Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [119]
individual who has been in the trenches with me for the past two years, and who thanks me for her first whiff of tear gas in Seattle), and my unofficial editorial board of friends and family who perform the all-important “butthead check”—making sure I don’t totally embarrass myself by acting like a jerk, checking that I have sufficiently covered up my lack of education and manners, and generally offering their constructive and supportive comments, in addition to some great research. They are, for this book, Anne Moore and John Hardesty (whose writing—and whose lives—were both the inspiration for and the engine behind the criminal justice chapter), Jeff Gibbs (who gave me lots of help and ideas on the environmental stuff and whose prognosis for the planet has scared the PBBs outta me), Joanne Doroshow (our good friend since our days together at Nader Central), and Al Hirvela, Ben Hamper, Harold Ford, Veronica Moore, Natalie Rose, and K. G. (who all read various chapters and made it feel like we were back sitting on the floor at the Flint Voice trying to put the paper together before the sun came up or we ran out of border tape!). And special thanks to my agents, MortJanklow and Anne Sibbald, at Janklow & Nesbit.
Twenty years ago this year, life got good. My deepest thanks to those responsible.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MICHAEL MOORE is a writer, filmmaker, and voter. His films include Roger & Me, The Big One, and the surprise hit of the Cannes Film Festival, Canadian Bacon. His next film is Bowling for Columbine. He is the author of the bestseller Downsize This: Random Threats from an Unarmed American, and coauthor with Kathleen Glynn of Adventures in a TV Nation. All four seasons of his and Kathleen’s shows, TV Nation and The Awful Truth, have been nominated for Emmy Awards (with TV Nation winning the Emmy in 1994, the only year they had the money to buy the votes). Mike is an active outdoorsman who likes to swim, bike, hike, rock climb, fish, hunt, paint, build boats and gliders, go whitewater rafting, bungee jumping, mountain cycling, scuba diving, and skydiving, and he’s a three-time champion of the Mesick Triathlon and the Burton Toughman Contest. His hobbies are cooking and crafts, and he likes to spend his time riding dirt bikes with Tony and reading Proust to his nieces Rosalyn, Madison, and Molly. He is an Eagle Scout, and once accidentally burned down the community center in his hometown while cleaning up after a bingo game. He divides his time between Flint and Paris. He often checks his E-mail at mmflint@aol.com and occasionally visits his Web site at www.michaelmoore.com. Barring success, this will be his last book.
BONUS CHAPTER FROM WWW.MICHAELMOORE.COM
"The Sad and Sordid Whereabouts of bin Cheney and bin Bush" A Free Online Chapter addition to "Stupid White Men" by Michael Moore
Part One: "What Does a 99-cent Bic Lighter Tell Us About the Bush War on Terrorism?"
On September 22, 2001, just 11 days after the terrorist attacks in New York and Arlington, I had to fly. I had actually wanted to fly on September 11, and in fact had a ticket on the 3:00pm American Airlines flight from LAX to JFK. As we all know, that flight never made it off the ground as hours earlier four California-bound flights, two on American and two on United, were hijacked as part of a coordinated suicide mission to attack the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon outside Washington, DC.
Stranded in Los Angeles, my wife and I (out there for the annual Prime Time Emmy Awards for our series, "The Awful Truth"), were awakened that morning by my wife's mother, calling us from Flint at 6:15 a.m., L.A. time. I answered the phone and heard her say that "New York was under attack, New York is at war." I remember thinking,