Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [2]
That’s right, the whole planet is being overrun—and I’m convinced it’s starting to fight back. One day last February in Chicago the temperature hit 70 degrees, and what happened? Everyone was, like, Wow, this is great! People were walking around in shorts, and the beach along Lake Michigan was filled with sunbathers. “Boy, I love this weather,” said one lady to me on the street.
You love this? Let me ask you—if the sun suddenly rose at midnight tonight, would you say, “Oh, wow, this is beautiful! I love it! More daylight!”
No, of course you wouldn’t. You’d be freaking out on a level that has never been measured. You would be screaming bloody murder that the Earth was spinning out of control, heading toward the sun at a million miles a second. I doubt anyone would be running to the beach to catch any of those bonus rays. Of course, maybe it’s not that bad: maybe someone just launched a thousand warheads on Milwaukee, and that’s the bright light you’re seeing to the north as nuclear fission interacts with vacant boarded-up breweries. Either way, you’d be ripping through so many Hail Marys and God Have Mercies you might just knock ten years off your sentence to purgatory.
So why on earth do we think a 70-degree day in the coldest month of the year, in one of the coldest cities in America, is something to crow about? We ought to be demanding action from our representatives, and swift retribution against those responsible for these climate changes. This isn’t right, folks: something is terribly wrong. And if you don’t believe me, ask that dead infected cow you’re drowning in A-1. He knew the answer, but we killed him before we could moo it out of him.
But let’s not worry about Mother Earth—she’s lasted through much worse. Let the tree-huggers lose their sleep over it—we’re too damn busy trying to make money!
Ali, money. The sweet stench of success. A couple years ago I was talking to a guy in a bar who happened to be a stockbroker. He asked me about my “investments.” I told him I didn’t have any, that I don’t own a single share of stock. He was stunned.
“You mean you don’t have a portfolio where you keep your money? ”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep your money in portfolios,” I replied, “or in a briefcase, or even under the futon. I save what little I can in a place called a ‘bank,’ where I have what the old-timers call a ‘savings account.’ ”
He was not amused. “You’re just screwing yourself,” he said. “And you’re being irresponsible. I remember reading you made a lot of money from your first film, right? Do you know how much you’d have today if you’d invested it in the stock market ten years ago? Probably about thirty mil.”
Thirty million? Dollars? Coulda been mine? Agggghhhh!!! What was I thinking?
Suddenly I got very queasy, and it felt like all my principles and beliefs were about to end up on my shoes. I excused myself and went outside.
Some time after this event, the stockbroker guy got hold of my home address and started sending me weekly “market updates” and other propaganda in the hope that I’d give him my kid’s college fund to gamble with on the Strip known as Wall Street.
Well, the “Investment Opportunities” flyers have stopped coming. In the past eighteen months, Microsoft has gone from $120 to $40, Dell from $50 to $16, and Pets.com and its cute little sock puppet have gone to puppy heaven. The NASDAQ has lost nearly 40 percent of its value, and average Americans, snookered into the madness of playing the market with their meager savings, have lost billions. Any thoughts of “early retirement” we may have entertained are out the window; we’ll be lucky if they let us cut back to forty hours a week when we’re eighty-two, or incontinent, whichever comes first.
Actually, not all of us. There are almost fifty-six thousand new millionaires in the country—and they’ve, made out like bandits. They made their money because they already