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Regan Books/HarperCollins, 2002 

Review by Tom Gallagher 

With a bestselling book and a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Michael Moore has definitely arrived, occupying a niche in American politics and culture somewhere between Ralph Nader and Al Franken. If you’re looking for historical parallels, Will Rogers might come to mind, but ultimately Rogers was more of a cynic about politics in general than any kind of radical. Not that long ago, most people would not have suspected that the spot Moore has carved out for himself was even a possibility. 

Books are not his forte—film and television are—but books allow Moore to be somewhat more specific about what he actually thinks, and selling this many copies of a book with politics this radical is no small achievement, even if the politics come wrapped in shtick. Stupid White Men continues the story of the central character of all of Michael Moore’s published and filmed work since Roger and Me—Michael Moore. 

Being Michael Moore these days means that phone calls you and I might dream of making just may go through if he makes them—like the one to right-wing magazine columnist Fred Barnes. Moore was somewhat inexplicably watching “The McLaughlin Group”—“hyenas on Dexedrine” as he refers to them—when he witnessed Barnes bemoaning a state of American education so debased that, “These kids don’t even know what The Iliad and The Odyssey are.” We must give Moore credit for realizing that a person like Barnes might have the chutzpah to publicly blather about the works of Homer, without actually knowing what they were about himself. When Moore asked Barnes to discuss them, he “started hemming and hawing, ‘Well, they’re...uh...you know... uh...okay, fine, you got me. I don’t know what they’re about. Happy now?’” 

The book generally reads like it was written by a celebrity rushing to print while he’s still “in.” The satire is not always the sharpest, for instance, the proposal that Northern Ireland be fixed by converting Irish Protestants to Catholicism. On the other hand, Moore gets serious from time to time. Levity may be okay for Ireland and the former Yugoslavia, but he won’t treat the Mideast as a laughing matter. His suggestion that the adoption of nonviolent tactics by Palestinians would enhance their chance of success in forcing Israel to yield the occupied territories is not original to Moore, but it certainly bears repeating, even if it has as much chance of coming to fruition as his proposal for Yugoslavia—bringing Tito back to life. 

Although he was a prominent Nader supporter, he declined an invitation to join a Nader tour of states in which Gore and Bush were neck-in-neck late in the 2000 campaign because he didn’t want to tip the election to Bush. His proposal that Nader advocate a vote for Gore in the swing states in exchange for a public Gore shift to the left on one major issue picked from a list that Nader would provide seems worth the attention of Monday morning electoral quarterbacks. While it seems unlikely that Gore would have agreed, Nader had little to lose from being unconventional and even a rejected offer might have quieted the pundits who thought Nader “egotistical” for insisting that the most important issues actually be addressed in a presidential election campaign.