Michael Moore: Stupid White Men

By GRAHAM REID

Moore is best known for his '89 documentary Roger & Me, which explored corporate America downsizing communities, specifically General Motors closing a plant in Flint, Michigan and Moore doggedly trying to grab the company chairman Roger B. Smith to ask him about it. It was smart, sassy, pointed and at times poignant infotainment.

Moore has parlayed that approach into the television series The Awful Truth in which he rants about politics, buttonholes corporate bosses and often seems to use the dispossessed or disadvantaged for his own self-righteous purposes.

It has a creepy, exploitive feel about it, like Candid Camera with a large-print political surtext.

This book, initially scheduled for release on September 11 last year, is a collection of well-informed rants against the Bush Administration, race profiling, the dumbing-down of America and so on. It is belligerently reductive in places, funny in others, and takes a sledgehammer approach. The chapters sound more like stand-up rants than considered prose. A book in what he sees as increasingly illiterate America (from Bush on down) to be read aloud perhaps?

But he certainly makes his points and his synopses of the careers of Bush's senior colleagues is alarming. Lord knows what Moore might make of the recent elections; he's certainly been handed more fodder.

The most interesting chapter - aside from that on how the Bush family and associates staged "a coup" for their man to become President - is the introduction to this new edition where Moore outlines how his American publisher initially withdrew the book from sale after 9/11, then said they wouldn't publish at all because the political climate had changed. They wanted chapters removed, headings (like "Kill Whitey") changed, and, because Bush had done a good job since the terrorist attacks, didn't want his election referred to as "a coup".

When it was finally published, unchanged, it became a bestseller.

In large part that is perhaps because Moore says the unspoken about the American political system and does so with aggressive humour.

He fudges often and is unhelpfully unspecific: "Some scientists say there was more pollution in the Los Angeles basin when tens of thousands of Indians and their campfires were there ... "

But he also throws in scary facts (his figures on increasing corporate sponsorship in American schools are frightening, and a warning) and delivers it with steam-hammer energy and amusing outrage. That's infotainment.

Penguin

$24.95