Burning Bush Essay Research Paper Burning BushStupid

Burning Bush Essay, Research Paper

Burning BushStupid White Men & # 8230 ; and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the NationMichael MooreHarperCollins? 18, pp304Michael Moore, the satirical agent provocateur of modern American life, returns with a acerb new book that created contentions even before it was released. Planned for an fall 2001 launch, Stupid White Men was shelved in the aftermath of 11 September, when its publishing house, HarperCollins, balked at its anti-Bush attitude.Although 50,000 transcripts had already been printed, the writer was told, harmonizing to Moore, to & # 8216 ; tone down its dissent & # 8217 ; . Traveling public through his ain much-visited web site, www.michaelmoore.com, Moore forced the company to change by reversal its determination and the & # 8216 ; banned & # 8217 ; book became a pre-order best seller on Amazon, traveling directly into figure three on the New York Times bestseller list.Best known in the UK for his satirical telecasting series Television Nation, Moore has been exposing and assaulting corporate America for old ages. In his old best-selling book, Downsize This! , and documental films Roger & A ; Me and The Big One, Moore chased down CEOs to convey them to personal history for what he saw as their onslaughts on the lives and supports of blue-collar Americans.Stupid White Men extends this to political relations. Moore argues that under Bush the Wasp captains of industry and authorities & # 8211 ; the Stupid White Men of the rubric & # 8211 ; have jointly done more harm to his state than any other cultural or special-interest group.This powerful set of brothers includes Republicans and Democrats. The lone difference, suggests Moore, is that & # 8216 ; the Republicans tell you they & # 8217 ; re traveling to sleep together you ; the Democrats don & # 8217 ; T, but so do it anyhow & # 8217 ; . Hesitating merely to observe that Clinton was & # 8216 ; one of the best Republican presidents we of all time had & # 8217 ; and Bush is merely an & # 8216 ; uglier and slightly meaner version & # 8217 ; of him, Moore offers to pay the legal fees for a amalgamation of the two partie

s.It’s this breakneck, tell-it-like-it-is rhetoric that makes Stupid White Men perfect for today’s speed-reader. In its 11 chapters Moore finds time to solve the Middle East (Arafat should deploy non-violent protest), Northern Ireland (convert the Protestants to Catholicism) and the Balkans (Yugo cars should be dropped like bombs until peace is secured). But these are really just asides, it’s the fat cats that really rile him.Moore’s analysis of the Bush election and administration sails perilously close to conspiracy-theory oblivion at times, but Stupid White Men is saved from the wild-eyed scrapheap by its disarming satirical reversals. Moore describes a whites-only neighbourhood where ’suspicious gangs of white people [were] lurking on every street corner, drinking Starbucks and wearing their gang colours of Gap Turquoise or J Crew Mauve’, and offers black people a checklist of items to take to their polling station next time, including a knitting needle to ensure correctly punched holes, a camera and a lawyer.But Moore is not just interested in jokes; he wants to change the world. He urges readers to seek election to local authority boards and committees, vowing to stand himself in his own district. For the key to change, he says, is the people. Moore rolls his eyes at the celebrity-obsessed ‘idiot nation’, but he has faith that individuals can rise up and improve matters.Although the book seems inextricably linked with 11 September, it was completed before then. A section on events since then will be an essential inclusion for the second edition.Moore has already earned his position as an almost lone voice of effective mainstream dissent in the American media. He’s a genuine populist; a twenty-first-century pamphleteer with a broad appeal that ageing critics like Noam Chomsky – still preaching to placard-waving middle-class undergraduates – must envy.· John Lee is a Vancouver-based writer.