Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [7]
This was now no longer just some little documentary we had made—and I was no longer seen as some “gadfly” that could be ignored like a nettlesome pest. This was now cover of Time magazine territory. This was now me being seated in the presidential box next to President Jimmy Carter at the Democratic National Convention. There would be a record four appearances in six months on The Tonight Show. The movie would open at #1 all across North America (the first time ever for a documentary). And, to make matters worse for the White House, it opened at #1 in all fifty states, even in the Deep South. Even Wyoming. Yes, even Idaho. It opened at #1 in military towns like Fort Bragg. Soldiers and their families were going to see it and, by many accounts, it became the top bootleg among the troops in Iraq. It broke the box office record long held by the Star Wars film Return of the Jedi for the largest opening weekend ever for a film that opened on a thousand screens or less. It was, in the verbiage of Variety, major boffo, a juggernaut.
And in doing all of that, it had made me a target. Not just a target of the Right or of the press. This movie was now affecting a sitting president of the United States and his chances for a second term.
So, the film—and especially its director—had to be portrayed as so repulsively anti-American that to buy a ticket to this movie would be akin to an act of treason.
The attacks on me were like mad works of fiction, crazy, made-up stuff that I refused to respond to because I didn’t want to dignify the noise. On TV, on the radio, in op-eds, on the Internet—everywhere—it was suggested that Michael Moore hates America, he’s a liar, a conspiracy nut, and a croissant-eater. The campaign against me was meant to stop too many Republicans from seeing the film.
And it worked. Of course, it also didn’t help that Kerry was a lousy candidate. Bush won the election by one state, Ohio.
There was a residual damage from all the hate speech generated toward me by the Republican pundits. It had the sad and tragic side effect of unhinging the already slightly unglued. And so my life went from receiving scribbly little hate notes (think of them as anti-Valentines) to full-out attempted physical assaults—and worse.
The ex–Navy SEALs moved in with us. When I walked down a public sidewalk they would literally have to form a circle around me. At night they wore night-vision goggles and other special equipment that I’m convinced few people outside Langley have ever seen.
The agency protecting me had a Threat Assessment Division. Their job was to investigate anyone who had made a credible threat against me. One day, I asked to see the file. The man in charge began reading me the list of names and the threats they’d made and the level of threat that the agency believed each one posed. After he went through the first dozen, he stopped and asked, “Do you really want to keep going? There are four hundred and twenty-nine more.”
Four hundred and twenty-nine more? Four hundred and twenty-nine files of people who wanted to harm me, even kill me? Each file contained minute details of these people’s lives and what they might be capable of. I really didn’t want to hear any more. My sister was surprised at the number.
“I thought it would be around fifty,” she said, as if “fifty” was a doable number we could handle.
I could no longer go out in public without an incident happening. It started with small stuff, like people in a restaurant asking to be moved to a different table when I was seated next to them, or a cab driver who