White trashing: Michael Moore thinks white men are byronic: mad, bad and dangerous to know

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 3, 2002 | by Rex Roberts

There are three things wrong with Stupid White Men (ReganBooks/ HarperCollins, $24.95, 303pp), Michael Moore's satiric take on American politics and society. The book is meant to be droll, but mostly it's dopey. It strives to be provocative, but it belabors the obvious. Worst of all, it presents itself as a commonsense tract imbued with righteous indignation, while it's really a disingenuous invective reeking with mean spirits.

Perhaps this is why Stupid White Men has followed Moore's Downsize This! to the best-seller lists. There are a lot of bitter people in America, and cynics love to have their prejudices confirmed. "The common view in the heartland is that the ship of state is running on fumes, and no one's at the wheel," writes Moore about the Bush "presidency," to borrow the author's punctuation. "After all, the designated driver wasn't designated by anyone--and he's a self-confessed drunk driver to boot."

Moore, who has been dining off his film documentary, Roger & Me, for well over a decade, spends the first 60 or so pages fuming about Florida, referring to Al Gore as president-in-exile and George W. Bush as thief-in-chief (one of the author's more successful witticisms). The problem is, he presents no new information nor even an original interpretation, instead rehashing material from left-wing sources such as The Nation magazine. If he has an argument, it's overshadowed by his anger. Moore despises George W., mainly because he comes from a rich WASP family.

"Instead of having to earn it, you have been handed the presidency, the same way you've come by everything else in your life," Moore whines. "Money and name alone have opened every door for you. Without effort or hard work or intelligence or ingenuity, you have been bequeathed a life of privilege."

That screed could describe Gore as well as Bush, but no matter. Moore quickly moves on to skewer other sitting ducks--overweening corporate greed, underfunded public education, overcrowded prisons, underprotected environments--a familiar list made wearisome by his predictable tantrums over the ever-diminishing ozone layer, ever-expanding sport utility vehicles and ever-exasperating white men in suits.

Why does Moore hate white men in suits? He lives among them, "on the island of Manhattan," where every day he sees their avarice, arrogance and asininity. "Those who run your lives live in my neighborhood. I walk the streets with them each day," Moore tells his readers, whom he seems to feel are naive Midwesterners in need of a lecturing. "I see their children being raised by Haitian immigrants, and I watch them pass by the Invisible Men who clean the grouting on the marble floors without saying a word, always in a hurry to get to wherever they're going--most likely to reduce your insurance benefits or put your workplace on the chopping block."

Why Moore chooses to live in such a horrid place remains a mystery, but no matter. Like Emerson, he never lets foolish consistency, the hobgoblin of little minds, stop him from sermonizing to the benighted. He rails against gas-guzzling automobiles, but he owns a Chrysler minivan and a Volkswagen, despite that New York has excellent public transportation. He hates to see Haitians exploited as nannies, although when he hires a black person for his media company ("five of my last five hires have been black"), he's acting as a progressive American. He ridicules the high salaries of chief executive officers, but black athletes are entitled to every cent of their salaries, even if white folks complain. "We can always work up a sweat calling in to sports talk radio to whine about how `overpaid' those athletes are," writes Moore.

Enough people enjoy his rants to make Moore as wealthy as those snobby blokes on his block in Bigottown, N.Y. But Moore always will be a champion of the little guy ... and this Manifesto on Malfeasance and Mediocrity is his apologia for the apoplectic.