Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [138]
“Tell me about your paper,” he said. And so I did. I told him about how the local daily was in the pocket of General Motors and that we wanted to present the news that wasn’t being covered.
“Sounds like a worthy effort,” Harry said. “Here’s my manager’s number. Give him a call and I’ll see what I can do.”
Dumbfounded, I left the backstage area on cloud seven (for some reason, my eternal pessimism about myself always kept me from getting any higher). I returned to Flint to tell the staff what happened. Within months, Harry Chapin was in front of a sold-out audience in Flint, and we now had the money to fund our paper.
And for the next five years, until a tragic accident on the Long Island Expressway took his life in July 1981, Harry Chapin came to Flint each year, doing a total of eleven benefit concerts for the Flint Voice. Those proceeds kept us afloat, and after Harry’s death, his brothers, Tom and Steve, and his band would continue the tradition of playing the annual concert in Flint.
But by 1985, it was not enough to sustain the paper, and the struggle to continue its publication was worsening.
It was at this time I received a phone call from a man in San Francisco. He was Adam Hochschild, the multimillionaire liberal who ran the foundation that owned Mother Jones magazine, the largest circulation publication on the left. He said he had been following the Flint Voice and liked what he saw, and he wondered if I would be interested in doing what I was doing in Flint, but on a national scale.
The offer sounded too good—and it was. I closed up my beloved Voice, sold everything I had, and moved to Parnassus Avenue in the Upper Haight district of San Francisco. It wasn’t long, though, before I realized what a huge mistake I had made. I wanted to turn Mother Jones into a magazine for the working class (the namesake of the magazine, after all, Mary “Mother” Jones, was a radical union organizer from the nineteenth century). Hochschild (whose family fortune and inheritance came in part from the mines of the then-apartheid South Africa) wanted a more erudite and “sublime” periodical of commentary and reporting that would rival the New Yorker or the Atlantic. In fact, his second choice for his new editor had been Hendrik Hertzberg, an instinct he should have gone with. (Hertzberg later became executive editor of the New Yorker.)
I was a true fish out of water in San Francisco. I didn’t understand the way things were done at this magazine, and my efforts to make changes were met with much resistance. They wanted neo-nudnik Paul Berman covering the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. I had wanted Alexander Cockburn. They wanted to do an investigative piece on herbal teas; I wanted to give a monthly column to an autoworker on the assembly line in Flint. They were Mars and I was Bluto. On the day after Labor Day, after just four months on the job, Hochschild fired me. He said we weren’t “a good fit.” He was right. I sued him for breach of contract and fraud and won $60,000.
There was now no newspaper for me to return to in Flint, and all attempts to seek employment with other lefty/liberal publications on both coasts were met with the embrace one gives a leper. No one on the left wanted to upset Mother Jones. No one wanted this guy from Flint. Other than the people who worked at Ralph Nader’s office in D.C., there was no one who would offer me work.
And that, my friends, was supposed to have been the last you were to have heard from me. My fifteen minutes on the national stage were over.
After a month of lying in bed and bemoaning my fate, I got up one day and went to a bookstore. There, while mindlessly roaming through the racks of magazines, I ran across a notice in a business publication that caught my eye. It said:
“EXPO MAQUILA ’86”
PRESENTED BY
UNITED STATES DEPT. OF COMMERCE
AND
THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE IN MEXICO
DISCOVER HOW TO USE MEXICO TO BETTER YOUR BUSINESS
‘MOVING