Michael Moore is the man who took up Noam Chomsky’s challenge to make American politics more exciting than sport. His groundbreaking documentary film, Roger and Me, set records as the most successful non-fiction film ever. It is also the film where he patented his style of “just ask a stupid question…” journalism.
In Stupid White Men, Moore sets the record straight on one or two questions that most people know the answer to but are too afraid to ask. Who is the real, elected American president, for example? We all know that Dubya Bush is not. Or why are most Americans afraid of black men when white men are the ones that rob them, cheat them and fuck them over on a regular basis? Everyone from the kid that shot him in the butt with a BB gun to the executive that cancelled his television show TV Nation has been one of those shady white guys.
Moore’s way of getting at the truth is simple, direct and hilarious. When Moore sees magazine editor Fred Barnes on television complaining that the education system is failing kids, for example, he does the right thing. Barnes says the trouble is that kids don’t know what the Iliad and the Odyssey are. Moore phones him up and asks him if he knows what they are. The answer: “Well, they’re… uh… you know… uh… okay, fine, you got me—I don’t know what they’re about.”
Stupid White Men sees Moore at his sharpest. He is, quite simply, the man.
Rating: VVVV
Rob Thomas
This is the third novel by one-time managing editor of Adbuster magazine and former Harper Collins author Jim Munroe. Munroe left Harper Collins, owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch, for political reasons after his first novel, Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask. He went on to self-publish his second, Angry Young Spaceman. His do-it-yourself approach worked out to his benefit, too. His second, independent book outsold the first.
In his third book—another indie—Munroe takes on the future world of 2036. It is a lawless, corporate-dominated world that looks more like the Internet then your average urban neighbourhood. Corporations have long since disbanded those parochial governments and no scrap of land remains un-branded. It is a world as ugly as the smog which suffuses it.
There is relief, but it comes at a price. Upload your mind to the Microsoft virtual reality Self and—assuming you can afford a gold membership—you can kiss those pesky ads goodbye. What are you giving up? Your troublesome physical body? Any real control? Freedom?
But perhaps your old lifestyle had already undermined those frivolous indulgences. Everyone in Silico is, quite simply, 1984 circa 2036, where Big Brother is much worse than a puny, tyrannical government; it’s a corporation.
Rating: VVV
Rob Thomas
