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EPILOGUE

Tallahassee Hi-Ho

I HAVE A confession to make:

I am the person responsible for the “presidency” of George W. Bush. Me. Michael Moore. I could have prevented it all.

Now I have made a lot of people angry, and the country is in the crapper.

That’s why I’m in hiding.

I am writing this epilogue from my bunker in the woods of northern Michigan, somewhere along the forty-fifth parallel. The locals say that I am sitting exactly halfway between the Equator and the North Pole, but to me it feels like a million miles from nowhere.

I am no longer thinking about how we can Save the country or the planet—my only concern now is how to save my own sorry ass.

It all started in Tallahassee. Tallahassee, Florida. Yes, that Tallahassee.

My presence in the state capital of Florida had nothing to do with the thirty-six-day media circus that followed the 2000 election. That little piece of slo-mo roadkill was for those who hadn’t had their OJ/Monica fix for a while and desperately needed to watch one more ugly seam of the nation unravel like a Newt Gingrich marriage. That was not what brought me to Tallahassee, and I was there for none of those thirty-seven days.

I landed in Tallahassee 15 days before the election. What I didn’t count on was a pre-dawn meeting with the Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush. Just him and me on a dark street in downtown Tallahassee, his bodyguards lurking nearby, ready at a moment’s notice to eat me for breakfast.

I had gone to Florida to try and stop his brother from winning the election, to ward off a disaster that loomed on the horizon, to defeat the enemy. Twenty Seconds over Tallahassee!

It was a mission destined to fail.

As a result of my actions, I don’t know whom I should fear more—the oilmen who now run the corporation known as “The United States of America” from inside the Oval Office, or the deranged liberals who want my head because they think I was somehow the mastermind behind the Nader campaign, and that I ... I ... I ...

OKAY! ALL RIGHT! IT’S TRUE!! IT WAS ME—YES ME! ME! ME! IT’S ALL MY FAULT!! WHAT WAS I THINKING??? DID I REALLY WANT TO MEET SUSAN SARANDON THAT BADLY? Oh God, forgive me, I have wrecked the country—this wonderful psycho nation of idealists and accountants who only want the right to drive their Chevy Blazers across the fruited plain, whose only request is to someday be told the difference between “partly sunny” and “partly cloudy,” who seek nothing more than a cellular plan with enough peak-time free minutes so they’ll always be ready if one of their kids should call from inside a school shooting because they need Mommy or Daddy to phone CNN immediately and start negotiating the rights to the really cool footage they’re shooting right now of the carnage in the cafeteria.

Somehow I think I can outwit the thugs from Halliburton and Enron (now referred to as “Special Assistants to the Vice President”). They will be contained, quarantined, and put out of their misery soon enough.

But no amount of contrition will satisfy the Gorestapo who are rightfully upset that their man has been barred from the office he won. They’re brimming with anger. I have to tell you, I have not seen liberals this angry since ... since ... well, I don’t think I’ve really ever seen liberals get too worked up about anything! After all, it’s not like they’re the Christian Right, who have managed—with God and insanity on their side—to always get their way.

Except now all these liberals agree finally on one thing: Blaming Ralph Nader—and blaming me! Why blame me? They don’t know the whole story! Ralph Nader fired me in 1988—kicked me out on the street, penniless!

Now, in order to survive, to protect the ones I love, and to get this book I’ve written out to those of you lucky enough to find it amid the latest literature from our national wrestling heroes, I have retreated deep into the forest with my laptop and my compass, living off the land the way Nature intended, jotting down my final thoughts in the hopes that some