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The War To Come
Why Michael Moore loves Spokane

by Chuck Van Wey
Free Press Contributor

In October, Michael Moore, creator of "Roger and Me" and TV Nation came to Seattle on his national book tour. Perhaps the most telling moment of Moore's visit was a UW audience's reaction to his simple utterance of the word, "Spokane".
"Last night I was in Spokane," he began. Many in the crowd hissed, some booed. Moore, who had spent a grueling day protesting corporate welfare (promoting his book, commiserating with and encouraging local activists) feigned bafflement. One would have expected so visceral a reaction if Moore had heartily endorsed Bob Dole, or launched into an Amway sales pitch. But Spokane?
"Aw, come on, what's wrong with Spokane?" he intoned.
Michael Moore and Crackers,
the Corporate Crime Fighting Chicken,
lead the worker's revolution in the U.S.
Of course, Moore knew what he was doing. He knows that no group takes the bait quite like the nice-sweatered Left. In fact, his chief aim is pointing out the potentially disastrous discomfiture of Liberals and the academic Left with country music, rap music, trailer courts and labor unions. In short, he's trying to reconnect the Left with poor people and, in particular, with poor white men.
He is an ambassador from the great laid-off, screwed-over and pissed-off heart of the country. These are the people who don't vote anymore, who join militias, who seek dignity and meaning in a fantasy of redemptive Kampf against dark conspiracy and betrayal.
But there is more than just sarcasm and working class angst in Moore's diplomatic pouch.
It's about class, stupid. Things really are falling apart. All that the "center" holds these days is a wan politics of corporate whoredom for the elite and corporate serfdom for the rest of us.
With the rumpled, arch affability of Columbo - or Socrates - Moore tells the story of Mike from Michigan, the infamous short-wave bandito of the militia Right.
It turns out that Mike is a janitor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, as hot a bed of flaming, raving Leftism as there is in this country. But Mike just cleans up after the meetings, the seminars, the rallies. He is the guy with the Dickie's work shirt and a mop that you look through on the way to a Michael Moore lecture. "Mike needs help," Moore says sadly. But he won't get it from the baroque, featherbedding feel-goodism of identity politics.
We already know who our enemies are, Moore seems to be saying, but who are our friends? Why should the guy with a mop care whether the CEO who lays him off is a woman? Why should the woman sleeping in her car with her two-year-old care whether the human resources director for the fast-food chain that exploits her is an African-American?
Some folks on the Left, I'm sad to say, have adopted the lingo of the global free market. They have even bought into the supposed inevitability of it all: the widening gap, the "regrettable dislocation."
But there is only one thing inevitable about history: When enough people get pissed off, heads roll. If we leftists can't help to invent a robust populism that embraces even the struggles of Mike from Michigan, the Right sure as shooting will.

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Contents on this page were published in the January/February, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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