Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [5]
I can’t describe the relief I felt. Michael Moore wrote me another letter, thanking me. But now the hard work of the real appeal would begin.
And then 9/11 happened. You know the cliché “9/11 changed everything”? This was one of those things. Compassion for killers went way out the window. It was killing time in America, and if an innocent man could be killed while eating a danish during a business meeting 106 floors above Manhattan, then a murderer in Texas certainly could not expect to be kept alive. Kill or be killed was all that mattered to us; we were now a people ready to go to war, anywhere, one war after another, if need be. You would soon be able to sum us up the way D. H. Lawrence once did: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”
Plans for the execution of Michael Moore were placed on the fast track. All appeals were rejected. Michael put me on the list to attend his execution—if I so chose to come. I could not. I could not go to Texas and watch Michael Moore die. I wanted to be there for him, but I simply couldn’t do it.
At 6:34 p.m. on January 17, 2002, Michael Moore became the first execution of the year in the state of Texas.
And yes, the headline read: MICHAEL MOORE EXECUTED.
The hate mail after the Oscar speech was so voluminous, it almost seemed as if Hallmark had opened a new division where greeting card writers were assigned the task of penning odes to my passing. (“For a Special Motherfucker…” “Get Well Soon from Your Mysterious Car Accident!” “Here’s to a Happy Stroke!”)
The phone calls to my house were actually creepier. It’s a whole different fright machine when a human voice is attached to the madness and you think, This person literally risked arrest to say this over a phone line! You had to admire the balls—or insanity—of that.
But the worst moments were when people came on to our property. At that time we had no fence, no infrared cameras, no dogs with titanium teeth, no electrocution devices. So these individuals would just walk down the driveway, always looking like rejects from the cast of Night of the Living Dead, never moving very fast, but always advancing with single-minded purposefulness. Few were actual haters; most were just crazy. We kept the sheriff’s deputies busy until they finally suggested we might want to get our own security, or perhaps our own police force. Which we did.
We met with the head of the top security agency in the country, an elite, no-fucking-around outfit that did not hire ex-cops (“Why are they ex-cops? Exactly.”), nor any “tough guys” or bouncer-types. They preferred to use only Navy SEALs and other ex–Special Forces, like Army Rangers. Guys who had a cool head and who could take you out with a piece of dental floss in a matter of nanoseconds. They had to go through an additional nine-week boot camp with the agency to work for them. They already knew how to kill quietly and quickly with perfection; now they would also learn how to save a life.
I started by having the agency send me one of their ex-SEALs. By the end of the year, due to the alarming increase of threats and attempts on me, I had nine of them surrounding me, round-the-clock. They were mostly black and Hispanic (you had to volunteer to be on my detail, thus the lopsided but much-appreciated demographic). I got to know them well and, suffice it to say, when you live with nine hardcore SEALs who also happen to like you and what you do, you learn a lot about how to “floss.”
After the Oscar riot and the resulting persona-non-grata status I held as the most hated man in America, I decided to do what anyone in my position would do: make a movie suggesting the president of the United States is a war criminal. I mean, why take the easy road? It was already over for me, anyway. The studio that had promised to fund my next film had called up after the Oscar speech and said that they were backing out of their signed contract with me—and if I didn’t like it, I could go fuck myself. Fortunately, another studio picked up the deal