Michael Moore, You Used To Be My Hero
February 17, 2004
Michael Moore, you used to be my hero.
Back in the days of your pro-worker documentary Roger & Me
(1989), I was working construction at a power plant in the South and
you were the one public figure who seemed to speak for working men.
The one who questioned the right of a business to take what it wants
from a community and then pull out in search of cheaper labor, leaving
a trail of unemployment and broken lives behind. The one who opposed
union busting and corporate plunder.
Spending every day hanging by my hook belt off the side of a rebar skeleton
50 feet up in the air, my life seemed to be out of a Michael Moore documentary.
I remember one time a journeyman electrician with a rope in one hand
and his tool box in the other called me down to help him. We walked
over to a large room filled with immense electrical panels. He told
me to stand 10 feet behind him and hold the rope. He then made the other
part of the rope into a harness, put it on, and said "I'm gonna
work on these wires, and some of them are live. If I hit the wrong one
and start to fry, you pull me out."
I thought he was joking.
He wasn't.
"Why don't they turn off the power so you can do this without being
in danger?" I asked.
"Company won't do it. Too expensive."
"More expensive than your life?"
"To them."
On our job the pay rate for new construction was significantly higher
than for repairs, so the company chiseled us by classifying everything
as repairs. We built a backup generator on an empty plot of land absolutely
from scratch yet were paid substantially less because the company classified
it as a repair job. I remember thinking "this would be perfect
for a Michael Moore documentary."
According to a recent New York Times investigative series by
David Barstow, there have been over 170,000 workplace deaths in the
United States since 1982. Working at the power plant I could believe
it. Over lunch every man had a horror story to tell, either about what
happened to him or what happened to his buddy on this job or at another.
The guy who repaired power lines and hit a live wire while working 20
feet up and is only alive today because his buddy kicked him off the
pole. The guy who shot his nailgun into a knot in wood and the nail
glanced off and nailed his hand to the wall--just before his ladder
came out from under him. The guy who got his leg jammed in a threading
device, and who ended up with a threaded stump of a leg which looked
like a large bloody screw. These stories, as well as the powerful brotherhood
between the men, would fit well into a Michael Moore documentary.
Once we saw a standard safety film which depicted all kinds of workplace
maimings, most of which are too gory to describe. I sat in the back
of the room but after a few minutes I couldn't watch any more and put
my head down. A few minutes later I looked up and realized that everyone
in the room was turned around looking at me. The instructor tried to
be polite, but one worker barked "Nothin' in that film that we
ain't seen up close before."
Michael, I can't say that I ever agreed that corporate CEOs were devils--I
saw them as being more misguided and out of touch than evil--but you
more than anybody articulated the feelings and views of working class
men. The men who put their bodies on the line on construction sites
and in factories, mines, and refineries so their wives and children
can live in safety and comfort. The millions of men who have been killed
or maimed since the industrialization of this country on what early
trade unionists called the "battlefield of labor." All of
these men have been edited out of our past and present because nobody
wants to remember or acknowledge them. The Right doesn't dwell on struggling
blue collar workers and the Left is beholden to the feminists, for whom
any mention of men as special contributors or as victims is forbidden.
But Michael, you have betrayed those whose cause you once championed.
Once the voice of the unappreciated working man, I have watched in amazement
and dismay as you have degenerated into one of the all too common scourges
of our society--the low rent man-basher who pours derision upon the
last remaining politically correct target of bigotry: men.
Men are a target in both your recent book Dude, Where's My Country?
and your mega bestseller Stupid White Men. In Dude you
criticize the Democratic Party for "watering down their beliefs
to appeal to all of the dumb white guys out there"--I guess you
mean the guys at the power plant--and you imply that the Democrats should
simply write them off in 2004.
In your view these are the guys who "long for the days of Strom
Thurmond and legally accepted date rape," and who oppose abortion
because they are male chauvinists who want to control women. You even
compare opposition to abortion to opposing women's right to vote. These
claims don't square with reality, since polls, including a CBS poll
conducted last year around the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade,
have shown that men and women support choice at equal rates.
In your chapter "The End of Men" from Stupid White Men
you cite declining male birthrates as evidence that "Nature is
trying to kill us off" and that men have done "plenty"
to "deserve this." Men have "made a mess of our world.
Women? They deserve none of the blame. They continued to bring life
into this world; we continued to destroy it whenever we could...how
many women have spilled oil into oceans, dumped toxins in our food supply,
or insisted that the new SUV designs had to be bigger, bigger, bigger?...[Men]
are working overtime to wipe out this beautiful, wonderful home we were
given free of charge...no wonder Nature is getting rid of us."
On Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher you asked "how
many women have created factories that have polluted this environment?...most
of the crap in this world came from a guy" and said "[It's
not] female fishermen doing all that extra fishing, ruining the oceans.
It's the men ruining the oceans. Name a woman who's ruined the oceans."
The central flaw in all of these statements is so obvious I wouldn't
bother pointing it out except that it seems nobody else has. Yes, Michael,
few women have created factories which have polluted the environment,
just as few women have created factories which have produced the staples
of modern civilization. You vilify men for large SUV designs without
giving them credit for the miracle of modern transportation. You blame
men for "spilled oil into oceans" without giving them credit
for the millions of metric tons of oil which are transported by sea
each year, almost all of it without incident.
You also enthusiastically try to sell many of the standard modern canards
about men. For example, you hammer on men for the largely mythical "wage
gap," a gap created by male sacrifice more than by male privilege.
Men work the longest hours at the most demanding and dangerous jobs--how
could they not earn more money? Do you really believe that the
secretaries at the power plant should have earned as much for working
in a safe, air conditioned office as we did for braving hazards and
working in the 100 degree heat? If demanding and dangerous jobs didn't
pay more than safe jobs of an equal skill level, how would companies
get anybody to do them?
Studies that compare men and women working the same hours at the same
jobs at the same experience level found little if any wage discrimination
against women, and herein lies one more contradiction in your thinking.
You have criticized the greedy capitalists for breaking unions, leveling
entire industries, and throwing men out of work to shift jobs to cheap
labor havens. Do you really believe that these same capitalists, out
of the pure kindness of their philanthropic hearts, voluntarily choose
to pay male workers more than females?
You tell us that "a woman is five times more likely to be killed
by a husband or boyfriend than a man is likely to be murdered by his
wife or girlfriend." Actually, official statistics put it at two
or three to one, not five to one, and when poisonings, hired killers,
and unsolved murders are properly accounted for, domestic homicide rates
are actually about even. Let's hope that your female readers understand
that your section instructing men on how they can survive their beds
being set on fire by their angry wives as they sleep is just a joke.
Which it is. I think.
You top off your chapter with an asinine semi-endorsement of fatherlessness
at a time when the costs of fatherlessness couldn't be clearer or more
devastating. I doubt many fatherless children will thank you for it.
What's even more amazing, Michael is that you've gotten away with all
of this. With thousands of conservative pundits, talk show hosts, and
web-based commentators looking for sticks to beat you with, few if any
have cited your anti-male bigotry. To the limited extent that reviewers
(such as CNN's Robert Nebel) have commented on "The End of Men,"
it has not been to criticize its bigotry but to praise it. With your
help, Michael, our society has become so desensitized to man-bashing,
man-blaming, and man-mocking that apparently nobody even noticed.
Needless to say, your friends at the National Organization for Women
ate it up. NOW's Communications Director Lisa Bennett said ‘The End
of Men' "should warm the hearts of feminists" and gleefully
noted that it "details the havoc that men have wreaked on women,
government, and the planet."
And Michael, don't try to dismiss this despicable chapter as being a
joke or an attempt at satire. After your mother's death you expressed
your grief to the Guardian and said "...she was reading
it and when we came back to the house after she died, it was sitting
out there with the page marked where she had left off, and she was on
the chapter about the end of men...and I'm sure she loved that."
How wonderful--your dying mother's last connection with the work and
beliefs of her now famous son was to revel in his man-bashing. Sticking
the knife in men's backs warmed mommy's heart in her final days. You've
previously described your upbringing as being decidedly matriarchal,
with your mother and your two angry feminist sisters calling the shots.
It must have been some childhood.
Interesting too that while you have so often emphasized a class based
analysis of society, you seem happy to chuck all that stuff overboard
when speaking about men. In your words and writing the men who run a
Fortune 500 company are indistinguishable from the common blue collar
worker. They're all men, so they're all "in control," have
all the power, and are united in one large, extremely profitable conspiracy
against women. Michael, you're the socialist, not me, but even I
know that Marx, Lenin, Trotsky & Co. always held social class to
be a vastly greater determinant of privilege in capitalist society than
gender.
More importantly, is it any wonder that men, including working class
men, spurn the political party you shill for? According to a recently
released ABC/Washington Post poll, white men (pardon me, Michael, stupid
white men) preferred Bush over an unnamed Democrat in 2004 by a staggering
33 points.
Some of the pro-Bush sentiment may stem from a sense that many of the
left-wing attacks on George Bush--particularly yours, Michael--seem
more rooted in a personal animus than a disagreement over policies.
I suspect that if tomorrow Bush instituted free universal health care,
nationalized industry, and declared the dictatorship of the proletariat,
you still wouldn't have a kind word to say about him.
But the biggest reason men have turned away from your party is simple--why
should men support a party which doesn't support them? Why go to a party
nobody invited you to? Why go where you're clearly not welcome?
Michael, it saddens me that the beleaguered men at that power plant
have lost a valuable friend and gained one more enemy. It saddens me
to watch you and your party marginalize yourselves and slowly commit
political suicide by spitting on those who once admired and supported
you. And when your party gets trounced among male voters in 2004, I
know what explanation you'll give. In fact, you've already written it
in Stupid White Men: "men are just not as smart as women."
