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Michael Moore
Director, Roger and Me; Creator & Host, "TV Nation" and "The Awful Truth"; Author, Downsize This! and Stupid White Men and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: Dear Michael, I saw you at an A's game in Oakland and you denied you were you. Are you really you today? I hope so.
A: We were driving over the Bay Bridge, the Gray Davis-protected Bay Bridge on the way here he's out there himself protecting the thing right now. No, whenever I would go to an A's game out here, just because I was being loyal to my Detroit Tigers, I couldn't be seen there. It's been so painful living in New York now watching what's happened to the A's at the hands of the Yankees. I don't know what to say other than we had lived here for a short period of time, we had given up our lives in Flint and our newspaper and everything and came out here. I was going to be the editor of a magazine out here. I was fired about four months after I arrived. It was the most painful time of my life. I couldn't come back to the city for many, many years because it gave me such a bad feeling.
What I remember, though, is that the day they were going to fire me if you've ever been let go from a job, you know how they change the locks and bring the consultant in to advise you for ten minutes instead they got one of the editors in the office to take me to a Giants game. Right away I should have been suspicious, taking me out to Candlestick Park in the middle of the day, freezing my butt off, and we didn't go to an A's game, and right then I knew I was doomed because we weren't going over to Oakland.
Q: What does the "S" on your cap stand for?
A: Michigan State.
Q: In light of what you were saying about the recession in Silicon Valley, having just been downsized, out of a job, I'm wondering, considering your in-depth investigation into the demise of the American auto worker, what's the first thing I should do to cope?
A: Leave California like I did. I write about this in the book: In 1919, 20 years after the invention of the automobile, there were something like 108 car companies. Twenty years later in 1939 there were 44 car companies. Anytime there's a new invention all the entrepreneurs just go for it and, because of this great economic system we have called capitalism, the mediocre rise to the top, so you end up with VHS instead of Beta, you end up with IBMs instead of Apple. The most mediocre wins. It's kind of the Darwinism of this kind of economic system. So maybe think of what you could do with your life and your time and your talent that could help better society and move it forward and beat the people who believe we should all aspire to the mediocre which is a Kurt Vonnegut line from "Happy Birthday, Wanda June."
Q: As a follow up to that question, are you hiring?
A: We're not in production right now. I'm just in the editing room right now, finishing my new film, which is called Bowling for Columbine. It's a documentary feature exploring the American culture of violence and fear and why we're the unique country on this planet that kills its own in this manner. We're not hiring anybody right now, and I don't know what I'm going to do after this, but I'm always looking for good people. I've hired a lot of people just from people sending me their resume or a nice letter on the website or the Internet, send it to my e-mail address but you'd have to move to New York.
Q: Considering the impact of Internet technology, have you found that an e-mail list and website, etc., have helped you get your message out to a degree greater than just books and films?
A: Yes, the Internet is an incredible invention. The Internet saved this book, in the chat rooms. The key here is that we keep this great egalitarian device in the hands of us and not in the hands of those who want to control it, censor it, make money off it. This is like the early days of FM radio if you're old enough to remember the early days of FM radio where the people who wanted to make the money didn't see any money in it, so they just let people play whatever they wanted to on the radio. That existed at one time. You could actually play whatever you wanted to on the radio. There was no playlist. That's where we're at now with the Internet. I'm grateful to the Internet. I think it's a great thing to be part of. I wish I wasn't a boomer in the sense that I have that certain illiteracy about it that I wish I didn't have. Six or seven years ago a free disk comes in the mail from AOL and I go, Hey, a free disk! I didn't even know what AOL was. Then I get out and start putting my address on all my films and books, and then I start to realize what AOL is, and now they won't forward your mail to a new e-mail address. So now there's this horrible incongruity of me having an AOL address. The only way I've been able to deal with it lately is I grabbed the name stupidwhitemen@aol.com, because I just love the name, being able to say that all the time, stupidwhitemen@aol.com.
Q: The search for bin Laden has now taken a back seat to the renewed efforts to bury Saddam Hussein. What are your thoughts on the administration's push for war against Iraq?
A: It has to be opposed by all of us. It has to be opposed loudly and aggressively by all of us. Ralph Nader said the other day, "We went over to burn down the haystack to find the needle, and then we couldn't find the needle.& What is this now, Sonny wants to go finish the job Daddy didn't do? Please, spare us the human misery of the Bush family and what they've been up to. I've called for George W. Bush's resignation on the opening day of baseball season. I can't take this anymore. You're going to go get us in another war so we won't be talking about Enron and Halliburton and Unocal. I'm sorry. I want you on the pitcher's mound at 4:05 p.m., when the Astros are playing the Brewers, in the middle of Enron Field. I want George W. Bush there, bring Cheney with you, and leave, just leave. Have the good grace and dignity to just leave.
Q: Do you think the United States would have bombed Afghanistan if Al Gore had been elected and inaugurated president?
A: Yes.
Q: Why?
A: Bush, Gore. Gore, Bush. Bush, Gore. Bush Bush, Gore, Gore. Gore, Gore, Bush, Bush. Gush Gush, Bore Bore. Gush, Gush, Gush. Second debate: I sat there with my little legal pad 39 times Al Gore and George Bush said, "I agree with you. No, I agree with you. Well, no, I agree with you. I agree with you." Thirty-nine issues. "I love you. No, I love you." Is Gore a better person than Bush? Absolutely. Is he a better human being? Absolutely. He'd be bombing Afghanistan because he'd be afraid of looking like wimp, because Democrats must be strong. Bush is over there to help the oil industry and his oil buddies and his dad's buddies. He's doing it for money, so yes, that's more evil. You put any two things up against one another, and one is worse than the other. It doesn't matter what it is: A's, Giants. UPN, WB. One is worse than the other. Mussolini, Hitler. Mussolini, fine, I'll go with Mussolini. Go back through history, put any two up against one another, one is going to be worse than the other. What does that mean? We need more political parties in this country. We need more of a real choice. This is just nutty: Two political parties represent the aspirations of 280 million people? Is that craziness? This has got to change. We need proportional representation. We need the priority system of voting. We need to change this whole rotten system and make it more democratic and make it more open to people and not controlled by big money.
Q: You achieved great notoriety in your film on Roger Smith. What well-known business leader do you think you could do now interview with and do a documentary about in a similar fashion?
A: The obvious one is Ken Lay. I wrote about him. I started writing about him last May. You'll see this in the book. You'll see mentions of Enron, Arthur Andersen and these people. I just ran across this little article. I just said, What kind of a name is that? Was it some frat-boy prank? He had to go down and change his name to Ken Lay. It's like one of those bad Cinemax movies on late at night, "Starring Ken Lay with Bill Stud." Right away you shouldn't trust the guy.
Q: Many people are afraid to speak out about the situations of the day. What is your secret? Are you afraid of being arrested or discriminated against in some fashion by the government?
A: I'm afraid of not getting to the In-N-Out Burger by two o'clock. I'm just kidding. No, what's there to be afraid of? This is America. No, I'm not afraid. Should I be afraid? I don't know. No, we've got to quit being afraid. A lot of my film that's coming out is about how we just get so conditioned in America to believing that something horrible is going to happen or that the wolf is at the door. We lock ourselves in and we're afraid to speak out, we're going to lose our job. I learned at a very early age that there's really no reason to be afraid at all, and really, if you act out of fear, that's when you get screwed. It's only when you act out of some sense of power in your self now I'm going to start sounding like Dr. Phil here but really this like an old lesson you learned in grade school with the bully in the schoolyard: If you stood up to the bully, the bully would never bother you again, because the bully would much rather go bug the people who aren't going to fight back. That's easier for him. He wants the path of least resistance. If you stand up to the bully, the bully is like, "Oh, I'm not going to deal with that guy again, that's too much trouble." I don't know. I've never really given that much thought. Part of that is I'm very much a slacker at heart. When I was a kid, I watched five or six hours of TV a day. That was a good day.
I think we need to broaden politics out to a much wider group of people. It can't be in the church here. It can't be to the choir. We've got to reach out to all those other people who would like to join but see that being involved politically means you've got to be like this and you've got to go to all these meetings and you've got to sit at that Greenpeace table on the campus commons for 24 hours a day. No, you don't. We've got to make this more accessible to all the slackers out there in the American public who would be with us and who make up the majority really. When I was 16 years old I got selected to go to Boy's State at my school. You go down to Sacramento for a week and play government juniors, seniors, sophomores or whatever. You elect a governor and a lieutenant governor and a legislature and all this. I went there and I couldn't stand this. I didn't go to any of the meetings, I didn't run for anything. I just sat in the dorm room at Michigan State just going, Oh, what am I doing down here? One day I had the munchies, so I went down to the munchy machine, and they had these new potato chips called Ruffles, with the ridges, and I thought I was getting more chip because of the little extra bit, the little mountains of chip. So I go down to the munchy machine to get the Ruffles, and on the bulletin board there's a sign saying, "Speech contest for Boy Staters on the life of Abraham Lincoln, sponsored by the Elks Club."
I'm reading this and my Dad had just tried to join the Elk's Club. He had gone there, but he wouldn't join because on the application it said and this is the 1970s, early 1970s "Caucasians only." So he wouldn't join. So I thought, This is very ironic, a racist organization sponsoring a speech contest on the life of the great emancipator. So I'm going to write a speech for these guys, yeah. I take my bag of Ruffles back to my room. I write the speech out, I give it the next day. The Elks aren't there to judge it. They've hired a speech teacher from a high school to judge it. I win the contest, just railing against the Elks. "These Elks, these outrageous Elks." So the next day they ask me to give the speech in front of all of Boy's State and the Elks guy is there to hand me the trophy. I wouldn't take the trophy, and some reporter comes up and interviews me, he puts it out on the wire. Two hours later I get a call. I'm sixteen years old. I get a call from "The CBS Evening News" with Walter Cronkite in New York saying, "Will you come on The CBS Evening News' tonight to talk about this thing you did?" I'm just going, Oh no. I just wanted a bag of potato chips. I'm just thinking no amount of Clearasil is going to save me now. So I go on. The next day there are calls for congressional investigations, hearings are held. Six months later the Elks Club and all these other private organizations are forced to integrate.
This whole thing started not just because I wanted to change the world but because I had the munchies. If somehow we could just reach out to all our fellow munchy people. You don't have to do a lot. You can do just a very little bit. All change throughout history has occurred with just a few people doing a little bit. The majority have never been involved; they're always apathetic. Twenty-five percent of this country supported the revolution. There was a guy with 12 fishermen, look what happened there. One dropped out in the final round. Marx and Engels, they were just two old guys warming their hands over a fire in London talking shit to each other. Boom. That's all they were. One woman was tired and said, "I don't want to go to the back of the bus, my feet are tired." One woman, look what happened. Those one or two people could be in this room right now. The spark could be right here. Think about this, it doesn't take a lot.
