Dude, Where's
My Country?
Michael Moore. ISBN 0-713-99700-1. Price listed as £17.99, but available
most places for £8.99.
This is a book you must read, for your enjoyment. Michael Moore's view
of world affairs will be your own, so for you there will be nothing challenging
in Dude, Where's My Country?. It is the sort of book you would write yourself
if you had Moore's team of talented researchers checking the facts, and
you were a genius in finding ways to present these awful facts about our
present world in a forceful, though hilarious, way.
The main story Moore has to tell is America's war against Iraq, set in
the broader landscape of malign U.S. foreign policy, and he writes with
a specific purpose. Not to make money - though Dude Where's My Country?
will undoubtedly do that - but to reach and influence a wide-enough audience
of waverers and non-voters in his own country, so that the world will
not have to suffer a second term of George W. Bush after the election
of November this year.
Bush has given the rich a tax cut, and Michael Moore, after the huge success
of Stupid White Men and Bowling For Columbine, is a very rich man. Moore
has vowed to use every dollar of his Bush tax windfall to oppose Bush's
re-election. Moore's dollars will no doubt be welcome in the campaign,
but much more influential will be this hard-hitting, hilarious polemic.
If you call Tom Paine's Common Sense a pamphlet, then this book is also
a pamphlet, and may have as huge an influence on American public opinion
at a critical time as Paine's had. In fact, the way Moore pursues an idea
and throws light on dark problems in the clearest prose, reminds me of
Paine. (Readers who know my great respect for Tom Paine will realise that
it costs me to admit there could be a modern equivalent to Britain's greatest
social reformer.)
Let's have a quote to give the flavour. 'Stop terrorising our own citizens
with the Patriot Act. And while you're at it, read 1984 by George Orwell
and stop naming things in ways that remind us of totalitarian dictators.'
The chapter on the real America, A Liberal Paradise, makes heartening
reading for us pro-Americans who have been dismayed by Bush's America.
Chapter 5 is headed How to Stop Terrorism? Stop Being Terrorists! As you
might imagine, the book is full of the sort of dependable but shocking
facts which make you wonder how Bush and his entourage have got away with
it. Let's hope that readers hitherto ignorant of them will react appropriately
when it comes to putting crosses on the ballot paper. Only one small complaint:
In the analysis on Afghanistan, there was no mention of the Taliban's
offer to give up Bin Laden for trial at an international court, an offer
that was turned down by the U.S. in favour of dropping bombs on the entire
country.
Well now, having finished this review, I am now going to give myself the
pleasure of re-reading this book.
H.D.
|