Max has his own write up of the event right here. Go read it.
The campus was abuzz today. Famed infamous, controversial, love-him-or-hate-him documentary/fictional movie filmmaker Michael Moore was showing up to talk. On campus, at McCarthy Quad. The democrats were in a tizzy because Michael Moore, the champion of their cause was coming. The republicans were in a tizzy because Michael Moore, the champion of their cause was coming. Protests were expected. A crowd of over 7,000, consisting of students, faculty, parents, and off-campus visitors were expected. The School of Cinema-Television teamed up with the speaker inviters and paid a hefty sum to get Moore to appear. Moore’s personal security staff coordinated with the USC Department of Public safety to ensure that everything would go smoothly.
Meanwhile, I was late to my Philosophy class, and turned in arguably the shittiest paper I have ever written in my entire academic life, which is to say, just about business as usual.
It’s impossible to not have an opinion about Moore and his work, really. He is, in many ways, the left’s Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh, the extremist on the sidelines with the megaphone, and as such, one is bound to be opinionated about him one way or another. My personal objections to his work is that he presents it as documentary film, when very often it is so biased as to shift from documentary to propaganda. Of course he’s going to be biased. It is in the nature of documentary film to be influenced by the director. But when the bias is so strong that it misrepresents and deceives the viewer, I believe that’s going a bit too far. When he wins awards for one of his documentaries, when other entries into the category are truer representations of the form, I can’t help but feel a little miffed that he’s getting credit he doesn’t deserve.
That said, there is no doubt about Moore’s influence on the American landscape today. Fahrenheit 9/11 became the first documentary to ever be the top weekend gross (of course, seeing as it was up against the brilliant Wayans Brother’s flick “White Chicks,” it might not be that impressive an achievement). Bowling for Columbine set records for documentary gross. For a genre that has been associated with unbearable boredom and snobbery, these accomplishments are no laughing matter. It is an indication of his ability to latch onto the zeitgeist and create something that both reflects and changes society, even if it is perhaps a tad underhanded.
The stop off at USC is part of his “Slacker Uprising” tour, a tour of 60 cities in swing-states on college campus to get students to go and vote (for Kerry, of course). It was a big deal, and the daily newspapers on campus were just about falling all over themselves to talk about it (right after they were done covering the almighty Trojan football team, of course).
Moore was scheduled to start at 7:45, and around 5:30, people had already filled up the space directly in front of the stage. I say the following not intended as a stereotype, but I saw the highest ratio of Nalgene bottles per square foot in the area in front of the stage than I have seen anywhere else in my short time on-campus here at USC. I was hit by momentary nostalgia for Seattle, before realizing “Yeah, we really are all dirty hippies back home.”
Max Geiger, my partner in crime, and I wandered around a bit. We wondered if Moore would take questions from the audience, and if he did, what might we ask? Max considered approaching the mike, starting a question, and then ending it with “Augh! Suck it!” and then turning around and burning rubber. A friend of his suggested “Excuse me, Mr. Moore, but are you in fact the muppet formerly known as Sweetums?” Max added, “And did your escape from the Muppet Show and eventual turn down the path of documentary film cause Jim Henson’s death?”
After a bit of ambulation, Max and I finally arrived at the quad, thirty minutes before Moore was scheduled to appear. Darkness had fallen and the lamps that usually illuminated barren lawns instead cast long shadows of the massive crowd that had formed. Everyone walked about, and a tension was in the air. In one corner of the quad, as far away from the stage as possible, the “free speech holding pen” had been established for the school Republicans.
The holding pen for free speech, although intuitively a fundamentally flawed concept if one is concerned with the first amendment, was probably a good idea. The open-minded liberal thinkers were all busy shouting at the republicans, flipping them the bird, and generally showing little respect. The republicans on the other side were happy to oblige with much shouting and suggestive hand gestures, except of course they had the advantage of huge intimidating signs. Of course, this being a college, angry members from both sides were fueled up to the brim with good ol’ fashioned liquid courage.
The sidewalk had about three feet of grass before it reached the gate. Two burlesque Dept. of Public Safety guards were stationed along the barrier to ensure that nobody entered or touched the demilitarized zone between sidewalk and barrier. These two guys basically got paid to make sure three feet of grass were kept pristine, and they enforced the sanctity of the grass as a “no-fly zone” like hawks. Democrats and republicans, when confronted and when half drunk, can be very violent folks, and freedom of speech can often extend to freedom of fists into faces at close quarters.
“Four more years! Four more years!” shouted the angry republicans.
“Two more weeks! Two more weeks!” shouted back angrier democrats. Max and I had to interrupt their chant to explain (very patiently) that even if Kerry won, the democratic process for changing an office would take a couple of months. “Two and a half more months! Two and a half more months!” we offered as a helpful alternative, but the democrats did not listen.
“Boy, you better not be helping those democrats!” said the republican.
“You want to mess with Max and Freddie, you go through me, puta!” said the feisty democrat.
“You cannot handle this barrier or these signs!” said the angry republican.
“Boy, I am pointing at my boobs! Step off!” said the feisty democrat.
“Yes. Please keep pointing at them,” said the amateur journalists.
“Kids, this is all good fun, but it is getting retarded,” offered the nice security guard. “Step off the lawn, ma’am. It just got reseeded.”
Four feet to the left:
“No way! Osama was hot for Moore this whole time! That is nasty!”
And so on. There were some awfully dumb people on both sides who believed with all their hearts that, if they shouted their incoherent arguments loud enough, they could convert the other side wholeheartedly. A republican put up a sign declaring Michael Moore was a Nazi. Several democrats tried to get DPS to remove the sign, saying it was hateful and offensive. The large black DPS officer basically told them, “Look. If it bothers you so much, walk away. I’ve got enough problems with this strip of lawn here already.”
The funniest sign was held by this girl:
“W stands for woman? No fucking way, you fucking moron!” shouted a democrat, “More like W for…” His voice trailed off as the alcohol blocked the higher associative processes of his mind to find a more suitable word expressing his viewpoint beginning with W. “You guys are both wrong,” Max offered, “W actually stands for ‘Walker.’ It is George Bush’s middle name, in fact.”
One particular republican was confused as to whose side I was on (I was holding both Kerry and Bush stickers at the time). Any sort of debate in this environment on any issue except those regarding one’s mothers and their alleged sexual promiscuity would be hopeless, so I told him “You know, it’s just that if that jerk Bush wins, I’m going to have to reorganize my entire CD collection. Like, all my ABBA and Zappa. That would suck!” The girl beside him laughed at the non-sequiter, but he scrunched his face up in the most disgusted, annoyed look I have ever received. If he had a weapon, he would no doubt have not hesitated to use it against me with extreme prejudice. I take it he wasn’t an ABBA fan.
Overall, the level of discourse wasn’t exactly to the level of the presidential debates. But they were pretty close! (Zing!)
Michael Moore took his damn time in showing up. I wondered if he had in fact, been so disheartened by the drunken republicans that he said to USC’s president "Aw, I’m sorry. I can tell when I’m not wanted. Here is your $50,000 back. Sorry." But Moore loves his money too much, and he finally arrived forty minutes late (apparently, he’s done this a lot on the tour), ambled up the steps to the stage after introductions from school officials to a wild, cheering crowd. They were treating him like schoolgirls treated a shirtless British rock star. They even had books and DVD’s on sale, and probably large semi-nude posters, but you’d have to ask for those. Luckily, it wasn’t "A Shirtless Evening With Michael Moore," because if Moore had taken off his shirt, I’m pretty sure I’d be unable to write this right now because I’d be busy filling my eyes with hydrochloric acid.
“USC! USC! Los Angeles! Yeah! Yeah!” he shouted in the microphone. It reminded me of a much heavier, much more excited Howard Dean. His signature baseball hat was removed, and he took the USC hat on the podium and popped in on. More cheers. The Trojan Standard, the right leaning paper, had published an obvious baited picture of Moore wearing a UCLA hat, so the USC hat probably soothed those wild and angry Trojan football whores in the crowd.
Although I respect his filmmaking talent, the truth is, Michael Moore is a terrible public speaker. I mean, embarrassingly bad. It would’ve been a bomb if he weren’t preaching to the choir, so to speak. He made several jokes about Bush’s lackluster performance during the first debate, and proceeded to repeat the phrase “It’s hard work” mockingly a good six or seven times. At least he milks his weak jokes for all they’re worth. His brief speech contained very little content, but instead mostly crowd rallying and republican bashing.
The drunk republican frat boys were extremely vocal about their complaints, shouting boos and organizing witty chants amongst themselves. I was positioned on the far wing, by one of the large projection screens. A small group of them kept shouting up from the wings (far out of view of Moore). They would congratulate themselves on being so awesome and rebellious and cool. A security officer warned them to tone it down, but they continued. One would shout “Boo!” for a good four seconds in a pause in Moore’s speech, and then go to his buddies “Man that’s it! That’s all I got” before repeating the process again. “It’s America and we got free speech,” they declared ironically, “We can say whatever we want.” Unfortunately, it usually wasn’t all that much, because the worst insult they could come up with on the eminently insultable Moore was digs on his weight. Yeah, real edgy there. Never heard the "Michael Moore is fat" one before. Jeez you guys should print T-shirts. I bet you’d make millions.
As a DPS guard got called over to escort them off, I heard one say “Yeah, that’s great. Let’s go back to the other guys in the back” and they scurried away before the officer could do anything. A bunch of guys with some real balls, I’d say.
Moore then showed some fake ads against Kerry that utilized a similar style of humor I employed in promoting Reed Schuler for Vice President last year at Pomona (Reed spelled backwards is Deer. I know a guy who hit a deer once. He died). Thus, I found them quite amusing, and it was immediately clear that Moore’s strengths are nowhere near public speaking, but in good ol’ movie making: “John Kerry used to drive a Chevy. Then he drove a Ford. Now he rides his bike. What’s this point to? Two words: Flip flopper.”
Thankfully, we weren’t subjected to his somewhat monotonous speeches for very long, because he pulled out letters from servicemen and read them aloud. Those had an actual point across other than “Republicans are all terrible and stupid people ” (namely, even those fighting the war do not support it). He had Tom Morello of Audioslave (and Rage Against the Machine) come up and do some acoustic folksy songs, which was a bit strange because the lyrics were pretty awful and the music fairly sucky. Tom had “Whatever it takes” written on his guitar. I’d offer that it’s going to at least take a couple of guitar lessons and maybe a lyric writing workshop.
Perhaps the defining moment of the event, which overall played out like a bizarre disjointed sideshow of various acts, was when a guy got up to talk about how his brother had died in Iraq, and simultaneously, the drunk republicans in the back marched around and blew air horns. If the republicans on campus had expected to maybe change some minds tonight, they utterly failed with that particular gesture. There’s a certain degree of tastelessness that is required to punctuate a guy’s heartfelt speech about the death of his close loved ones with blasts of an air horn and drunken rallying cries.
Moore ended the speech by asking those who were of age four years ago but didn’t vote in the 2000 election. Several embarrassed individuals rose from the crowd, and he said “If you pledge to vote this year, I’ll give you a weeks supply of the slacker’s fuel: ramen noodles.” They did, and Moore and his cronies started tossing out ramen noodles to people (and clean white underwear for the males (no I’m not kidding (really))). It was a fittingly bizarre end and a rather entertaining spectacle. Moore, after exhausting his noodles, ambled to his car and was driven off to the sounds of a cheering crowd behind him. Tom Morello walked sullenly in a coat behind the fence, kind of confused, as if Moore forgot to pick him up or something. He turned and left the other way, a broken man. Definitely cried himself to sleep that night.
The overall message of Moore’s campaign was to encourage young people to get off their lazy slacker asses and vote (and for Kerry, please). The truth is, Moore played basically to a crowd that mostly worshipped him, and criticism of the arbitrary sideshow of events was limited to loud drunken shouts by republican frat boys. Moore’s ability to read a crowd and get them riled up behind his cause is brilliant, but beyond that, his speaking skills leave much to be desired. He ought to stick to making movies (but not documentaries. He has a history of having difficulty with facts that conflict with his theories). His movies cause political discourse, and in an increasingly apathetic society, political discourse is vital to the survival of our democratic process. Just not loud, obnoxious, drunk political discourse. Like his movies or not, Moore causes conversation, and that’s far more important to the democratic system than falsehoods in a movie.
So go vote, already, you losers.
-f.w.
America, FUCK YEAH!