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Michael Moore: Flint Voice
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Michael Moore grew up in a suburb of Flint, Michigan, which was then home to a GM factory. He is an Eagle Scout, and a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association. He claims to have never smoked marijuana. He was elected to the local school board in 1972 at age 18. Moore wrote for Flint's alternative weekly, the Flint Voice, and was promoted to editor. Under his leadership, the paper expanded its coverage and changed its name to Michigan Voice.
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With his trademark ball cap slightly askew atop his chubby face, Michael Moore hardly seems like a scary guy. But put a camera in his hand and corporate giants shudder. At least that was the case with General Motors chairman Roger Smith, the "Roger" of Moore's hilariously nasty film, Roger & Me. His relentless stalking of the GM honcho in the wake of plant closures in Flint, Michigan established Moore as a caustically funny commentator on the battle of Big Corporations vs. The Little Guy.
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In Bowling for Columbine, Moore dwells on the case of the six-year-old boy who shot and killed a classmate in, coincidentally, Flint, Michigan. The boy got into trouble, Moore informs us, because welfare reform forced his mother, Tamarla Owens, to work two jobs and left her unable to care for her son. Moore does not mention that the boy and his mother were living in a crack house filled with guns, or that social workers had previously cited Tamarla Owens for being “involved with drugs” as well as for child abuse, including an incident where, according to Newhouse News Service, she admitted holding down another of her children so that two male friends could beat him with a belt. Nor does he mention that poverty rates and well-being for black children have improved markedly since the “terrorists” passed welfare reform. But why would he? The test of his moral system is the degree of resentment it inspires, not facts and reason.
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In 1976 Moore created a small leftist newspaper, the Flint Voice (later called the Michigan Voice), which he edited for ten years. This position gave him access to leftwing activists and fundraisers, and the opportunity to do occasional commentaries for the National Public Radio feature "All Things Considered."
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Stuck in the Walter Reuther past, Moore can make no sense of this. A while back, he was appalled when The Nation asked him to be part of a lecture cruise, “to hold seminars during the day and then dock at Saint Kitts at night!” he hissed derisively, as if it were still the era when plutocrats in tuxedos and women in gowns and diamonds dined on caviar and champagne with the ship’s captain, while workingmen and women scrimped for a week’s vacation at a dank lake bungalow. He seems not to know that plumbers from Milwaukee and secretaries from Akron fill Caribbean cruise ships these days (though probably not those sponsored by The Nation), and that factory workers often sport two cars—and a boat on a trailer—in their driveways. Our economic system has “got to go,” he told Industry Central, before admitting, “Now don’t ask me what to replace it with because I don’t know.” How convenient: he can dwell in his mythical land of Flint and never face the manifest truth that the system that downsized and restructured with such turmoil ultimately improved living standards for millions, while at the same time absorbing hosts of poor immigrants.
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Never mind that Moore actually grew up in Davison, a Flint suburb. That's small spuds (as author Jesse Larner found out when he went looking). Never mind that Moore has told at least 14 contradictory stories about why he was fired from Mother Jones magazine: because he refused to smear the Sandinistas, because he refused to condone violations of the magazine's union contract, because he was planning a series of articles critical of Israel, because several of the women on staff had complained about the magazine's "sexist" publisher...take your pick.
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