A Fair Trade Book
Title: Here Comes Trouble
Author: Michael Moore
Date: 2011
Publisher: Grand Central
/ Hachette
ISBN: 978-0-446-53224-2
Length: 427 pages
Illustrations:
black-and-white photos
Quote: “This is a book of
short stories based on events that took place in the early years of my life.”
Critics
complained, in documents we can easily identify as objective reports of facts
by titles like
Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man
: that guileless
twenty-something in
Roger and Me
who came back to Michigan straight
out of college, and found his beloved hometown devastated by GM’s “outsourcing”
of jobs, was a fictional character. The real Michael Moore is a bit older than
that, a seasoned muckraking journalist. And although some Protestant
“seminaries” are graduate programs at universities, in this book Moore explains
that when he was expelled from a Catholic “seminary” he was in grade ten. He
says he never actually went to college. And he really grew up in a suburb, not in downtown Flint.
And he didn’t just happen
to film one of a very short list of great documentary movies by stumbling
around with a video camera in hand. He now says he always was the rare adult
(and heterosexual at that) who went to film festivals and studied movies.
He apprenticed with the producers of
Blood in the Face
; the research that
went into that movie was too scary for New York filmmakers, who found Moore’s
impressive size and aw-shucks manner a reassuring buffer between
themselves and the haters they were studying.
Roger and Me was the
first movie Moore produced all by himself, but he had some informal backing
from people who, for various reasons, didn’t want to do the legwork, appear in
the movie, or be publicly identified as its backers...just personal friends who
happened to have lent some money to a buddy who wanted to try to make a movie.
The movie was a smash
hit. Among other demographics it was a hit with people who, like me, really were college
kids in the 1980s, who’d grown up with all that rhetoric about “careers” and
“success,” only to find our career paths crowded with people just ten or
fifteen years older than we were, even before employers started exporting all
the steady jobs. Moore was the living proof that, if the older generation
weren’t going to give us decent breadwinner-type jobs, we could jolly well
become successful (and become breadwinners) on our own. So Roger and Me seemed
to say. Only that aspect of Roger and Me happened not to be true.
The stories in Here
Comes Trouble reflect Moore's real age and background. They seem carefully selected and edited.
The ritual kowtow
to the homosexual lobby, now apparently mandatory in all left-wing
publications, is dreadful. At Moore’s school the “gay” boy was a few years
ahead of Moore, and such a repulsive bully that his suicide seems to give his story a happy ending. Since readers are unlikely to buy into the
claim that if only people had “accepted his sexuality” and cuddled up with this
jerk he could have grown up making love not war—sexual pleasure didn’t cure
Charles Manson, Jim Jones, or John Gacey—Moore comes awfully close to saying
that male homosexuals should die before they get big enough to hurt younger
kids. Let’s face it: even
if one out of six or seven or even twenty Americans has the ability to complete
a homosexual act, nowhere near that many people are actually homosexual. Most
of us don’t grow up with “gay friends,” and the demand that we write as if we
did is likely to produce more of this kind of thing.
Apart from that one, most
of the stories are good stories, funny if you share that Irish genetic quirk
that sees comic potential in everything, plausible, and generally the sort of
thing that makes a book hard to put down. You will put Here Comes Trouble down,
of course. Even fast readers need a break somewhere in between 427 pages; each story is conveniently discrete, so any chapter break is a
reasonable place to pause. But you’ll want to come back for more and feel
almost regretful when you finish the last story, although it leaves our hero
the producer of a successful movie and, beyond that point, the newspapers have
already told us most of what’s fit to print about the life of Michael Moore.
Highlights of this one
include the first story in which Moore, as a successful movie producer and
supporter of causes, takes up the cause of a convicted murderer who happens to
share his name, and thus encounters counter-protesters whose slogan is “Kill Michael
Moore” and newspaper headlines of “Michael Moore Executed”; the story of how his
father and fellow Marines stormed a hill, routed a Japanese troop, and then did
or didn’t survive an aerial attack by fellow U.S. troops firing on what they
imagined must be the Japanese army; the story of how Moore, a not especially
popular high school boy, was dazzled by a date with a popular girl, to the
point where he agreed to share the date with the most unpopular girl in the
class; two stories about Moore and friends infiltrating the scenes of
politicians’ public addresses in order to hold up protest signs; and, of
course, the story of Moore’s help with the research for Blood in the Face,
titled “Hot Tanned Nazi.”
Moore presents himself in
these stories as very much like a modern American version of Giovanni
Guareschi’s character,
Don Camillo
. I’m not
sure I believe that he’s never hit a fellow human; I do believe that
he’s one of those super-size guys who’ve grown up being told to use their
brains, not their bulk, if they want to win respect, and he’s been able to do
so. He has brains. And nerve. And a wonderful sense of humor. And a genuinely
liberal view of the possibility that opposing points of view can probably be
reconciled, to the benefit of both.
There are, of course,
times when reconciliation will not work, at least not right away. Moore thinks that
American employees should have the right to form unions. Check. And he’s seen
firsthand that American employers have been motivated to “outsource” jobs to
poorer countries with the bait that “Pancho,” or these days it’s more likely to
be “Chang,” “won’t be joining any unions.” Check. Now we approach the point at
which people take irreconcilable positions. Because his family and most of his
friends were left-wingers, Moore takes the old twentieth-century left-wing
position and thinks we need bigger government to force American
employers to hire unionized American employees. The old twentieth-century
counter-argument was that we need bigger government to force the
unionized employees to bargain down and accept work on terms as unsatisfactory
as what the employers are offering Pancho, or Chang.
Reasoning from an
historical and etymological interpretation of the term “liberal,” I propose
that taking a really liberal position would require either side to
back away from the unproductive twentieth-century conflict. Free our minds from
Cold War ideologies. Look at the situation without prejudice; consider what
both sides really wanted and needed, and why they’ve not achieved it.
Business leaders, let's call them "Roger" here, as in Smith, wanted to
avoid the annoyance of dealing with unions by exploiting near-slave labor in
poor countries. Did that work? No; for a few years it seemed to serve a few
businessmen well, but as a general practice it’s leaving a critical number of Americans
too poor to support our own businesses.
Union leaders, let's call them "Jimmy" here, as in Hoffa, wanted to boost their own standard
of living by demanding higher wages and better benefits for American employees.
Did that work? No; as the jobs have gone overseas, an increasing number of
Americans are competing for a decreasing number of jobs, and turning their backs on
unions that haven’t done anything for them. The reaction of union leaders has
not been to reconsider what the unions are doing and bring their work into line
with employees’ actual needs, but to harass non-unionized workers and the
businesses that employ them...giving businesses even more of an incentive to
have all the work done by non-unionized, low-wage, no-benefits workers in poor
countries, and pulling the U.S. economy even further down.
Both Roger and Jimmy are
wrong, but a realistic understanding of human nature does not require us to
believe that these individuals are permanently locked into wrongheaded
positions. When some people observe disparities between their
expectations and external reality, they can actually change their
expectations and adjust their course of action accordingly.
What should Roger and
Jimmy do now? The genuinely liberal thing for them to do would be to
admit that they went wrong—in both cases, by failing to
consider other people’s needs as being equally important with their own, by forgetting that what goes around has a tendency to come around.
American businesses need to employ American workers so that the American
economy continues to support American businesses. American workers need the
right to form unions, and to keep those unions flexible, temporary, and small
enough that the unions truly represent the workers’ interests—that, for
example, when the workers don’t agree that their working conditions are
completely unacceptable, the only reason for them to go on paying union dues
would be that the union is putting those dues into a pension fund. And when there are sound reasons for American businesses
to go on employing foreigners, those foreigners are entitled to the same
benefits and working conditions as Americans; paying them the same wages as
Americans might not be feasible, but analogous wages and benefits should be
mandatory.
The liberal approach to
this kind of thing is always voluntary, not coercive; it allows government to encourage people
to do the right thing, by public displays of moral support and, if the economy
can stand it, even by tax breaks. (Coercive approaches are not liberal but
merely left-wing, and have very seldom motivated anybody to do the genuinely
right thing.)
Unfortunately this is far beyond
what Michael Moore is saying. Moore is very, very good, probably the best
of our generation, at finding examples of just how much harm Roger’s right-wing and
Jimmy’s left-wing approach have done; but he’s not applied his brain to any
actual solution of the problem he’s set up so well. Here it is 2011 and he’s
still writing as if he thinks Jimmy’s approach could work. There used to be a
country that at least claimed to be trying Jimmy’s approach, when Moore and I
were young. It was called the Soviet Union. It ceased to exist during our
formative years, because Jimmy’s approach is inherently incapable of working. I
think Moore was just so caught up in the work of producing movies, books, and TV shows that
he’s never really taken time to absorb the news that, instead of turning into
communist utopias, the socialist democracies of Europe have been collapsing,
one after another throughout our adult lives.
The result is that, although
you weren’t reading Here Comes Trouble with any expectation of a
serious proposition for ending the recession, you do notice turns of phrase
like “the Commerce Department had to be ‘not so public’ in its support...as
apparently some Democratic union-sympathizers...found a clause in some
‘ridiculous law’ saying that it was illegal—illegal!—for U.S. tax dollars to
go toward anything that promotes jobs being moved overseas.” You have to read
the fine print—a footnote below the scene where “Republican congressman Jim
Kolbe from Arizona...was a big backer of the move of American business to
Mexico” observes that “In 2010, Barack Obama appointed Jim Kolbe to his
Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations”—to realize that, probably
against his will, Moore has recognized this as a bipartisan problem.
If you’ve been thinking about the problem enough to recognize how bipartisan it
is, Moore’s continuing to identify himself as a “lefty” and a “Democratic
union-sympathizer” becomes annoying.
Moore was, in between
books, the Greenie who did most to expose the disturbing numbers of
“Republicrats” in both major parties who aren’t working toward party principles
but are blatantly in politics for personal gain alone. However, he was advised
that his exposure of left-wing “Republicrats” might have had something to do
with the election of W Bush. So in Here Comes
Trouble, Moore seems to have retreated safely inside the good old familiar
party line, and although I enjoyed the book immensely and although Moore never
even worked with George Peters, a memory of George Peters’ voice comes to mind: You
can do better than this.
Still, even if Moore can
and should be leading his “lefty” audience back toward a really liberal
position from which real progress might be made in this century, is this the
book in which he should have done it? Why should it be? Here Comes Trouble is
autobiographical fiction; it’s primarily about Moore’s life during the Cold War years. It’s
primarily an entertaining read about the early adventures of a humorist, with
one detour into a really sad story about the death of Moore’s mother. It’s also
the confession of a Catholic who’s kept some religious faith in his life, but
has never felt obliged to let the strict truth interfere with a good
story...and has probably enjoyed the fact that many of his fans believed him to
be ten or fifteen years younger than he is.
You will laugh. You may
cry. You’ll see Michael Moore as different from the narrator of Roger and
Me, but not necessarily less likable. And if you like short, self-contained
stories but prefer them to be linked by a consistent cast of characters and
chain of events, you will love Here Comes Trouble.
To buy it here, send $5 per book + $5 per package to either of the addresses at the bottom of the screen, for a total of $10, out of which $1 will go to Moore or a charity of his choice. Here Comes Trouble is a big fat book, but we could probably squeeze a few of Moore's DVDs or one or two standard-sized books into the package and keep the total cost down to one $5 shipping fee.
