Irony Lives!

In his less hyperventilated moments, Michael Moore knows that “stupid white men” are not responsible for what disgusts him. They--the “gang of geezers” who Moore believes run the country--are far from stupid, increasingly go well beyond what is generally considered to be “white” and are even superficially redressing the superficialities of gender imbalance.

You will quickly see, if you graze very deeply into “Stupid White Men,” that what really gets Moore’s ample undies hysterically bunched, page after page, is not intelligence, ethnicity or genital structure, but power.

Moore is not without a certain power himself. Mostly it’s the power to be in the right place at the right time and publicize the result. This is the guy whose version of how and why he was rapidly dismissed as editor of Mother Jones took on a not-necessarily-true life of its own. The guy whose breakthrough film “Roger & Me” rested on a conceit (the alleged unwillingness of the then-head of General Motors to be interviewed) that may or may not have been true. The guy who bravely tells tales to get access to people and areas where access would normally be denied to enliven (or even make possible) his very uncommercial TV product, yet keep it full of yuks enough to get it, however marginally, on commercial TV.

And now, behind “Stupid White Men” comes a tale (not included in the book, because it was printed and temporarily mothballed in the wake of Sept. 11) of how its publication was delayed by political timidity on the part of the Rupert Murdoch-owned publisher now making money from it as it heads just about every bestseller list. The problem with giving the book a straight reading now is that the same powers Moore decries for their policies of personal and planetary devastation have now raised the post-Sept. 11 ante.

It is hard to find very many folks, for example, still feeling daily outrage at the way George W. Bush became president, one of Moore’s obsessions. Equally difficult would be a search among our fellow citizens for people whose world view is not at least partially defined by a lingering image of the World Trade Center imploding on Sept. 11.

“Everything” did not change after Sept. 11, as some wags would have it, but enough did so that trenchant, even satirical, social criticism has to keep that ghastly date and its continuing fallout in mind. And Moore, whose book was completed before then, of necessity, cannot.

But inevitably, irreverence will come to have an audience again. And perhaps the large audiences at Moore’s book tour appearances and the fact that he’s ahead of the now usual gaggle of right-wing polemicists in sales is a milestone in that process.

There has been an unnatural imbalance in bestsellerdom for many months now, with Bill O’Reilly, Pat Buchanan, Peggy Noonan, Bernard Goldberg and their ilk taking over where once more liberal (although rarely progressive) authors prospered.

And after all, what could be more popular than one-liner studded populism from a top-down guy like Moore, who “loves this big lug of a country, and all the people in it”? What he emphatically doesn’t love is economic inequality, racism, environmental pollution, unjust incarceration and the rest of a laundry list that might have been taken from the Green Party’s 2000 platform.

If you’re on his side, you already know most, if not all, of this. Although even then “Stupid White Men” may cheer you up, as it contains abundant documentation to back up Moore’s predilections. If you’re not on his side, or know someone who isn’t, you may well find “Stupid White Men” a useful tool to change minds, though hardly a fulcrum strong enough to change the system in which Moore believes so many minds are trapped. After all, his publisher, the Murdoch tentacle known as Regan Books, also offers Robert Bork, Howard Stern and Bo Derek. And, if “Stupid White Men” sells enough copies, we can look forward to an inevitable sequel (“Cowboys in Camo”)? There will surely be no end of raw material. Just look at the other sections of this newspaper if you need proof.