When Mike read it wrong

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

• Discount UK Shopping

Related Articles

Wanted: CEOs from India

: There is nothing Michael Moore appears to enjoy more than bashing up the bad guys. In fact he embodies this era’s American cowboy — baseball cap, an oversized check shirt shabbily covering a frame seemingly spun off many Mcdonald’s happy meals, jeans and attitude aplenty.

In 1989, when he first hit the mainstream radar with a documentary, critics were bowled over. Here was a peculiar coming together of two Flint, Michigan natives: General Motors and Moore. The former had closed down its 11 plants in the vicinity, the latter had gotten mad and the result was Roger & Me. As people began being evicted from their homes, Moore mortgaged his own to go after GM head Roger Smith. But as neatly as he exposed corporate callousness, a greater achievement lay in juxtaposing it against the hard choices made by ordinary people. He introduced the world to Rhonda Britton, who was caressing lovely little rabbits in one scene and hacking them to death in another, to put food on her dining table. As far as survival games go, that was as powerfully pathos-ridden an image as any in the archives.

Kindness, sympathy, empathy and all that’s gentle gets short shrift in Mike’s Election Guide 2008. Whether it’s Gladys Simple who wants to know what good it will do to fly an American flag on the back of her Dodge Ram or Betsy Hill who is struggling to cope with a pastor who doesn’t recognise her right to terminate a pregnancy, whether it’s Richie Bouton asking when the first ballot was cast or Bill Nelson who questions why the Electoral College gives special rights to the Iowa and New Hampshire electorate, or whether it’s Rose NgBacThiu being curious about why the Vietnamese had once shot down John McCain, Moore couldn’t feel less for them. All these characters, complete with reality-emphasising mug shots, pin together the opening chapter of the Guide. Its rejoinders may be persuasive, but their tone is uniformly abusive. Only a doofus would ask such questions, right? Often been accused of preaching to the choir, here Moore is bawling them out as if they were Satanites.