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Dude, Where's My Country?
Michael Moore
Allen Lane, 217 pp
Review first published in Third Way.
According to some he has a brilliant mind, incisive wit, formidable investigative skills, and is a man-of-the-people giant-killer. Others would say it is simply due to the fact that hearing an American speaking out against Bush is (with apologies to Dr Johnson) like seeing a dog walking on its hindlegs - it's not that it's done well but that it's done at all.
According to the cover, someone at The Independent absurdly considers him a 'comic genius'. If that was said in connection with this book (which is very hard to believe, though the quote is not to be found on the paper's online archive), it confirms what they say about both a friend in need and the first casualty of war.
One has to be glad that Moore is around. He is an excellent filmmaker for one thing. Having such a hit with a documentary about gun control as he did with Bowling for Columbine is an extraordinary achievement. It was funny and powerful, even if it left some question marks about editorial manipulation.
Moreover Stupid White Men, though a liberal political tract in a conservative climate, was America's bestselling non-fiction book of last year, another formidable achievement, if not an artistic one. Such a contribution to political debate, under the nose of the US's monolithic media, is something to be grateful for.
Dude, Where's My Country? continues the cluster-bomb approach of his previous book. After interogating the President over the events surrounding September 11 and his Iraq policy, later chapters take on America's environmental pillage and its climate of fear, pass on a letter from God to the US and launch a campaign to replace Dubya with Oprah.
The intolerable thing about Dude is Moore's prose style. The first paragraph of the book alone has seven exclamation marks, eight words in italics, two in capitals and three dramatic pauses. I would complain about his feeling the need to 'write like he speaks', but on film he is quite deadpan. Give him a word processor though, and he turns into the British stereotype of an American who cannot state, only exclaim.
There is little original in the book, apart from Moore's eccentric conspiracy theory whereby 9/11 was not a terrorist attack from al Quaeda but a Saudi military offensive (all couched in the 'what if?' questions reminiscent of those schlock theology 'Was Jesus a Martian?' blockbusters where if challenged the author can always say 'Well, I was only asking').
Of course, lack of groundbreaking research is not necessarily a weakness, as there is a valuable role for popular entertainers in broadcasting political analysis to a wider public. But Dude is not remotely funny either. So, if Moore has no greater wit, rhetoric nor vision than the next liberal, one has to ask what makes so many in the British press acclaim him so ardently. We seem to be back on the walking dog circuit.
Possibly a greater weakness even than all the exclamation marks is this book's factual patchiness. Just to offer two of many examples. Firstly, Moore condemns the US government for "making a killing" of "$6 billion in trade with the Iraqi dictator" in 2001. This is utterly unreasonable because that trade was entirely through the UN oil-for-food programme, where 72% is spent on humanitarian aid, 25% on reparations to Iraq's victims in Kuwait and 3% on UN costs.
Secondly, he accuses Bush of flying his friends in the bin Laden family home from the US to Saudi Arabia immediately after the September 11 attacks, during the national flight ban. "While thousands were stranded and could not fly, if you could prove you were a close relative of the biggest mass murderer in US history, you got a free trip to gay Paree!" In fact, as the sources Moore quotes make clear, the first Saudis went home a week after September 11, five days after the flight ban had been lifted, on a chartered plane at Saudi expense and after being interviewed by the FBI.
The fact that such statements manage to mislead while steering clear of outright falsehood, plus that fact that Moore employs three teams of fact checkers, suggests that such distortion is tactical rather than accidental, strict truth an acceptable casualty. Many seem willing to overlook this for the sake of his services to the greater truth. I happen to agree that his causes are good ones, and wish him all the best in his campaign to unseat George Bush.
But abusing one's power as a bestselling author and filmmaker is just political corruption writ small. Honesty matters for its own sake: those who take the trouble to read non-fiction deserve to get facts, and those who write it have a responsibility to supply them. It also matters for the sake of one's cause. After his anti-fiction Oscar speech, Moore stands accused by himself.
He ultimately leaves the impression that he has no confidence in the justice of his case. If the truth is on your side, you do not need to fight propaganda with propaganda. Fighting fire with fire, you burn both your houses down.
abusing one's power as a bestselling author is just political corruption writ small