activist at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, describes it, during the 1960s "the union gave foremen a blank check to mistreat blacks and keep them out of the high-rate machine jobs and the skilled trades."
More misleading still is the director's melodramatic narrative of corporate downsizing and Flint's decline. During Mr. Moore's golden childhood, when his father was assembling spark plugs, the U.S. was the world's pre-eminent manufacturer. But by the 1980s, that world was passing--and not because of black-mustachioed CEO villains. For the first time, as other industrial nations recovered fully from World War II, American companies were battling genuine competition from abroad; by 1980, the U.S. commanded only 25% of manufacturing output, down from 42% in 1962. Especially hard hit were the heavy industries of the rust belt like the automotive companies. As cheap, well-made foreign cars flooded the market, industries introduced ad campaigns to "buy American." But people were not easily dissuaded from purchasing Honda Civics when their last Impala had dropped its transmission and its muffler.
Faced with these realities, companies had no choice but to cut costs and improve quality and productivity. They laid off workers, and organized those who were left into teams that had to take responsibility for the quality of their product. It wasn't just blue-collar heads that rolled. Restructuring, aided by waves of computerization, meant wiping out entire layers of management, a process that was bloody and sometimes deeply unjust. Mr. Moore is right that CEOs often compensated themselves royally, while their downsized ex-employees worried about buying shoes for their kids. But the fact is that many industries emerged from the carnage more competitive and better equipped to avoid layoffs in future recessions. Back in 1988 Ross Perot, GM's most prominent critic before Mr. Moore, quipped that dealers complained that "when you step on the accelerator, a Cadillac needs to move." Today, as just one example of the success of the nation's industrial restructuring, the Cadillac is moving again, America's luxury competitor to the Lexus and BMW--and talk about Japan as No. 1 stopped years ago.
In "Downsize This!," Mr. Moore attempted to elaborate on the theme of the downsized economy where "Roger and Me" left off, but the book's description of a rust-belt dystopia of pink slips and unemployment checks was out of date long before it hit the bookstores. By 1996, the number of jobs and heft of paychecks in the Midwest had improved markedly. In 1998, the Department of Commerce was writing that "more flexible, market-oriented companies have generated hundreds of thousands of jobs" in Michigan. A 2001 Michigan Economic Development Corp. report noted that with the exception of still-depressed Flint, the state's metropolitan areas saw an increase in personal income between 1989 and 1998, with income rising more than 20% in places like Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids.
Stuck in the Walter Reuther past, Mr. Moore can make no sense of this. A while back, he was appalled when The Nation asked him to be part of a lecture cruise, "to hold seminars during the day and then dock at Saint Kitts at night!" he hissed derisively, as if it were still the era when plutocrats in tuxedos and women in gowns and diamonds dined on caviar and champagne with the ship's captain, while workingmen scrimped for a week's vacation at a dank lake bungalow. He seems not to know that plumbers from Milwaukee and secretaries from Akron fill Caribbean cruise ships these days (though probably not those sponsored by The Nation), and that factory workers often sport two cars--and a boat on a trailer--in their driveways. Our economic system has "got to go," he told Industry Central, before admitting, "Now don't ask me what to replace it with because I don't know." How convenient. He can dwell in his mythical land of Flint and never face the manifest truth that the system that downsized and restructured with such turmoil ultimately improved living standards for millions, while at the same time absorbing huge numbers of poor immigrants.
Mr. Moore is hardly the first to engage in a little nostalgic mythmaking. What makes him unique is his willingness to construct his myths on a scaffolding of calculated untruths. It's an irony worth savoring. Mr. Moore's chief conceit is that he is the lonely truth teller, seeking out the story no one else is brave enough to touch. He repeatedly blasts the media for ignoring issues that only he, a lowly college dropout, has the courage to bring before a hoodwinked public. "In the beginning there was a free press--well not really, but it sounded good," the announcer of his TV series, "The Awful Truth," would say as the show opened. But the awful truth is that Mr. Moore himself is a virtuoso of lying--which is the only way he can give the appearance of truth to his untenable theories.
Let's begin with his bold-faced lies. In an appearance on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" in March 2002, Mr. Moore announced that during the period that planes were grounded for two days after the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration allowed a Saudi jet to whisk away bin Laden family members over FBI objections. As Snopes.com, an Internet site devoted to tracking down urban legends, points out, the planes did pick up bin Laden family members--on Sept. 18 and 19, days after commercial flights had already begun flying again--and they did so only after the FBI had questioned the departing Saudis. At the college talk, I witnessed another stunner, when Mr. Moore announced--without so much as a blip on the polygraph line--that even though the media report that children in intact families are better off, "every study shows that's a big lie. Children of single mothers do better in life."
Then there are lies of omission, a genre that reaches its apogee in the movie "Bowling for Columbine." Prompted by the horrific murders by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999, "Bowling" is Mr. Moore's putative attempt to explore why America endures so much more gun violence than other industrialized countries. It seems to make sense when he interviews the punk singer Marilyn Manson, whose violent lyrics the Columbine killers favored. Yet Mr. Moore's point is not what you'd expect. Objecting that to "scapegoat" Mr. Manson for the murders makes as much sense as blaming bowling, since the killers supposedly bowled on the morning of the murders, Mr. Moore listens with reverence to Mr. Manson's theory--which happens to be Mr. Moore's own--that Americans are violent because we live in a "culture of fear." Never mind that the investigators at Columbine have concluded that the killers did not go bowling that morning; the larger point is that Marilyn Manson chose to name himself after Charles Manson, one of America's most infamous mass murderers. Mr. Moore says no word about any of this.
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