Michael Moore: Stupid White Men ...And Other Sorry Excuses For The State Of The Nation!

Stupid White Men, the latest batch of livid, confrontational satire from author and director Michael Moore, was originally slated for an October 2001 release, but jittery HarperCollins editors held it in limbo for four months. They were concerned that the book's full-bore attack on George W. Bush ("a man no one elected") wouldn't fly in the wake of Bush's high post-Sept. 11 approval ratings. But they may have failed to realize that Moore mostly preaches to the converted. Like all of Moore's work, Stupid White Men is funny and daring, but to a greater degree than his previous books, it's also caustic and self-righteous enough to put off all but the most devoted left-wingers. Men uses a variety of tones and tacks to discuss how the old white guys in power are destroying the world: the Republicans by being evil, corrupt, self-centered, money-grubbing, racist pigs, and the Democrats by doing the exact same things as the Republicans, but hypocritically pretending that they're different. Moore begins by discussing the 2000 election and how the Republicans rigged it—not after the fact, through the courts and during the counts, but well in advance, by removing thousands of black voters from the Florida rolls for specious reasons. In an "open letter" to Bush, he unctuously casts Bush as an illiterate, alcoholic felon who needs to step down and get some help. He excoriates American race relations (in a chapter called "Kill Whitey"), foreign policy ("We're Number One!"), and jurisprudence ("One Big Happy Prison"). And he provides templates for change, offering advice that ranges from practical to insensitive to downright Swiftian. But his self-serving humor and his earnest outrage blend poorly, and Stupid White Men switches gears too often and too radically. Moore's outrageous, irrational statements, particularly the too-encompassing attacks on the reader, undermine his attempts to lay out rational evidence for his arguments, just as his stridency undermines his jokes. It's clear that as always, Moore means to turn heads and shake Americans out of their complacency by any means possible, from statistics to stunts. It's a laudable goal. But here the approach seems too scattershot, too uncoordinated, and just a bit too shrill. HarperCollins might have saved some sweat over Stupid White Men's timing and devoted more energy to helping Moore find a consistent voice to go with his consistent message.