The Moore the merrier

There’s some catching up to do – it’s high time I got round to writing about my personal impressions of reading Michael Moore’s ‘Stupid White Men’, a mere six weeks since I finished it…

Having bought the book back in January, and having read so much about it, it wasn’t until fairly recently that I picked it up and digested it for myself. It’s perhaps because it had been hailed almost universally as a brilliant piece of polemic that I immediately found myself looking for faults and weaknesses. Two things in particular struck me.

Firstly, at times I found Moore’s attempted satire too flippant. For instance, he suggests that the solution to the political and religious conflict in Northern Ireland lies in the conversion of all Protestants to the Catholic faith. Elsewhere, he encourages the people of the former Yugoslavia to attend self-help groups to deal with their addiction to violence, warning them “If you don’t do this, we are going to drop thousands of those shitty little Yugo cars from cargo planes high above your country. It will never be safe to go out of the house because you’ll never know when one of those 2000-pound lemons is heading for your head”. Admittedly these passages raised a smile, but the problem as I see it is that, while Moore writes disparagingly about the way the USA insensitively imposes itself upon the rest of the world in economic, political and cultural terms, he leaves himself open to a very similar charge – that in proposing flippant solutions to the world’s trouble-spots which fail to engage with the very real complexities of the circumstances (albeit in a way aimed at eliciting laughter), he is imposing what come across as his own arbitrary and ignorant ideas. On occasion I also had some difficulty in swallowing his reasoning: just because some states abuse the recycling system, for example, doesn’t mean that we should all just stop collecting and sorting waste for recycling – that’s just being thoughtlessly defeatist.

If I had to sum up, though, the main reason why I found reading ‘Stupid White Men’ a more underwhelming experience than I’d hoped it might be, it would be because I constantly found myself comparing it to books like ‘No Logo’, ‘Fast Food Nation’ and ‘The Silent Takeover’. In comparison, Moore’s book felt disappointingly shallow and superficial, with little real analysis and dissection of facts and events.

But, of course, the comparison is grossly unfair – ‘Stupid White Men’ is a completely different beast altogether. There’s absolutely no doubt that his heart is in the same place as those of Naomi Klein, Eric Schlosser and Noreena Hertz – he just approaches the same issues from a different angle. Consequently my criticisms could be accused of completely missing the point. Ultimately, there are at least three very good reasons to celebrate Moore’s achievement – firstly, the fact that it was written by a dissenting American; secondly, the fact that a major publisher felt the weight of pressure and released the book (of course, now it’s turned out to be a major money-spinner but its publication in the post-September 11th climate was initially a very risky business); and thirdly, the fact that the book has captured the public imagination, or more accurately, that it has voiced the thoughts and feelings of thousands across the world. What really matters is that these issues are being discussed and that these viewpoints are being aired at all.