Michael Moore

I was never “big” on Michael Moore. From the time he burst on the scene in connection with his General Motors documentary Roger and Me, I was very turned off by Michael Moore. For the most part I liked his point of view when it came to corporate American and some of the other things he was saying and doing, but I did not like him. I thought he was over the top on many issues, shrill, just plain wrong about some things, and more. Other things that turned me off were his appearance; the way he slouched; the goofy-looking baseball hat he wore lopsided with his long, messy hair coming out on all sides; the sloppy, rumpled dungaree outfit; the sneakers; the glasses he wore—almost everything about him galled me. Gradually, over the years I warmed up to him a bit, but just a bit. I always admired his documentary films but practically nothing else including his several books.

Michael Moore has a new book out, Here Comes Trouble. It’s more than 400 pages, and I read it last weekend in just a few sittings. The best way for me to describe the book is to quote from the publisher’s inside-flap copy, which is something I never do because it is always self-serving and very often not accurate. But here’s what whoever wrote the flap copy to Here Comes Trouble said:

Michael Moore—Oscar-winning filmmaker, bestselling author, the nation’s unofficial provocateur laureate—is back, this time taking on an entirely new role, that of his own meta-Forrest Gump.

Smashing the autobiographical mold, he presents twenty-four far-ranging, irreverent, and stranger-than-fiction vignettes from his own early life. One moment he's an eleven-year-old boy lost in the Senate and found by Bobby Kennedy; and in the next, he's inside the Bitburg cemetery with a dazed and confused Ronald Reagan. At the age of seventeen, he goes to get a snack one day and ends up on the national news—creating a firestorm that helps eliminate racial discrimination at private clubs all across America. He begins his first underground newspaper in fourth grade; sixteen years later, the police are raiding the printing office of his latest publication—and the U.S. Congress steps in and takes up his fight. On top of all that, he becomes one of the youngest elected officials in the country at age eighteen—but not before planning a hilarious "dry-run" escape to Canada with his stoner friends just in case they get drafted to go to Vietnam. Fast-forwarding to 2003, he stuns the world from the Oscar stage by uttering the words, “We live in fictitious times . . . with a fictitious president" in place of the usual “I’d like to thank the Academy.”

And none of that even comes close to the night the friendly priest at the seminary decides to show him how to perform his own exorcism.

All of this is the stuff of great fiction—but every one of these stories is real. Before Michael Moore became the Oscar-winning filmmaker and all-around rabble-rouser and thorn-in-the-side of corporate and right-wing America, there was the guy who had an uncanny knack for just showing up where history was being made. You will be stunned and surprised to meet the Michael Moore you never knew.

Capturing the zeitgeist of the past fifty years, yet deeply personal and unflinchingly honest, HERE COMES TROUBLE takes readers on an unforgettable, take-no-prisoners ride through the life and times of Michael Moore. Alternately funny, eye-opening, and moving, it's a book he has been writing—and living—his entire life.

 Well, Michael Moore’s new book delivers on that promise. The book does indeed “smash the autobiographical mold” and did at times stun me. I was surprised to meet the Michael Moore I never knew. After reading Here Comes Trouble, I realized that Michael Moore has a big heart. Michael Moore loves this Country. Michael Moore is very intelligent. Michael Moore is right about a lot of things. Michael Moore is, in my opinion, still wrong about other things. Michael Moore is misunderstood by many, and a large part of that may be his own fault.

Michael Moore’s book deserves to be read. I did what every school kid is told not to do, and that is to judge a book by its cover. I judged Michael Moore by what I saw, the “cover,” and not by the content, what is inside the man. My mistake. My loss. Sorry, Michael.