Michael Moore: Stupid white man
My good friend Matt has always had Michael Moore down as a bit of an idiot, but then again, he often thinks people are idiots. Sometimes for such trivial offences as not thinking.
Anyway, I took this with a pinch of salt. Bowling for Columbine is pretty decent, and what I saw of TV nation was generally both funny and right on. But it turns out that on this occasion Matt is right!
In the flat I was staying in lately there were two copies of Stupid White Men… so I took one. It’s one of the worst books I’ve ever read. Not only is the style brash, squanderingly antagonistic towards the sympathetic ear of the reader, and ineloquent, but much of the substance is… well… lacking in substance. Below are three of the most egregious examples.
New York’s water supply … is collected and stored in twenty-two open-air reservoirs in the Catskills…
an acquaintance remarked … how wonderful it is to boat on the reservoir.
“Boat?” I cried. “You’re boating in my drinking water?”
That was when the cases of Evian began entering my apartment
How much of an idiot is he? Had he presumed there existed several hermetically sealed huge lakes in the hills. And why does he care so much about people boating but not fish dying. Does this man not have reflective capacity? This extract of the book is, in fact, a pretty good example of the short-sighted, “me me me” rich American idiocy he rails against in the rest of the book.
After the Soviet Union lost over twenty million citizens in World War II, it’s no surprise that they sought insurance against future invasion by seizing and dominating nearly every country that bordered them
Has he not heard of the non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia which saw Russia occupy the Baltics and half of Poland right at the start of the second world war, before they lost the 20 million, and actually purely as an aggressive expansionist measure? The man’s wilful misinterpretation of history makes you wonder about his research into and manipulation of present day facts.
Thirdly, virtually the whole of the “We’re number one” chapter is idiotic and often offensive. I laugh a lot at offensive jokes, but they must justify themselves by either being hilarious or insightful. His are neither. What is the point of writing a chapter which jokingly suggests all protestants in Northern Ireland convert to catholicism, and seriously lays out high school level manifestos for creation of peace in the Balkans and the Middle East.
At the end of the book I felt appalled that, at it’s time of publication, it was seen as a provocative shining light for the American left. Thank god for the rise of the Daily Show.
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Tags: michael moore, stupid white men