Michael Moore - Offensive to all my Senses

When watching Bowling for Columbine recently, I noticed that throughout the film I had a foul taste in my mouth, the air smelt disgusting, and my skin was extremely itchy. This confused me, of course my sense of sight and hearing would be repulsed, but why were the other senses also being offended in such a way?

On an average day, when looking at Michael Moore, my brain would probably look something like this..

However, during Bowling for Columbine, the resource required to run the hatred process became so intense that it was necessary for my brain to load balance the workload over all my senses, and consequently I could smell, feel and taste how much I hate this man.

One of Michael Moore’s favourite past times is denouncing the wealthy, he hates greedy rich white America and even has a book called Stupid White Men which is dedicated to criticising them for being rich, greedy and white. If you would like the 400lb rich white man Michael Moore to visit you and give a talk about how much he hates greedy rich white men, he will charge you up to $30,000 to do so.

We will start with Roger & Me, Michael Moore’s first “documentary”. Moore’s fans say that this film was “snubbed” by the Oscars for the best documentary award, because that fits in with the blame shifting mentality these idiots all share in common. There was in fact a very good reason for this perceived snub. Roger & Me was basically about Michael Moore pursuing Roger Smith, the then president of General Motors, to try to get him to walk around Flint Michigan and see the devastation that mass layoffs at GM had caused to the town.

In 1986, GM closed a number of plants in Flint, and around 30,000 people lost their jobs. According to Moore, the town then went all to shit. The film shows how clumsy the city was in trying to deal with the crisis. They pay a TV evangelist to try and cheer everyone up, they get Ronald Reagan in to eat Pizza with the poor and suggest they move somewhere else (while somebody steals the cash register), they build an automobile theme park and a water street pavilion to try and make the shit hole town a tourist attraction. And of course, the town still ends up on it’s arse.

This is all fine, if a city did these things in response to a social crises they would deserve to be slated in a documentary. But here’s the thing, the Autoworld Theme park opened in 1984, the Water Pavilion opened in 1985, the TV Evangelist came in 1982, and Reagan visited in 1980 (before he was president). The GM Motor’s layoffs were in 1986. Perhaps my understanding of that whole cause/effect, action/reaction thing is a little rusty, but I’m pretty sure if a series of things are done before an event, you can safely assume they were not a reaction to said event.

Oh yeah, and the cash register that Moore showed getting stolen while Reagan was visiting, was actually stolen 2 days later. Pesky details.

Moore’s justification for this deception is that he never said these events took place post 1986. Great justification there Mikey, why not just point at the first person you see and say “He did it”. Moore manipulated the film to look like these events all took place as a direct response to the GM layoffs, and the fact he didn’t expressly say that they did doesn’t change anything. A documentary is supposed to educate, it isn’t supposed to mislead. It shouldn’t be open to interpretation, if you watch a wildlife program and see a hawk flying, you should be able to assume a hawk can fly. If you found out later they couldn’t, you wouldn’t accept the excuse “We never said they could fly”. You fucking showed me a hawk flying you bastard, what was I supposed to think? When an interviewer pressed Moore on this and said basically what I’m saying now, Moore lost his shit, used his standard defence line “you’ve bought into their bullshit man” then said that the problem was that “you see this primarily as a documentary, I think of it as a movie, an entertaining movie”

No Oscar for you fat man! Word of advice, if you want to win best documentary, don’t admit to a journalist that your film is a work of fiction.

During the film, Moore also chased Roger Smith all over the place trying to find him and hold him accountable for how much of a shit hole Flint was. However, to make sure he didn’t actually find him and risk getting torn all to shit, Moore made a point of only looking in places that Roger Smith has never actually been to, and would never actually go. Genius.

But this was nothing compared to Bowling for Columbine. He has made himself extremely wealthy profiting from the senseless murder of children. What a great guy. And of course, he again used deceptive film techniques to lie to his audience and further strain the hatred process my brain has to continually run.

The NRA is his main target, or is it the media, or is it Bush. I don’t think even he knows. The thing is, I basically agree with his dislike for all these things. Being English I find the idea of an entire populace owning guns bizarre, I despise the media, and let’s face it Bush is almost certainly insane. So the fact that Michael Moore has managed to make me hate him for criticising things that I feel negatively about anyway should illustrate how much of a dick he is. In Bowling for Columbine, Moore gives the impression that the NRA held a pro-gun rally in Denver shortly after the Columbine High School murders as a response to the tragic event. He shows a clip of children crying outside the school and then cuts to Charlton Heston, the NRA President, holding a rifle in the air and shouting “From my cold dead hands!” Basically making him look like an insensitive cunt.

The whole film is like watching a magic show, it’s constant misdirection and illusion. The “pro-gun rally” was in fact an annual meeting which was booked years in advance, and was not in any way a response to the shootings. Because the NRA is a non-profit organisation, it’s annual meetings are regulated by law. The NRA is a New York corporation, and New York non-profit corporation law requires an annual meeting of it’s members. The New York statutes do not allow for the location of the meeting to be changed at short notice. The cut off point is 10 days, the Columbine shootings occurred 11 days before the meeting, and the NRA have 4 million members which they would have had to contact by the next day. It was impossible to cancel. They legally could not change the location or cancel the meeting, but they did cancel all normal sporting events, dinners and rallies, events that normally go on for several days, and all they did was complete the meeting that they were legally obliged to hold.

The “cold dead hands” clip was in fact taken from a speech in North Carolina a year after the columbine killings, and was in response to being given the musket he was holding as a gift.

Moore uses clever editing to make it appear that Heston had been asked not to come to Denver and didn’t care. The speech Bowling for Columbine shows Heston make is nothing short of a lie, and I truly believe Moore should be put in prison for creating it. If you don’t remember or haven’t seen the film, go and watch the Charlton Heston speech Moore shows you, then come back and let me educate you.

The speech shown was only possible due to severe and brutal editing. He used audio from seven sentences, from five different parts of the speech in Denver, and also a section of an entirely different speech. Each edit is covered up by using a still image or video footage.

The speech starts showing weeping people outside the school in Columbine, then it cuts to Heston saying “From my cold dead hands” clearly making it seem like he’s talking about this situation. To cover the transition from this statement to the Denver speech, Moore goes to a visual of a billboard to distract the audience, because otherwise you might notice Heston suddenly change clothes mid-sentence.

Moore then edits out Heston saying that all events have been cancelled other that the meeting they were required to continue with by law, and instead goes straight to showing him responding to the mayors request that the NRA do not come to Denver. Moore shows Heston say “I said to the Mayor ‘As Americans, we’re free to travel wherever we want in our broad land. Don’t come here? We’re already here’”. He looks like a callous prick. However, Moore had actually created this sentence himself by editing various other parts of Heston’s speech. This is what Heston actually said, and it was in reference to his WWII vet status “I said to the Mayor, well, my reply to the mayor is this “I volunteered for the war when they wanted me to attend when I was 18 years old. Since then, I’ve run small errands for country, from Nigeria to Vietnam. I know many of you here in this room could say the same thing”

The only bit of that Moore decided to use was “I said to the mayor”, and he then appends “As Americans we’re free to travel wherever we want in our broad land” which Heston said at the end of the next paragraph. He makes it seem like a full sentence by cutting to footage of protestors to hide the splice. The viewer is given the impression this is one sentence.

At the end of the speech, Heston is shown to say “Don’t come here? We’re already here!” completing a sentence that makes him look like the worlds biggest arsehole. But of course he actually said that part of the sentence five paragraphs later in the speech. This is the context it was actually used in…

“NRA Members are in City Hall, Fort Carson, NORAD, the Air Force Academy and the Olympic training centre. And Yes, NRA members are surely among the police and fire and swat team heroes who risked their lives to rescue the students at Columbine. Don’t come here? We’re already here. This community is our home, every community is our home.”

He then talks about something boring (I’m not editing because it’s negative, it’s just dull) but he then continues to say…

“So we have the same right as all other citizens to be here, to help shoulder the grief and share our sorrow and to offer our respectful reassured voice to the national discourse that has erupted around this tragedy”

Moore basically took a man saying “look, this is a terrible event but we do have to do this, and it wasn’t us that did it even though we do like guns, but we’ll get it done as quickly as possible and then we’ll leave” and made it seem like he was saying “fuck you all, I’m glad your kids are dead”.

He later goes on to do basically the same editing trick with an interview Heston granted him in order to make Heston look like a racist. Heston worked with Martin Luther King, picketed discriminating restaurants, and was the first Hollywood star to appear in a role kissing a black woman. This is a man who’s entire life shows he is anything but a racist, but who cares about the truth when you’ve got money to make out of lying eh? Obviously I don’t know what was edited out of that interview, but I do know that during the interview, the clock you can see by Moore’s head shows 5:47 the first time you see it, and 6:10 at the end. The interview only lasted about 5 minutes in the film, and is presented as one continuous conversation. You can do the math.

And all of this still doesn’t piss me off as much as the constant stirring up of hatred and attempt to create division between rich and poor, black and white, left and right. Poor people aren’t ever to blame for their own situation, it’s always the fault of the rich, criminals aren’t ever to blame for committing crime, it’s the fault of the media. It’s fucking stupid. Sometimes people have a shit life and it’s isn’t their fault, but sometimes it is, and it’s obtuse to pretend otherwise. Michael Moore’s career is about creating division, he makes people believe their problems are someone else’s fault, and of course that makes them feel better about themselves, and this creates a feeling of warmth towards him. The truth is that he’s taking advantage of these people more than any corporation ever could, he manipulates them, prays on their insecurities, and plays on the western worlds white guilt. He has created an image for himself that means disagreeing with him classes you as a racist who hates the poor, and he’s sat back and raked in the money off the back of this fallacy. Weak people always want someone to blame for their problems, and Moore allows them to do this. That is why he has such a devoted following of people desperate to ignore the plain truth; he’s just another greedy selfish white man.

To illustrate how everything anyone does is always the fault of the evil government, Moore tells us the story of the young boy that killed Kayla Rolland in school a few years ago and paints him as this poor sweet little kid who was the victim of the government not helping poor people. According to Moore, the only reason the boy shot Kayla was that his mum was forced to do some work in return for her welfare and couldn’t look after him. Again he doesn’t mention the facts. Like the fact the kid lived in a crack house and stole the gun from his drug dealer uncle. Like the fact the kid had already stabbed one girl with a pencil before he killed Kayla. Like the fact he had threatened Kayla before the attack. Like the fact the boy was known for being violent. Like the fact his grandmother and aunt had just been arrested for drug dealing and that they were so hated by their community that the neighbours applauded when they were taken away by the police. If you present a case present every side of it, don’t skip out the bits you don’t like. The facts of this case are as plain as day if you choose to address them all honestly. Kayla was murdered by a violent kid brought up by a shitty family. Governments do not raise our children, families do, and this kid was always going to be a criminal because his family were vermin. You cannot simply blame the social situation, their neighbours were in the exact same social situation and they weren’t crack dealers.

He then suggests that the only reason America has a high crime rate is that the media report crime so much that everyone is scared, and that leads to more crime. I’m sorry, what the fuck are you talking about fat man? That doesn’t make any sense, if the crimes aren’t happening, then they can’t be reported you retard. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking hate the media and I do believe they are determined to create fear, but that isn’t the cause of crime, and anyone that thinks it is is a moron. The statistic Moore uses to prove his point is that in America, over a period where murder rates were falling by 20%, media coverage of murder increased by 600%. On the surface that does seem to prove his point, unless you have an IQ, and then you’ll do this.

“When media coverage increased 600%, murder rates fell 20%”

Same statistic, said slightly different, proves the exact opposite, that media coverage of murder reduces the murder rate.

Michael Moore should be nailed to a tree. His justification for his continuous deception is that other people, namely corporate America and the Government, are deceiving us to believe the other extreme. That isn’t a justification, it’s a lame excuse, what he should actually say is “I’m a fat greedy prick and I want your money”, but that would involve being honest, and that’s not something he’s good at.

The cure for deception is not more deception. In Moore’s Academy Award acceptance speech for Best Documentary, he used the opportunity to shamelessly self-promote himself with a pathetic speech criticising George Bush. “We live in fictitious times, we live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons” blah blah blah blah blah “Shame on you Mr Bush. Shame on you”

He got the shit booed out of him. It was hilarious.

This from a man who is only on the stage in the first place because of a fictitious documentary. If you are going to criticise any individual or group for not meeting standards, you simply have to meet those standards yourself. You should also stop eating so fucking much.