The Mouth That Still Roars

Michael Moore is ticked off about a lot of things. Racism, corporate greed, mad cow disease, drilling for oil on Alaska’s North Slope. You name it, America’s favorite left-wing gadfly can get worked up about it.

But what really sticks in Moore’s craw, the thing that makes him want to strangle someone, is how the last presidential election was decided. “We live in a democracy. The majority rules. And Gore got the most votes,” says Moore, whose new book is “Stupid White Men ... and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation” (Regan Books).

“I can’t believe we’ve got a guy sitting in the White House who did not win the White House,” says Moore, who voted for Ralph Nader. “And I will never get over that. I will never be silent about it.”

Of course, when has Michael Moore ever been silent about anything? Ever since he exploded into the national consciousness with his critically acclaimed 1989 documentary “Roger and Me” (in which he tries to track down General Motors President Roger Smith to ask him why he closed the plants in Moore’s hometown of Flint, Mich.), Moore has been a one-man radical SWAT team, using humor and his shuffling, bearish presence to lay into America’s sacred cows.

Along the way, he’s also become a ubiquitous media figure. Moore has written a bestselling book (“Downsize This”), written and directed a feature film (“Canadian Bacon”), and written, produced and directed two TV series, one Emmy-nominated (“The Awful Truth”) the other an Emmy winner (“TV Nation”). He’s even acted in one feature film (“Lucky Numbers”).

Love him or hate him, Moore has become very difficult to avoid. So here he is, heavier and shaggier than ever, a 47-year-old Irish Catholic from the depressed factory city of Flint, Mich., whose public persona seems to be equal amounts humility and bombast. One moment, Moore will brag about how “I am one of the few people on this side of the [political] fence that does reach a mainstream audience.” The next moment he’ll discuss why “Roger and Me” was a failure, because the film was made to shine a light on Flint’s many problems, yet the city is worse off than ever.

“I know why I started out to make that film, and it wasn’t to get a deal with Warner Bros.,” he says. “It was to save my hometown, and just the opposite happened. To me, it feels like a failure.”

Moore says all this while seated on a couch in his tchotchke-filled office on West 57th Street, home to his production company, United TV. The large space, which has a view of the Hudson River, is filled with toys, plaques, movie posters, framed newspaper stories and pictures, including one taken when Moore sneaked into the presidential screening room during a Clinton-era White House dinner to which he was invited.

When his magazine-style TV series “The Awful Truth” is in production, Moore employs as many as 50 people. Currently, he’s working with a skeleton staff of four or five film editors while he pieces together “Bowling for Columbine” (the title refers to the last class Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attended before they shot 13 classmates and themselves).

The new documentary takes an idiosyncratic look at America’s gun culture--of which Moore, a longtime NRA member, is a surprising participant (he won target-shooting medals as a kid).

“Why are there 16,000 gun murders a year [here], and 150 in Canada?” Moore asks. “And in part of this movie I’m going to show that Canada has 7 million guns inside of 10 million households. They’re a clear example of how you can have guns laying around but not kill each other. I wanted to explore why that was.” His theory is that Canada’s social welfare system gives its citizens a comfortable enough safety net that they don’t get desperate enough to resort to violence.

Right now, though, Moore is lying on his couch looking for all the world like a very hairy beached whale while discussing “Stupid White Men.” The impetus for the book came from the 2000 election, which so infuriated Moore’s sense of democratic process he decided to attack some other issues that were gnawing at him.

The book is filled with Moore’s by-now familiar style--alternately snarly, outraged and very funny--and it takes on everything from the sorry state of American education to (not surprisingly) the entire Bush administration.

But probably the funniest and most controversial chapter is called “Kill Whitey,” a satiric look at racism in which Moore wonders why people are so afraid of minorities when it is white people who have caused all the world’s major problems.

“Who gave us the black plague?” Moore writes. “A white guy. Who invented the punch card ballot? A white man. The genocide of Native Americans? White man. Slavery? Whitey.”

And so on. Moore can be merciless when he wants to be, and he certainly does not hold back in an open letter to the president, in which he questions George W. Bush’s literacy level, his arrest record as a young adult and his drinking. Referring to the election, he even calls Bush the “Thief-in-Chief.” It is this no-holds-barred tone, in fact, that Moore says caused problems with his publisher Harper-Collins.

“Stupid White Men” was due to come out in September, but its release was postponed because of the Sept. 11 attacks. Moore says, “The book was held up because the publisher was afraid of offending people who like George W. Bush, because the book is extremely harsh on the president. They wanted me to change that, to tone it down. But I didn’t feel any differently about him on Sept. 12th than I had on Sept. 10th.”

Moore says he also offered to add a chapter to the book, to reflect the post-9/11 world, but that Harper-Collins “said you can only add something if you change your criticisms of George W. Bush and you share 50% of the reprinting costs, which would be about $100,000.” Moore refused.

Lisa Herling, a spokeswoman for Harper-Collins, declined to respond to any of Moore’s specific complaints, saying only that “in light of the events of Sept. 11 the book was put on hold until we could figure out the best way to move forward.

After a period of time it was decided that the book should be published now as it was originally written.”

The controversy certainly didn’t hurt the book’s sales. “Stupid White Men” hit the No. 1 spot on Amazon.com’s bestseller list only days after its publication late last month and has been in the top five ever since. Moore feels especially gratified by this for two reasons: It means he is not simply preaching to the choir, and his success is a big raspberry in the face of lefties who disdain popular culture and mass appeal.

“I have a very wide, broad audience that goes deep into the mainstream of America,” says Moore, “and I’m one of the few people on the left that has that, and I feel very fortunate and privileged to have it.”

In fact, Moore feels he gets more criticism from political allies than those opposed to his positions. “There’s that part of the left that likes to be in the role of the victim, and always losing,” he says, while adding that “I have literally hundreds of letters that open with ‘I’m a Republican, and I love your show.’ It’s clear that what they’re saying is they understand I respect their opinion, even if it disagrees with mine. Even those people know I say and do the things I do because I love this country, and I love the people in it, and I just want to see it be better.”

Say this for Michael Moore: You can take the boy out of Flint, but you can’t take Flint out of the boy. Moore is wealthy, famous, honored. He is recognized in the street all the time, and lives on a relatively tony block on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Yet he still maintains a home in Michigan and hangs out there with the same friends he had 20 years ago, when he was writing and editing an alternative weekly. So maybe he plays on this Joe Workingman image a little much--you can’t say Moore doesn’t know his roots.

“You have to understand when you come from Flint, Mich., there is no left,” he says. “There is no left community, no cafe to go to and order a latte and talk about this stuff. The politics I have come from growing up in an Irish-Catholic working-class factory family.

“And it makes sense to me that if you come out of that experience, you have a healthy distrust of those in authority, and you’ve figured out who’s trying to get rich off the backs of those who do all the work.”

Michael Moore will appear at 2 p.m. today at Cal State L.A. in the Luckman Theater and at 7:30 tonight at Immanuel Presbyterian Church, 3300 Wilshire Blvd.