Biting the hand that flies him

Michael Moore sat in the back seat of a black sedan moving silently along a dark, two-lane highway toward a private airfield (“a marijuana airstrip,” Moore had joked) in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

A Time Warner jet awaited him. Moore, the controversial filmmaker behind the documentaries “Roger & Me” and the Academy Award-winning “Bowling for Columbine,” was with a bodyguard, a driver and a reporter; an SUV containing the rest of his party followed. They included Moore’s sister, Anne, who is a criminal defense attorney, two assistants and another bodyguard. Two other figures in the SUV -- Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein -- were lifelike but in fact the spawn of Photoshop and cardboard.

Moore is on a lecture-book tour for his latest satirical polemic, “Dude, Where’s My Country?” He is barnstorming the country, trashing Republicans and corporate America and what he sees as President Bush’s trumped-up, hypocritical war in Iraq.

In getting these messages out, Moore, the Flint, Mich., native and self-styled voice of the average worker, is also availing himself of corporate America’s toys -- SUVs and a private jet, provided by his publisher, Warner Books.

“I would never pay for this, let me just tell you that right now,” Moore had said, earlier in the day, en route from Occidental College to Van Nuys Airport. Of the bodyguards, from Gavin de Becker & Associates, Moore said: “I’m grateful for the security because I want to get through this [tour] OK, and I know the country I live in.”

For everything else he is, Moore is a guy who can move books: “Stupid White Men” which came out last year, has sold more than 4 million copies, and “Dude, Where’s My Country?” on Sunday hit No. 1 on the Los Angeles Times and New York Times bestseller lists. So if a major publisher was going to supply him with a plane, to sell a book that bashed corporations while it made the corporation money, why not use it?

“Look, it’s highly ironic, and the irony is not lost on me,” Moore said. He continued to play around with the idea. Reporters in the past have confronted him about seeming contradictions between his public image and private life.

It’s boilerplate by now, Moore’s reaction indicates. He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan but wears Kmart-bought jeans.

“Don’t take offense at this,” Moore said. “When I’ve been interviewed in the past, it’s rare that anyone from the working class would ask, ‘How does the plane, the Town Car affect you?’ The working class just thinks it’s cool.”

Hitting the campuses

Moore, 49, is reviled in some corners as a liberal propagandist, someone who cheats the truth in his movies. On this tour, which started Oct. 9, he is speaking mostly on college campuses, where his films are revered by 20-year-old cineastes and his role as an oversized slacker-subversive plays well.

But the audience for “Dude, Where’s My Country?” is broader, as it is for other anti-Bush administration harangues that are bestsellers alongside titles by conservative commentators Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham. They include Al Franken’s “Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them)” and “Bushwhacked” by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose.

“It reflects the fact that the progressive, populist end of the spectrum has dusted itself off and realized that it really wants to be heard,” Peter Osnos, chief executive and publisher at the independent house PublicAffairs Press, said of the mood being tapped by Moore, Franken, et al. Jillian Manus, a Republican and president of the literary agency Manus & Associates, says the controversial 2000 presidential election stoked the public’s hunger for political discourse: “They want confirmation of their own beliefs, or they want criticism.”

Having voted for Ralph Nader in 1996 and 2000, Moore says he hasn’t decided whom he will support for president.

“Don’t you think that I’d better serve the public by being on the outside and commenting on what’s going on and trying to push the debate and try to bring up the issues and trying to keep them honest?” In New York, Moore was inside enough to meet with retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark at Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner’s apartment, and with former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean at an event thrown by actor Paul Newman and International Creative Management agent Boaty Boatwright.

The image of Moore accepted into polite society clashes with the on-screen provocateur lumbering into the lobby of a glass office in jeans and baseball cap, asking for a sit-down with a CEO. In his guerrilla-style work -- which in addition to his films include the 1990s TV series “TV Nation” and “The Awful Truth” -- he has taken victims of throat cancer to a tobacco company’s headquarters and had them sing Christmas carols through their artificial voice boxes. In “Bowling for Columbine,” he took two victims of the Columbine High School shooting to Kmart headquarters to return the bullets still lodged in their bodies.

Now, as the 2004 presidential election nears, Moore is using his book and his lectures and his next film, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” to try to hound Bush out of office. In a way, it’s a campaign for our times: A leftist attacking big-media influences, using big media to convey his message. In the end, both the leftist and big media profit.

Like his previous films, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which Moore hopes to complete by the spring, is a documentary, but a documentary in the sense that it documents Moore’s worldview. In the case of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, that worldview, essentially, goes as follows: The Bush administration cynically used the attacks to jam through a conservative agenda and sell a false war, based on false fears of an imminent terrorist threat, all of which left a host of more pertinent questions, eventually raised by the press, unanswered by the administration. “Is it true that the Bin Ladens have had business relations with you and your family off and on for the past 25 years?” is one of the “7 Questions for George of Arabia” Moore asks in his book.

Figuratively, anyway, Bush is Moore’s new Roger Smith, the General Motors chairman and corporate villain he stalked in “Roger & Me.”

“Thank you for letting me finish my Oscar speech,” is something Moore has been saying to audience after audience on his lecture tour. The line gets a big laugh and Moore, make no mistake, finishes that speech. Back in March, of course, there were scattered boos and chagrined people in Vera Wang when Moore, holding his Oscar onstage at the Kodak Theatre, had his microphone cut as he shouted: “We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fiction of duct tape or fiction of orange alerts, we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you.”

In the months after the Oscars, Moore says, right-wing talk show hosts gave out his home number, and he couldn’t walk the streets of Manhattan or use the subways without being confronted physically.

But now, he feels, given mounting U.S. troop casualties, and the fact that weapons of mass destruction have not been found in Hussein’s arsenal, and charges that the president used faulty intelligence to push for war, things have changed.

“People now know we were lied to,” Moore said. “What I said on that stage was the truth.”

Support and scolding

On the jet, heading north to Grass Valley, Moore was eating a chef’s salad brought him by a flight attendant. He had done more than three hours at Occidental, speaking and signing books, and would do an additional four hours that night at the Grass Valley War Memorial Auditorium. Anne Moore sat across the aisle. She is handling some of his press on this tour, handling her older brother. It seems important to have someone around Moore who agrees with his cause but has the power to scold him. Moore can’t really be controlled; at times he’s more like a giant adolescent, passionate and disarming but also motor-mouthed and oblivious to schedules.

“I got this great interview,” Moore said, referring to a former FBI official he’d interviewed about the Al Qaeda terrorist cell for “Fahrenheit 9/11.” “They don’t let just anybody into their little club.... You make it into Al Qaeda, you get health care, paid vacations. Serious. Hilarious stuff. He was one of the point men on the whole Al Qaeda business,” Moore said of the FBI guy.

The plane landed, took off again to avoid some pheasants, then landed again. In the SUV heading into Grass Valley, Moore said: “They can spin the one bad apple story all they want, but the truth, and the videotape that I have in my possession, which I can’t speak too much of, shows that Bin Laden family members were supporting [Osama] right up until 9/11. They had contact with him right up until 9/11. The same ones benefiting from family relationships with Bush.”

The event in Grass Valley, an old Gold Rush town, drew aging hippies, families, students from nearby colleges. Nevada County is majority Republican, Schwarzenegger country, but this was a liberal pocket. Moore entertained them, venting about weapons of mass destruction (the only ones Hussein had were the ones for which we have the receipts); Democratic presidential candidates (“I’m in the anyone-but-Lieberman camp”) and, of course, conservatives (why are these angry white men so angry?).

Moore signed books for two hours, by which time it was midnight. The traveling Michael Moore Show was due back at the airfield, for a short flight to San Francisco. He will be at Cal State San Marcos on Tuesday and at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Nov. 22 and 23.

In the sedan back to the jet, Moore yawned. But he seemed satisfied. And he kept talking. He talked about his flaws (“I’m way too indecisive. I procrastinate for the longest time”) and “Fahrenheit 9/11” (“It’s not a conspiracy theory movie, it’s investigative journalism in the vein of I.F. Stone”) and about the amazing footage falling into his hands (“Word is out on the Internet that I’m making this film”).

He talked about the crowd tonight -- “schoolteachers and social workers and nurses. Boomers who haven’t given up on their ideals, they’ve just gone out and worked.”

Michael Moore’s America. Or something like it.