Michael Moore: Dude Where Is My Country?

Reviewed by FEDERICO MONSALVE

IF the end of American imperialism was upon us, Michael Moore would be the first to ride through the sky on some apocalyptic white horse (kindly donated by the United Nations), showering the world (now ruled by Oxfam or the Green Party) with pamphlets about the sins that caused the fall of this great Gomorrah.

Unfortunately for Moore (and probably the rest of us), and as heralded in his latest book, the great deceiver marches on.

Moore approaches the George W. Bush-led, post-September 11 2001 political chaos with the blatant satire that made him a bestselling author with Stupid White Men, and the crusading attitude of his documentaries Roger and Me and Bowling for Columbine.

The message is clear and strong: the American spin-masters, aided by the media, have fed the world a pack of lies about Iraq, perpetuated paranoia about the Middle East and terrorists, and fattened the pockets of oil moguls.

To prove this, Moore does an in-depth analysis of the media and the messages dripping from the Bush Administration and, unlike in Stupid White Men, he meticulously backs everything up with footnotes and a lengthy Sources and Notes section.

Unfortunately, the tone is unfitting. In an attempt to reach what he considers America's common denominator ("65 per cent of American adults [can]not find the United Kingdom on the map ... 92 per cent of us don't have a passport") he uses lukewarm, trivialising jokes to scream at the lies behind the Iraq war and the Patriot Act.

The strength of the book comes in its more serious snippets where Moore controls his ironic nature and uses concise, straightforward data to dismiss modern-day American myths.

Moore's latest manuscript cements his place as the populist Noam Chomski. His is an imperfect but much needed voice for a generation that detests North American intervention around the globe and its suspicious synchronicity with the needs of big business.

Publisher: Penguin/Allen Lane

Price: $45