Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life
By Michael Moore
448 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $26.99.
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If you’re the type who loves to be regaled by Michael Moore’s teenage masturbation stories, you are going to love his new “anti-memoir,” set to be released September 13.
If, however, you just threw up on yourself, you might think twice before opening up “Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life.”
Moore’s new tome is divided into more than 20 chapters containing stories of his large life. In order to get through the stories, of course, you have to trust that what Moore says is true. Given his record, that’s next to impossible.
Take this strange-sounding tale, just as an example. In discussing his family’s migration to Michigan in the 1800s and his ancestor Silas Moore’s interaction with Indians, Moore notes how progressivism runs in his blood. “Not all the white people in the area maintained the same friendly relations with the Indians as did Silas Moore,” he writes.
To hear Moore tell it, when the local Indian tribe came down with measles and the rest of Moore’s community quarantined themselves from them, it was Silas Moore — and Silas Moore alone — who came to the rescue, risking life and limb to help the Indian tribe.
Moore even quotes a verbatim conversation between Silas Moore and the Indian chief, who apparently spoke English, which comes across like something Disney would concoct.
“I am here to help,” [Silas Moore] said, his voice raised so they could hear him. “I am here to help. How many of you are sick?”
“Many,” said the chief. “Some die. The rest, we need food and supplies.”
Once the Indian tribe recovered, “for years they would never forget the generosity of Silas Moore.” And “[when] his [Silas’] son, Martin, was of school age, instead of sending him to the Elba school … Silas sent him to the Indian school that the county had established near his house.”
Maybe all of this happened. Maybe the Indian chief actually spoke just like he was in Disney’s “Pocahontas.” Just call me skeptical — especially considering the source.
Many of Moore’s tales sound made-up or manufactured to push his agenda. His pro-choice stance was solidified after a friend of his was forced into a back-alley abortion. He remembers a tormented gay boy on his block who ultimately committed suicide. Conveniently, “Many of the names and circumstances have been changed to protect the innocent and sometimes the guilty.”
Throughout, Moore tries to prove to the reader just how smart he is. He tells us how well he did in school. He learned to read early. Teachers noticed how bored he was in first grade and thought he “should have been in the second grade (if not the third!).” He was expelled from a seminary high school because he “upset the other boys by asking too many questions.” Later, his high school friends “humorously tolerated my I’m-sorry-to-be-so-smart attitude.”
Moore doth protest too much. Like Keith Olbermann constantly citing his Cornell pedigree, Moore thinks if he says he is a genius often enough, people will start to believe it. But unlike Olbermann, Moore doesn’t have a fancy Ivy League degree to lend his self-proclaimed brilliance at least a small modicum of credibility.
When Moore isn’t trying to prove how smart he is, he’s expending considerable energy trying to demonstrate how heroic he is — especially by recounting his “brave” decision to oppose the Iraq war in 2003, with all of liberal Hollywood watching, during his Academy Awards acceptance speech.
“All I knew was that I had said something that was not supposed to be said,” Moore will surely narrate breathlessly in the audiobook version. “Not at the Oscars, not anywhere. You know what I speak of, fellow Americans. You remember what it was like during that week, that month, that year, when no one dared to speak a word of dissent against the war effort.”
I was on a college campus during the outbreak of the Iraq war and I have no idea what Moore is talking about. There were plenty of people speaking out against the Iraq invasion, some more rationally than others. But this is the type of thing that passes as heroic in Moore’s mind: standing up in front of a liberal audience and bashing a conservative president.
Moore claims that in the aftermath of his defiance, “Homeland Security officials purposely keyed my Oscar,” horse manure was dumped on his lawn in Michigan, and he began receiving death threats.
Because he had the courage to speak out against the Iraq war, Moore writes, a “top security expert” told him: “There is no one in America other than President Bush who is in more danger than you.”
Somehow I doubt that.
We are supposed to feel sad for Michael Moore because he had to “pay a high price for this ‘success.’” But this is his business model, isn’t it?
Moore releases deceptive documentaries that bash his home country and as a result he hauls in cash by the wheelbarrow-full by catering to the extreme left. Feel sorry? Does he think his fans are that stupid?
Maybe that’s not a good question.
Moore seems genetically incapable of not bashing real heroes, the men and women who exhibit the type of bravery that he can’t begin to comprehend. When describing the top-notch security firm he hired to protect his family, Moore boasts that the former Special Forces soldiers assigned to him had to undergo supplemental training after the security firm hired them.
“They already knew how to kill quietly and quickly with perfection,” you can hear Moore whisper through his keyboard. “[N]ow they would also learn how to save a life.”
To Moore, American soldiers are ruthless killers, except when they are acting nobly to protect him.
It is hard to exaggerate how nausea-inducing this all is to read.
“More than once I have asked myself if all this work was really worth it,” Moore sobs. “And, if I had it to do over again, would I? If I could take back that Oscar speech and just walk up on stage and thank my agent and tuxedo designer and get off without another word, would I? If it meant that my family would not have to worry about their safety and that I would not be living in constant danger — well, I ask you, what would you do? You know what you would do.”
Right.
There is much more in this book that is beyond flabbergasting. Moore has no compunction demonizing American troops, but he also found room to justify the actions of a terrorist. In one chapter, Moore discusses how he was almost a victim of the notorious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. But don’t blame Nidal, says Moore: He was driven to murder innocent civilians by Israeli settlements!
“We were each just one of the faceless, nameless dozens who were to be hit by his machine gun fire or by a grenade or both, and then, should luck have it, bleed to death in front of the duty-free shop,” he reminisces. “Of course, we weren’t nameless and faceless, and landless, because when you’re landless, there’s no duty-free shops in the refugee camps, no Jamba Juice stand next door made with the oranges that were once yours. You were left to a life where you would bleed to death (though in a much slower way), just like you wanted me to, because you had been written off by the Israelis and by the world as meaningless, insignificant, a nuisance that should just go away.”
We do gain some insight into how Moore views his own documentary film-making. He notes that before he started producing documentaries, the ones he liked best were those “constructed as a movie first and a documentary second, then it would fuck me up in ways that no work of fiction could.”
And Moore notes that while making his first documentary, “Roger and Me,” he “felt no need to fake the sort of ‘objectivity’ that other journalists deceitfully hid behind.”
True to form, Moore’s work clearly demonstrates that he is not objective, though his disdain for deceit doesn’t come through in his flicks.
Reading his book, we also get special insight into just how obnoxious Moore is. It really is off the charts.
Moore was elected to his local school board as a high school student. When he was asked to speak to the students at his high school after he had graduated, Moore says he “used the opportunity to read an expletive-filled poem I wrote about the genocide of Native Americans.”
If you have any respect for yourself, don’t read this book. The best that can be said of “Here Comes Trouble” is that it would make a stellar alternative for the CIA to use in lieu of waterboarding. Given the option, I am sure terrorists would rather endure simulated drowning than be forced to hear how Moore “consoled” himself in bed as a teenager “with the latest issue of the Paris Match.”