Those Who Say "I Support the Troops"

Those Who Say "I Support the Troops" Should Just Stop, Out of Respect for the Troops
Michael Moore

I don't support the troops, America, and neither do you. I am tired of the ruse we are playing on these brave citizens in our armed forces. And guess what -- a lot of these soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines see right through the bullshit of those words, “I support the troops!,” spoken by Americans with such false sincerity -- false because our actions don’t match our words. These young men and women sign up to risk their very lives to protect us -- and this is what they get in return:

1. They get sent off to wars that have NOTHING to do with defending America or saving our lives. They are used as pawns so that the military-industrial complex can make billions of dollars and the rich here can expand their empire. By “supporting the troops,” that means I’m supposed to shut up, don’t ask questions, do nothing to stop the madness, and sit by and watch thousands of them die? Well, I’ve done an awful lot to try and end this. But the only way you can honestly say you support the troops is to work night and day to get them out of these hell holes they’ve been sent to. And what have I done this week to bring the troops home? Nothing. So if I say “I support the troops," don't believe me -- I clearly don't support the troops because I’ve got more important things to do today, like return an iPhone that doesn’t work and take my car in for a tune up.

2. While the troops we claim to “support” are serving their country, bankers who say they too "support the troops," foreclose on the actual homes of these soldiers and evict their families while they are overseas!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/29/bank-of-america-illegal-foreclosures_n_1118471.html

Have I gone and stood in front of the sheriff's deputy as he is throwing a military family out of their home? No. And there's your proof that I don't “support the troops,” because if I did, I would organize mass sit-ins to block the doors of these homes. Instead, I'm having Chilean sea bass tonight.

3. How many of you who say you "support the troops" have visited a VA hospital to bring aid and comfort to the sick and wounded?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/17/AR2007021701172_pf.html

I haven't. How many of you have any clue what it's like to deal with the VA?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/us/veterans-wait-for-us-aid-amid-growing-backlog-of-claims.html

I don't. Therefore, you would be safe to say that I don't “support the troops," and neither do you.

4. Who amongst you big enthusiastic “supporters of the troops” can tell me the approximate number of service women who have been raped while in the military? Answer: 19,000 (mostly) female troops are raped or sexually assaulted every year by fellow American troops.

http://public.cq.com/docs/weeklyreport/weeklyreport-000004169541.html

What have you or I done to bring these criminals to justice? What's that you say -- out of sight, out of mind? These women have suffered, and I've done nothing. So don't ever let me get away with telling you I “support the troops” because, sadly, I don't. And neither do you.

5. Help a homeless vet today? How 'bout yesterday? Last week? Last year? Ever? But I thought you "support the troops!"? The number of homeless veterans is staggering -- on any given night, at least 60,000 veterans are sleeping on the streets of the country that proudly “supports the troops.”

http://nchv.org/index.php/news/media/background_and_statistics

This is disgraceful and shameful, isn’t it? And it exposes all those "troop supporters" who always vote against social programs that would help these veterans. Tonight there are at least 12,700 Iraq/Afghanistan veterans homeless and sleeping on the street. I've never lent a helping hand to one of the many vets I've seen sleeping on the street. I can't bear to look, and I walk past them very quickly. That's called *not* “supporting the troops,” which, I guess, I don't -- and neither do you.

6. And you know, the beautiful thing about all this "support" you and I have been giving the troops -- they feel this love and support so much, a record number of them are killing themselves every single week. In fact, there are now more soldiers killing themselves than soldiers being killed in combat (332 suicides in 2012 through November vs. about 210 combat deaths). Yes, you are more likely to die by your own hand in the United States military than by al Qaeda or the Taliban. And an estimated eighteen veterans kill themselves each day, or one in five of all U.S. suicides -- though no one really knows because we don't bother to keep track. Now, that's what I call support! These troops are really feeling the love, people! Lemme hear you say it again: "I support the troops!" Louder! "I SUPPORT THE TROOPS!!" There, that's better. I'm sure they heard us. Don't forget to fly our flag, wear your flag lapel pin, and never, ever let a service member pass you by without saying, "Thank you for your service!" I'm sure that's all they need to keep from putting a bullet in their heads. Do your best to keep your "support" up for the troops because, God knows, I certainly can't any longer.

I don't “support the troops” or any of those other hollow and hypocritical platitudes uttered by Republicans and frightened Democrats. Here's what I do support: I support them coming home. I support them being treated well. I support peace, and I beg any young person reading this who's thinking of joining the armed forces to please reconsider. Our war department has done little to show you they won’t recklessly put your young life in harm's way for a cause that has nothing to do with what you signed up for. They will not help you once they've used you and spit you back into society. If you're a woman, they will not protect you from rapists in their ranks. And because you have a conscience and you know right from wrong, you do not want yourself being used to kill civilians in other countries who never did anything to hurt us. We are currently involved in at least a half-dozen military actions around the world. Don't become the next statistic so that General Electric can post another record profit -- while paying no taxes -- taxes that otherwise would be paying for the artificial leg that they've kept you waiting for months to receive.

I support you, and will try to do more to be there for you. And the best way you can support me -- and the ideals our country says it believes in -- is to get out of the military as soon as you can and never look back.

And please, next time some “supporter of the troops” says to you with that concerned look on their face, “I thank you for your service,” you have my permission to punch their lights out (figuratively speaking, of course).

(There is something I've done to support the troops -- other than help lead the effort to stop these senseless wars. At the movie theater I run in Michigan, I became the first person in town to institute an affirmative action plan for hiring returning Iraq/Afghanistan vets. I am working to get more businesses in town to join with me in this effort to find jobs for these returning soldiers. I also let all service members in to the movies for free, everyday.)

A Holy Thursday

September 18th, 2012
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/must-read/holy-thursday

Excerpted from Here Comes Trouble: Stories From My Life by Michael Moore

“Don’t just stand there, the niggers are comin’!”

Walter was twelve, and he was only trying to be helpful.

“Whaddaya mean?” I asked while standing in his driveway with my baseball glove and a bat, hoping to get a game going before sundown.

“The niggers in Detroit are rioting! My dad says they’re on their way here right now! We’re headin’ up north!”

And sure enough they were. They were wasting no time hurriedly jamming their station wagon full of food and supplies and shotguns. Walter’s mother, Dorothy, was shouting orders to her six boys about what to load and what to leave behind. I stood there in awe of the precisionlike nature of this operation. It was as if they had run this drill many times before. A few doors down, I noticed another family doing the same thing. I started to get scared.

“Walter, I don’t understand. Why are you guys doing this? Are you going to come back?”

“Don’t know. Just gotta git. Dad says the niggers from Detroit are on their way here and will be here any minute!”

On their way to where? Here? They’re coming to Hill Street?

“Walter, I think Detroit’s a long way away from here.”

“Nope, no, no, it’s not! Dad says they could be here just like that!” Walter snapped his fingers, as if by doing so he could magically make a Negro appear to prove his point to me. “They’re going to get together with the niggers in Flint and then come ’n’ kill us all!”

Although I had never heard anything this fantastical before, I was not unfamiliar with the attitudes in the town of Davison when it came to the issue of the Colored People. Black people—niggers, as many wistfully called them—were simply not welcomed. There was not, to my knowledge, a single black person living among the 5,900 people who inhabited the city of Davison. Considering we were just outside Flint, a city with fifty thousand black people, this was not an accident. Through the years, realtors knew what to do if there were any inquiries from Negroes looking to move out of Flint and into Davison. And the unwritten, though not always unspoken, agreement among the city residents was to never sell your house to a black family. This kept things nice and orderly and white for decades.

This attitude did not exist a century before. In the 1850s and 1860s, Davison was a stop on the Underground Railroad, a series of secret destinations that stretched from the Ohio River Valley north through Indiana and Ohio and into Michigan, all the way to the Canadian border, where escaping black slaves would find their freedom. There were over two hundred secret stops along the Railroad in the state of Michigan. Members of the new Republican Party in Michigan worked extensively on the Underground Railroad, assisting the runaway slaves, giving them safe passage, and hiding them in their homes.

But bounty hunters from the South were allowed by federal law to come into states like Michigan and legally kidnap any slaves they found and bring them back home to their masters. This was one of the many compromises the North had made over the years to keep the slave states happy and in the Union. Thus, a slave was not free by simply escaping to a free state; he or she had to make it all the way to Canada.

So it was with some risk that hundreds of Michiganders set about to protect the victims of this cruel and barbaric system. One such person owned the home on the corner of Main and Third streets in Davison, a mere fifty-nine miles to the Canadian border. It was said in later years that the family in this house had a hiding space in their cellar and that the townspeople kept this secret from the marauding bounty hunters. (This house would eventually become my grandparents’ home.)

It became a sense of pride in Davison that the village was participating in something important, something historic. Many of the boys in the area would soon be off to the Civil War, and when slavery ended, the people of Davison were proud of the small role they played in making this happen.

Such was not the mood on a sweltering August day in the summer of 1924 when twenty thousand people gathered at the Rosemore racetrack in Davison to attend a rally of the Benevolent Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Looking at the photos from that day, with thousands of citizens in white robes, one wonders how hot they must have been, especially with those pointed hoods! Many, though, did not wear the hoods, as there really was no reason to hide their identities because it seemed that everyone and their third cousin was a member of this fine organization dedicated to terrorizing and lynching black people.

But in the summer of 1924, it wasn’t so much the Negroes in Flint (most of whom had learned to know their place and remain quiet) that were the issue. No, the problem confronting the Klan on this Sunday afternoon was the “Papists”—the Catholics. Catholics, it seemed, had starting running for office. They were moving into neighborhoods meant for white Protestants, and this did not seem like the natural order of things. Catholics had also started to intermarry, something that created a deep, sick feeling among the gathered faithful. Marriage, as you were supposed to know, was to be between a Protestant man and a Protestant woman (and, yes, it could be between a Catholic man and a Catholic woman — but not between a Catholic and a Protestant).

My mother’s dad (Grandpa Wall) did not understand such rules (and he was to be forgiven as he was, after all, from Canada). In 1904 he, an Anglican, married my grandmother, a Roman Catholic. For his troubles, the Klan burned a cross on his front yard in Davison.

“It wasn’t much of a cross,” my grandmother would later remark. “You’d think we’d rate more than a four-foot-high cross!”

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Davison and other parts of Michigan were hotbeds of enthusiastic bigotry. From Father Charles Coughlin railing against the Jews each Sunday on his nationwide radio show from Royal Oak, to the Sunday Klan rallies in Davison (and Kearsley Park in Flint), there

was enough to be ashamed of and enough to wonder about how far the state had drifted from the days of the loving humanity of the newborn Republican Party, a party that not only ended slavery but also the death penalty and sought to give women the right to vote. Now what we had were scenes like Henry Ford getting medals from Hitler.

It was the last week of July 1967, and all that was on my mind was that we were soon moving six blocks away to a paved street! But down in Detroit, some sixty miles away, the city was indeed in flames. It had been on the news the night before. From what I could gather the police had tried to arrest every black person at an after-hours club that was holding a party for two returning Vietnam vets. This offended the neighborhood and triggered immediate protests, which then turned to violence. The National Guard was called in and much of southeastern Michigan was convinced that the race riots that broke out in Watts two years prior—and in Newark, just two weeks earlier—were now in full bloom in our state.

What was not understood at the time was that, in fact, this was an uprising of Detroit’s poor — and those poor found the police and the Guard going berserk and gunning down any suspicious person with black skin.

Up in Flint, though, things were different. The year before, the city had elected the country’s first black mayor, Floyd McCree. McCree was a beloved figure in Flint, a city that was still nearly 80 percent white. Flint’s voters would also soon pass the country’s first open housing law, making it illegal to discriminate when renting or selling a home.

Although Flint’s neighborhoods were by and large still segregated, there seemed to be some sort of desire to “fix things” when it came to the issue of race.

Which made Walter’s family and their crazed fleeing seem all the more absurd to me as I stood in their driveway. Flint was not going to explode, and the black people there were not going to kill me. I didn’t even need to check in with a parent to confirm that. Actually, my biggest fear was that my mother might have heard Walter saying “nigger,” a word that was never spoken and specifically forbidden in our household. I would suffer some embarrassment if she yelled out to me to get back in the house, but there was nothing to worry about, as she and my dad were busy planning our move to Main Street.

The station wagon was filled to the brim with provisions and paranoia, and so off they peeled down the street, their tires kicking up the gravel as they fled to safety.

Flint did not riot, but Detroit raged on for a week. Each night on the local news, war scenes from Vietnam were replaced with war scenes from Detroit. It jolted the entire state. Detroit, this beautiful, bountiful city, would never be the same again. In later years it would be hard for anyone to understand what that meant, but those of us who grew up within a stone’s throw saw Detroit as our Emerald City, this place so full of life, its sidewalks packed with people, its stores the envy of the Midwest, its universities and parks and gardens and art museum (with its Diego Rivera mural), the Detroit of Aretha and Iggy and Seger and the MC5, Belle Isle and Boblo, and the twelfth floor of Hudson’s, where the real Santa sat on his throne and promised us a gift-wrapped future of endless possibilities and eternal cheer, on Comet and Cupid and...Donner...and...Blitzen...and...and...and in the blink of an eye, it was gone. All gone. It wasn’t like we didn’t know where it went or that we couldn’t remember why it went. We knew when it went; we knew the exact moment when it went. It went up Woodward and down Twelfth Street, over to Grand River and down past Tiger Stadium and it didn’t stop until it took our last morsel of optimism with it. And then we ran, da-doo-run-run, to get away from them to leave them behind, to let them suffer and wallow in the misery they’d never really climbed out of since we, the Michiganders, led the charge to free them. President Johnson sent the 82nd Airborne Division into Detroit on the fourth day, complete with tanks and machine guns a-blazing, the Vietnam War finally at home. When it was over, forty-three people were dead and two thousand buildings had been blasted apart or burned to the ground, and our spirit was buried deep under the rubble.

*

It was in this backdrop that my dad took the family to a Tigers ball game in Detroit just a couple weeks later. The tickets had been purchased at the beginning of the summer, and although my mother voiced her concern over the wisdom of such a “trip” to Detroit at this time, I suppose they decided that to throw away tickets they’d paid for was a worse crime, and so off we went.

It was a Thursday night, an unusual time for us to drive to Detroit to see a ball game. My dad preferred to drive there during the daytime; all previous excursions were made to day games on Saturdays or Sundays. But this was a game against the Chicago White Sox, who that year had Tommy John and Hoyt Wilhelm pitching for them, and former Tiger Rocky Colavito in the outfield. My dad thought this would be a good game, as both teams were in a tight pennant race.

It wasn’t. The Tigers lost, 2–1. But it was my first night game, and it may not make me sound like much of a sports guy, but it was truly a magical moment for me to see that historic field bathed in such a bright light, as if it came from the heavens, or at least a nearby Fermi nuclear plant.

When the game was over, there was a tension in the crowd as people exited into the neighborhood that bordered the riot area. It was the March of the Frightened White People, a kind of walk-run people do when they hear the sound of a tornado siren. Walk, don’t run—but run! Run for your life!

We got to our car, a ’67 Chevy Bel Air, which my dad had parked in a paid lot instead of on the usual free side street. Saving money on parking in this post-riot month was not on anyone’s mind. Getting out alive was.

We pulled out of the lot off Cochrane Street and headed down Michigan Avenue until we came to the right turn that would take us onto the Fisher Freeway north. As we approached the expressway ramp, steam began coming out of the hood of our car. Thinking there might be a gas station on the other side of the entrance ramp, my father continued on the overpass and into uncharted territory. It was there that the Chevy simply died. I looked up at the street sign. We were on Twelfth Street, ground zero for the riots. I pointed this out to my dad, and he became agitated in a way I rarely saw.

“Everybody just stay calm,” he said in a voice that was nothing resembling calm. Lock the doors!”

We obeyed immediately, but our father saw the growing terror on our faces, and he took this as a lack of faith in his ability to get us out of this mess.

“Dammit! I don’t know why we came down here! Wasn’t anyone paying attention?!”

That he could be both philosophical about why we were in Detroit and accusatory over an accidental breech in engine fluids was impressive, I thought.

My mother and sisters got very quiet. I was sure I could hear the thumping of our hearts, but the actual thumping was being caused by a black man knocking on our window.

“You need help?” he asked, as panic filled the Chevy’s interior.

My dad answered, “Yes.”

“Well, let’s take a look at what the problem is,” the black man offered.

“Just stay inside,” my dad said. “I’ll handle this.” He did not look like the guy who wanted to handle this.

I looked out the back window to see that the man’s car was parked behind us. And in the car was a woman and two or three kids.

“You at the ball game?” he asked my dad, as they met at the steaming hood.

“Yes.”

“We were, too! Came down from Pontiac. Man, that sure was some sorry game!”

The two dads lifted the hood and poked around and soon figured out the problem.

“We got a bum radiator hose,” my dad shouted back to us. The black man went back to his car and opened the trunk.

He brought out a jug of water and gave it to my dad to pour into the radiator.

“This should get you a few blocks to the gas station,” the stranger said. “But I’d go back in the other direction.”

My dad thanked him for his kindness and offered to pay him something, but the man would have none of it.

“Just glad I could help,” the man said. “Hope someone would do that for me if I needed it. You want me to follow you?”

My dad, probably still wondering if we would indeed have stopped for him if he’d been in trouble, said, no, we’ll be fine, we’ll just head back to Michigan Avenue where surely someone would be open.

And someone was. The gas station attendant replaced the radiator hose, filled the radiator up, and we were on our way. “We were lucky,” my dad said somewhere around Clarkston. “That was a good man we ran into. And that was the last night game we’re going to.”

*

Eight months later, and just six days before the Opening Day of a new Detroit Tigers season (one in which they would go on to win the World Series), Holy Week was approaching. It was Easter time, and this year the nuns thought it would be a good idea for us to see where the original “Last Supper” on Holy Thursday came from.

“The apostles and Jesus were Jews,” Sister Mary Rene told us. “They were not Christian or Catholic. They were Jews and they observed Jewish traditions. And so during this week, Jesus had come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, the Jewish feast commemorating the time Jews were told by God to smear lamb’s blood on their doorposts in Egypt. This was done so that when the Angel of Death was making his rounds to kill all the firstborn sons of the Egyptians, he’d know where the Jewish houses were so he could skip them. This was God’s way of sending a message to the Pharaoh: let Moses and the Jewish people go or I’ll fuck you up some more.”*

OK, well, whew, that was some story, and as I was the first (and only) son in my family, I found it mildly interesting if not creepy. God, in the Old Testament, seemed to have some sort of chip on his shoulder. He was constantly whacking whole tribes or tossing guys inside whales’ stomachs. Real attitude problem, I used to think. And why wasn’t his Angel of Death smart enough to know which ones were the Egyptian homes and which were the Jewish homes without having to mess up the Jewish front doors with difficult-toremove bloodstains? Couldn’t he just tell them apart from the different styles of architecture each group employed— the Egyptians with their split-level colonials, and the Jews with their fixer-upper slave huts? Plus, wouldn’t that blood on the door make the Jews less safe, especially considering the next morning, all the Egyptians are going to wake up to find they’ve got a dead kid in the house and then they’re like, “Let’s go get the Jews!” But then someone says, “How the hell will we find them?” and then someone else runs in and says, “Hey, they’ve all got blood out on their porches! Just burn down the huts with the lamb’s blood!”

Sister Mary Rene, like Sister Raymond and the other nuns, took great pains to let us know that, contrary to what we may have heard, the Jews did not kill our Lord and Savior. The Romans did. Jesus was Jewish, was born Jewish, and died Jewish and he’d be very upset if he thought we blamed his own people for his demise — which was supposed to happen anyway so that he could rise from the dead and start our religion! Yay!

The nuns contacted one of the three synagogues in Flint and asked if they could bring some seventh and eighth grade students over for a Passover dinner so we could learn the Jewish tradition of this time of year. The rabbi was more than happy to accommodate and we spent a week learning to sing “Hava Nagila” as a sort of thank-you to them.

I didn’t remember much about this event they called a seder, other than someone asked four questions and we couldn’t put the chocolate cake on the dish that had what passed for beef.

It was one week from Holy Thursday, 1968, the Thursday before Palm Sunday, the day that Jesus would enter Jerusalem and prepare for what would be his last Passover on the following Thursday. At St. John’s during Lent there was either a Lenten service or Mass on each weeknight. I was asked to be an altar boy on this particular Thursday. There were gospel readings and Communion and the consecrating of the altar with incense.

I was given the silver censer that held the burning coal onto which you placed the incense and then swung it around the altar and throughout the church. This had all of my favorite activities rolled into one: fire, smoke, and emitting a strange odor.

When Mass was over, one of my duties was to take the censer outside the church and dispose of the smoldering incense and coal onto the ground, putting it out with my foot.

It was a chilly evening on this early April night, and the vestments that I wore over my clothes were not enough to keep out the piercing wind that was blowing up into my black robe and making me want to get back inside as quickly as possible. I emptied the remnants of the incense out onto the still-frozen ground and rubbed them around, pressing hard with the heel of my shoe, until they were extinguished. It was then that a man in the parking lot, a parishioner who had gone out early to his car to warm it up, had heard a news bulletin on the radio as it came on. Excited, he wanted to share it with everyone as they were departing the church. With his car door open, he stood up on the floorboard so all coming out of Mass could hear his joyful announcement:

“King’s been shot! They’ve shot King! Martin Luther King!”

At that moment — in what I will recall for the rest of my life as one of the most depressing things I would ever witness — a cheer went up from the crowd. Not from everyone, not even from most. But from more than a few, a spontaneous joyful noise came out of the mouths that had just held the body of Christ. A whoop and holler and a yell and a cheer. I was still processing the stunning and tragic news about Reverend King I had just heard—heard from a man who said it with such surety that all would be well now, this Negro, this nigger, this terrorist, was somehow no longer going to bother us anymore. Hallelujah.

I jerked my head in the direction of the church door to see who in God’s name was celebrating this moment. Some people had smiles. But most were stunned. Some remained silent, while others rushed to their cars so they could turn on their radios and hear for themselves that this troublemaker was no longer with us. A woman began to cry. People passed the news back inside the church to those who had not yet come out. There was much commotion, and all I could think about was that stupid Angel of Death—and who the hell forgot the lamb’s blood tonight in Memphis? There would be no pass over.

What was special about this night? Every Easter, from then on and for the rest of my life, I would know the bitter answer.

* She did not use the F word. I just thought it would be cool if she did.

Here Comes Trouble Again

(The Paperback Is Out Today!)
Tuesday, September 18th, 2012

Friends,

Today my publisher is releasing the paperback edition of my book, 'Here Comes Trouble.'

This is my best book. Ever. How do I know that? The New York Times said so! Well, an ad in today's Times said so.

You can get the paperback right now, real cheap, by clicking here:

http://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-Trouble-Stories-Life/dp/1455513075/thekonformist

I get a buck-twenty from every book. If you don't want to click here to buy 'Here Comes Trouble' from the Evil Empire, I certainly don't blame you. Five years from now, there won't be publishing houses – it'll just be Amazon and Apple cutting deals with authors and then selling the books directly to you and your glowing device. Those still left with a decent income will be able to buy a "special classic print edition (cover and binding optional)."

You CAN visit that one local indie bookstore in your town that has survived the scorched-earth rampage of Borders.

Did I mention I really love this book – and that I know you will, too? Have I ever let you down? I'm not gonna start now. Read this book. I'm so convinced you'll love 'Here Comes Trouble' that, if you don't, I will personally come to your home and rotate your tires and clean out your gutters. Honest. I'll even bring the cider.

Thanks for reading and watching all my stuff over the years. I wish I could personally thank each and every one of you. Please know that I feel VERY grateful and lucky and blessed to have you as a friend and a fan.

All my best,

Michael Moore
MMFlint@MichaelMoore.com
@MMFlint
MichaelMoore.com

Twenty Names

Excerpted from Here Comes Trouble: Stories From My Life by Michael Moore
June 12th, 2012
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/must-read/twenty-names

"Moore, YOUR SHIRTTAIL is out!"

It was the voice of Mr. Ryan, the assistant principal for discipline at my high school, and he was right on my back. Not figuratively. He was literally on it.

"Turn around!"

I did as I was told.

"You know the rules. Shirts are to be tucked in."

I tucked it in.

"Bend over."

He was carrying "The Paddle," a shortened version of a cricket bat, but with holes drilled in it to get maximum velocity.

"C’mon, this is not right," I protested. "It’s a shirt!"

"Bend over. Don’t make me tell you again."

I did as I was told. And as I was bending over, I marked the date on my mental calendar as being the last time I would ever do what I was told to do again.

WHACK!

I felt that intensely. The flat board of hard wood smacking against my rear end, and the two-second delay before the pain set in.

WHACK!

He did it again. Now it really hurt. I could already feel the heat of my skin through my pants, and I wanted to take that paddle and bash him over the head.

WHACK!

Now the greatest pain became the humiliation I was experiencing thanks to the growing crowd and the eyes of everyone in the cafeteria who was standing to get a look at what was happening in the hallway.

"That’ll do," the sadist said. "Don’t let me see you with your shirt out again."

And with that he walked away. He had no idea how profoundly he had just changed my life—and his. He had, in that one act of corporal punishment, created his own demise. How many times had this man struck a child in his career? A thousand? Ten thousand? Whatever the number, this would be his last.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how one minute you’re just walking down the hall with your shirttail out, you’re thinking about girls or a ball game or how you’re on your last stick of Beaman’s—and then the next hour you make a decision that will affect all the decisions you make for the rest of your life. So random, so unplanned. In fact, it puts the whole idea of making plans for your life to shame, and you realize you really are wasting your time if you’re trying to come up with a college major, or how many kids to have, or where you want to be in ten years. One day I’m thinking about law school, and the next week I’ve committed all my meager teenage resources and energy to stripping an adult of whatever power he thinks he wields with that big paddle.

I straightened upward, red-faced for all to see in the cafeteria. There were plenty of snickers and guffaws, but mostly there was that look people have when they’ve just seen something they’ve never seen before. I was known as a good student. I was known as someone who had never been given the paddle. No one ever expected to watch me being beaten by the assistant principal. I was not the type of student you would see being told to "bend over." And that was what was so entertaining about this particular beating to the gathering crowd.

It’s not like Assistant Principal for Discipline Dennis Ryan hadn’t been gunning for me in the past, or that I hadn’t done anything to deserve his wrath. I had done plenty. By the time I was halfway through my senior year, I had organized my own miniprotests against just about every edict that Ryan and the principal, Mr. Scofield, had laid down. The latest of these revolts involved convincing nine of the eighteen students in the senior Shakespeare class to walk out and quit the class.

The teacher had just handed back to me my twenty-page paper on Hamlet with a giant red "0" on top of it. That was my grade: Nothing. Zip. I stood up.

"You cannot treat me this way," I said to him politely. "And I am officially dropping out of this class." I turned to the students.

"Anybody want to join me?"

Half of them did.?The zero grade would lower my GPA to a 3.3 by the end of the year. I couldn’t have cared less.

This was not my first run-in with a teacher. The teacher who ran the student council class also flunked me. I never missed a day of that class. I made more motions and participated in more debates than perhaps anyone else in there. And that’s what bothered the teacher who was the student council advisor.

"How can you flunk me?" I confronted him.

"I’m flunking you because you create too much trouble in here," he answered smugly. "I like a nice quiet, peaceful student council. You have made this year too difficult for me."

All of this weighed on my mind on the walk home that day of my public paddling by the assistant principal. How would I exact my revenge? I had to look no further that night than the evening newspaper.

A copy of the local Flint Journal lined the box of trash I was cleaning out in our garage. I looked down and between stains of Miracle Whip and Faygo Redpop I noticed a story that reminded me about how the voting age in America had recently been lowered to eighteen. Hmmm, I thought, I’ll be eighteen in a few weeks.

I went back inside the house and, an hour later, I picked up the town weekly, the Davison Index. There, on the front page, taunting me, daring me, my future calling me: Hello, Mike. Read this!

The headline?

SCHOOL BOARD ELECTION JUNE 12, TWO SEATS OPEN

Huh. I’ll be able to vote for school board in a few months. Cool.

Wait.

Wait a minute! If I can vote...can I run? Can I run for a seat on the Board of Education? Would this not make me one of the bosses of the principal and vice principal? Yes? Yes? Whoa.

The next day, I called the county clerk’s office, the people in charge of elections.

"Um, yeah," I stammered into the phone, not quite believing I was making this call. "Um, I was wondering that, now that eighteen-year-olds can vote, can we also run for office?"

"No. Not all offices. Which office would you like to run for?"

"School board."

"Hang on, lemme check." Within a minute he was back on the phone.

"Yes. The required age for school board candidates is eighteen."

WOW! I couldn’t believe it. But then panic set in. How could I afford such a thing? They must charge you a lot of money to put your name on the ballot.

"How much does it cost to get on the ballot?" I asked the man.

"Cost? Nothing. It’s free."

Free? This just kept getting better. Until he added the following:

"Of course you do have to get the required number of signatures on a petition in order to have your name placed on the ballot."

Damn. I knew there was a catch. There were twenty thousand residents in the Davison School District, comprising the town of Davison and the townships of Davison and Richfield. Going all over the school district to collect God knows how many signatures was going to be next to impossible. I mean, I still had lots of algebra homework to do.

"How many names do I need on these petitions?" I asked with resignation.

"Twenty."

"Twenty??"

"Twenty."

"Did you say twenty?"

"Yes. Twenty. You need twenty signatures on a petition that you can pick up at the board of education offices."

I could not believe that I only needed twenty names on a petition—and then, suddenly, I would be an official candidate! I mean, twenty names was nothing! I knew at least twenty stoners who would sign anything I put in front of them. I thanked the man, and the next day I went to the superintendent’s office to pick up the petition. The secretary asked if I was picking up the petition for one of my parents.

"No," I replied. And instead of adding "Would you like to see the welts on my butt or would you rather I call Child Protective Services?" I simply said, "It’s for me."

She picked up the phone and made a call.

"Yes, I have a young man here who says he wants to run for school board. What is the age requirement these days? Uh-huh. I see. Thank you."

She hung up the phone and bit her lip.?"How old are you?" she asked.?"Seventeen," I replied.?"Oh, well, then, you can’t run. You have to be eighteen." "But I’ll be eighteen by the day of the election," I blurted out.?"One minute," she said, picking up the phone again.

"Can a seventeen-year-old run if he will be eighteen on election day? Uh-huh. I see. Yes. Thank you."

"Apparently you may run," she said, as she reached into the file cabinet and pulled out the petition. "Make sure that every signature is that of a registered voter who lives within the boundaries of the school district. If you don’t have twenty valid names, you will not be placed on the ballot."

I had the names within the hour. When the twenty signers asked me why I was running, I just said, "To fire the principal and assistant principal." That was my entire platform on Day One, and it seemed to play well, at least to twenty citizens.

"What about college?" my mother asked, perplexed when I told her I had decided to run for school board. "How can you serve on the school board and go to the University of Detroit?"

"I guess if I win, I’ll go to U of M in Flint." She liked the sound of that. If I won, I would not be leaving home. My parents were not the type to kick you out at eighteen (though that is when my sisters would leave). They did not like to see us go.

I returned the next day to the school board office and turned in my petition. Word soon spread through town that "a hippie" had qualified to be on the June ballot. I set a goal of knocking on every door in the school district. I handed voters a flyer that I had written up outlining my feelings about education and about the Davison schools specifically. I told people the administrators in the high school had to go. I’m guessing this frightened most parents.

But there were some in town who were delighted with the idea of a young person on the school board. OK, they were all under twenty-five.

And then there was the majority, the ones who noticed I had long hair. The week I began to campaign, the racist governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace, won the Michigan Democratic Presidential primary. Not a good sign for me and my chances. (This was also my very first time voting. I cast my first vote ever as a citizen for Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm for president.)

The Chamber of Commerce types in town were appalled at the thought of me, a kid, winning, as were many of the Protestant pastors, the local rednecks, and the pro-war crowd (which was made up of all of the above).

The problem was, the town pooh-bahs had a really bad strategy to stop me. Six of them went down to the school board office and took out their own petitions to run against me. Six of them against me. Clearly they missed a few days of civics class when they were young. You don’t win by running the most candidates – you’ll split the vote and your opponent will win with a plurality. It was to my good fortune that they did not know the word plurality and I did. I taunted them and challenged more Republicans to go get their own petitions to see if they could beat me!

And that was when I got a taste of my own medicine. In addition to the six older, conservative adults who would oppose me, an eighteen-year-old decided to also run against me — and thus split the already very small youth/liberal vote I was going to get. The other eighteen-year-old candidate was none other than the vice president of the student council, Sharon Johnson — the girl who was one of my only two dates in high school.

"Why are you running?" I asked her, a bit peeved that she was stealing my thunder.

"I don’t know, I thought it would be neat. We could both be on the school board!" (Two seats were open on the board, and her idea was that we could both win and serve together.)

Why was she still tormenting me? First student council, then the bra, then the steamed-up windows, and now she’s going to split the youth vote and sink any slight chance I might have had to get elected.

A week before the election, I received my first anonymous hate mail. It was addressed to the two eighteen-year olds running. It read:

Sharon Johnson
Michael F. Moore

What lame-brained fool ever talked you two brats into running for the school Board?

Moore, you talk about your vast knowledge about all affairs. Where and when did you acquire this? Why you haven’t even got brains enough to get a haircut.

You are asking the citizens of Davison to vote you into the school board, actually insulting their intelligence by so doing.

My advice to you both is this? Have your good Mother take your diapers off; get a job or go to school, acquire some of this wisdom only acquired through experience and hard knocks and then come around and run for offices. Why you haven’t even started to live as yet.

Sharon—at least you are a beautiful young lady and you deserve a better fate than to be elected to a school board which is really a thankless job.

One who knows what he is talking about.


Yes, Sharon, you are a beautiful young lady, unlike that long-haired lug. As hate mail goes, this was one of the nicer ones I would ever receive.

On the morning of election day I got up, ate my Cocoa Krispies, and went to school. There were still five days left before graduation, and I had finals to take. The yearbooks were handed out and they contained the results of another election: the senior class had voted me "Class Comic."

When school recessed at 1:30 p.m., I went and voted for me. I had focused my entire campaign on getting every eighteento twenty-five-year-old out to vote. There were nearly two hundred eligible voters just in my senior class. I had spent less than a hundred dollars on the campaign. We had spray-painted yard signs with stencils in my parents’ basement. There were no ads, only the one-page flyer I handed out going door to door.

There was a big turnout at the polls, and when they closed at 8:00 p.m., the counting of the paper ballots began. Less than two hours later, the results were announced.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the district’s assistant superintendent announced, "we have the results. In first place... Michael Moore."

I was shocked. The group of hippie students who had gathered to watch the votes being counted went crazy with delight. A reporter from a local station asked me how I felt about beating seven "adults."

"Well," I said. "I’m an adult, too. And I feel great."

"Well, congratulations," the reporter said, "you’re the youngest person ever elected to public office in the State of Michigan."

"Is that true?"

"Yes, it is. You beat the previous record by three years."

Across the gymnasium where the votes had been counted, I could see the disappointed looks on the faces of the realtors, the insurance salesmen, the country club wives. The following day, a reporter from Detroit called to tell me I was the youngest elected official in the entire country (there was no one under the age of eighteen who held public office). Did I have a comment about that?

"Wow."

What else was I gonna say? I was too deep in my own whirlwind about what had just happened to my life. Now I was going to be one of the seven people in charge of the school district, and the boss of both the principal and, most important, the assistant principal, Ryan. I was now in a position to take that fucking bat out of his hand.

The next morning, I went to school as I had for the previous twelve years. Walking down the hall on my way to Mr. Hardy’s creative writing class, I saw Assistant Principal Dennis Ryan coming toward me. Funny, there was nothing in his hand.

"Good day, Mr. Moore."

Mr. Moore? That was a first. But hey, after all, how else would you address your new boss? Yet I was still a student under him. Weird. He kept walking and so did I.

It became a week of high fives and black power handshakes (I know, I know — this was Davison) among the students, many of them relishing what havoc I could wreak. I was given a number of suggestions from my constituents: make the jocks take real classes; put a cigarette machine in the cafeteria; institute the "four-hour school day"; drop the white milk and have only chocolate; find out what’s in the "Thursday Surprise" at lunch and kill the person who makes it.

Five nights later on June 17, 1972 (non sequitur alert: at the same time, burglars five hundred miles away were breaking into a place called the Watergate), I lined up inside Davison High School with my nearly four hundred fellow graduates, all of us in our maroon-and-gold caps and gowns. Dress code rules were still in effect, but a number of students chose to secretly wear no pants or skirts. They did make sure that the area at the top of the gown had the requisite blouse and shirt and tie, because that could be seen by the authorities. Flashing the nether regions would take place later on the football field at the end of the ceremonies. Water balloons were also well hidden.

Mr. Ryan walked down the line five minutes before the ceremony inspecting each of the students, mostly to make sure that there were no projectile devices in people’s hands and to be certain that every boy was wearing a tie.

And it was then that Ryan came upon Billy Spitz. Billy was a kid from a family of simple means. His idea of a tie was what was called a "bolo tie" — two long strings hanging from a knot or a clamp at the neck. For many who came from the South to work in the factories of Flint, putting on a bolo tie was called "dressing up." It was what you wore to a dance or to church. It was a tie.

Not to Ryan.

"Step out of line!" he barked at Billy. "What is this?" he continued, as he pulled the bolo tie out from under Billy’s gown.

"It’s my tie, sir," Billy responded sheepishly.

"This is not a tie!" Ryan retorted for all to hear. "You’re outta here. Go on. Git! You’re not graduating."

"But, Mr. Ryan —"

"Did you hear me?" Ryan snapped, as he grabbed him and physically pulled him away from the rest of us, showing him the door. It sent a shock wave through the line of graduates. Even in the final minute of high school, we had to witness one last act of cruelty.

And not one of us said anything. Not the tough guy in back of Billy, not the Christian girl in front of him. And not me. Even though I was now officially one of the seven in charge of the schools, I remained silent. Maybe I was just too stunned to speak. Maybe I didn’t want to cause trouble before we got out to the football field, as I was planning to cause a heap of it out there (I had been chosen by the students to give the class speech). Maybe I was still cowed by Mr. Ryan and it would take more than an election for me to stand up to him. Maybe I was just happy it wasn’t me. I really didn’t know Billy, and so, like the other four hundred, I minded my own business.

When it was my time to speak on the graduation stage, I got through the only three sentences I had written. I had seven pages from a yellow legal pad rolled up in my hands to make it look like I had prepared a typical graduation speech. In fact, I had something else on my mind that I was going to say.

I had learned that one of our classmates, Gene Ford, was not to receive the gold honor cords of the National Honor Society because, due to a serious disability, he had to be mostly home-schooled. Even though his grades were high, no one made any provisions for counting his home grades, which would have definitely qualified him for the Honor Society.

Less than a minute into my speech, I came to an abrupt halt and told the crowd that the student sitting in the wheelchair in the front row was denied his honor cords because he wasn’t "normal" like the rest of us. What if, I suggested, we were the abnormal ones? Some of us seniors, I pointed out, had chosen not to wear our honor cords because we did not want to separate ourselves from those who, for whatever reason, didn’t have the same grades we had. I went into an extemporaneous rant about the oppressive nature of being in school and not having rights or a say in your own education. I then said I’d like to present my honor cords to Gene.

And so I left the stage and did just that. And the school board members who were present? Well, they just got a coming attractions trailer to the movie they were about to star in with me for the next four years.

* * *

The following day the phone rang and my mother said it was Billy Spitz’s mom. I took the phone. She was fighting back tears.

"My husband and I and Billy’s grandmother were all sitting in the stands waiting for Billy to walk across the stage, waiting for his name to be called. They called the entire class and never called Billy’s name. We couldn’t see him sitting with the rest of you. We didn’t understand. We were confused. And then we got worried. Where was he? We got up and looked everywhere for him. We went out to the parking lot and to our car. And that’s where we found him."

She began to cry.

"There, in the backseat, was Billy, all curled up in a ball, and crying. He told us what Mr. Ryan had done.

"We can’t believe this happened. He was wearing a tie! Why did this happen?"

"I don’t know, Mrs. Spitz," I said quietly.

"Were you there?" she asked me.?

"Yes."

"Did you see Mr. Ryan do this?"

"Yes."

"And you did nothing?"

"I was still a student." And a coward.

"You were also a school board member! Isn’t there anyhing you can do about this?"

Of course, there was nothing I could do. They weren’t going to hold graduation over to correct this injustice. I had a chance, maybe, to do something about it the night before. But I didn’t. I would never forget this small but powerful moment of my silence and looking the other way. I promised her I would not let this rest and that, as I said when I ran for election, I would work toward Mr. Ryan’s removal.

Two days later I was told to go to the home of the school board secretary and be sworn in. I rode my bicycle over to her house in my bare feet and was sworn in without my shoes on. She said, "Where are your shoes?"

"I’m not wearing any," I said. She just glared at my feet.

I raised my right hand, and when it came time to say the words about "defending the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic," I added, "especially domestic." She looked at me and rolled her eyes. She had taught my mother in high school. "She was maybe the worst teacher I had," my mother told me later. Mom also told me I should have worn some shoes.

*  *  *

The honeymoon period in my first year on the board of education was longer than any of us had expected. Most of the motions I made to improve the schools—including establishing some student rights—were passed. The board listened to what I had to say about how the high school was being run, and how the assistant principal might do better being on the police force (in Chile). I said that the principal was not a forward thinker; he stifled dissent and created a climate where new ideas were not encouraged. In my first year I became a conduit to the board for students, teachers, and parents so that their voices could be heard.

One Monday night about eight months into my term, the superintendent presented "letters of resignation" from the high school principal — and Assistant Principal for Discipline, Dennis Ryan. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that, just ten months after I was beaten with a high-velocity wooden board, the mission I went on by running for the school board had actually been accomplished. It caught me by surprise, as I did not think they were really going to do anything about this problem. True, they were not going to publicly fire them. They let them resign, to save face. Saving face was not yet something I was interested in, as I was not yet old enough to have the necessary compassion and mercy for two men who were just in the wrong job—and had a right to be treated with dignity and respect, even if one of them had not accorded the same to me and Billy Spitz and others. So to twist the knife in deeper, I asked the superintendent at the public meeting if the principal and assistant principal had made this decision on their own or did he, the superintendent, ask for these letters? He nodded his head quietly and said simply, "The latter."

The next day, the students in the high school couldn’t believe that one of their own actually got to say "You’re fired!" to the principal and assistant principal. We started thinking — what else can we do?

That was a dangerous thought.

A Little Treat... from Michael Moore

Friday, May 4th, 2012

Friends,

Here's a free song for you:

http://soundcloud.com/occupy-this-album/01-michael-moore-the-times

It's my contribution to "Occupy This Album", a compilation CD (99 songs!) featuring David Crosby & Graham Nash, Steve Earle, Tom Morello, Willie Nelson, Ani DiFranco, Third Eye Blind, Immortal Technique and Jackson Browne to be released Tuesday, May 15th. All proceeds from this album will go to fund the Occupy Wall Street movement (all the musicians and songwriters have donated their time and music).

They asked me if I'd like to record a poem or maybe make a music video of some of the songs. I said, "I could just sing a song."

When the laughter died down, I recorded this.

I hope you enjoy my first try at this new profession (though I have no intention of giving up my day job).

And thank you, Bob Dylan, for your contribution, and for approving this, my debut.

Enjoy!

Michael Moore
MMFlint@MichaelMoore.com
@MMFlint
MichaelMoore.com

'Gratitude'

February 10th, 2012http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/must-read/gratitude

Excerpted from Here Comes Trouble: Stories From My Life by Michael Moore

I knew nothing about making a movie, and I wish I could tell you some cool story about how I started shooting films when I was six on my dad's 8mm Bell & Howell, or that I went to NYU film school with Spike Lee, and that Martin Scorsese was my teacher. All I knew, all I did, was go to the movies. And I mean go. In a good week I would try to see at least four or five films at the local multiplex (in other words, everything that opened that weekend). If I was lucky, I'd get to borrow the car and head down to Ann Arbor to one of the half-dozen film societies that showed a classic or foreign movie every night. A really special Friday night would mean a trip to the Detroit Film Theatre at the Detroit Institute of Arts. On the rare occasion, I went on a foreign journey to Chicago because I couldn't wait the month or two for the film to open in Michigan.

And then there was that insane, pure batshit-crazy, spurof-the-moment "Get in the car! I refuse to see Apocalypse Now in Flint because it does not have the new surround sound stereo and the ending that Coppola wanted!" The studio would play that version only in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto. And so I drove the three hundred miles to Toronto so I could see the alternate ending.

I looooved the movies.

I always did. Like most kids of my era, my first films were Bambi and Old Yeller, Swiss Family Robinson and The Alamo. But the first movie I remember having a strong reaction to was PT 109, the story of John F. Kennedy in World War II. It had everything an eight-year-old boy could want: action, suspense — but in this case, the story of a hero who initially screwed up and ran his boat into the path of a Japanese destroyer. Yet he didn't let his mistake defeat him. He saved his crew and found a way to get them all back to safety. He was a rich boy, and probably could have gotten out of being on the front lines, but he wasn't that kind of American. Even at eight, I got that.

I came of age as a teenager when the great films of the late sixties and early seventies blasted their way onto the screen. Out were the stiff, formulaic movies of the aging studio system, overblown fare such as Hello, Dolly! and Doctor Dolittle. In were Easy Rider and The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy and The Last Picture Show, Deliverance and Taxi Driver, Nashville, and Harold and Maude.

At seventeen, I saw Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, and then I saw everything else by Kubrick, and after that there was no looking back. I was hooked on the potential and the power of cinema. I took two Introduction to Cinema classes as a freshman in college, and the professor, Dr. Gene Parola, had us watch all the greats, starting with M and Metropolis and landing on Blow-Up and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? My friend, Jeff Gibbs, took both classes with me, and we would spend hours afterward dissecting every nuance of these movies. Two years later I opened my own "art house" in Flint where, for just two nights a week, I would show everything by Truffaut, Bergman, Fassbinder, Kurosawa, Herzog, Scorsese, Woody Allen, Buñuel, Fellini, Kubrick, and all the masters of cinema. Each film would get four showings, and I would spend my Friday and Saturday evenings watching all four shows. On the first viewing I would sit close and enjoy the experience. On the following three screenings, I would sit in the back and study them, sometimes taking notes. This became my one-room, one-student film school.

I did not like documentaries, and so I rarely went to see them. Documentaries felt like medicine, like castor oil — something I was supposed to watch because they were good for me. But most were boring and predictable, even when I agreed with the politics. If I wanted to listen to a political speech, why would I go to a movie? I'd attend a rally or a candidates' debate. If I wanted to hear a sermon, I would go to church. When I went to the movies I wanted to be surprised, lifted, crushed; I wanted to laugh my ass off and I wanted a good cry; and when I left the theater afterward, I wanted to glide out onto the street as if I were walking on air. I wanted to feel exhilarated. I wanted all my assumptions challenged. I wanted to go somewhere I had never gone before, and I didn't want the movie to end because I didn't want to go back to where I was. I wanted sex without love and love without sex, and if I got the two together then I wanted to believe I would have that, too, and forever. I wanted to rock and be rocked and five days later I wanted that film ricocheting around in my head so madly that goddammit I had to go see it again, right now, tonight, clear the decks, nothing else matters.

And I felt none of that when I went to see a documentary. Of course, it was rare, rare, rare that a documentary would play in a movie theater in Flint, let alone any other place in the state. But when it did, and when it was constructed as a movie first and as a documentary second, then it would fuck me up in ways that no work of fiction could. I sat in the Flint Cinema on Dort Highway and saw the devastating Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds — and to this day I have seen no finer nonfiction film. Another time I drove to Ann Arbor and saw something I didn't know was possible — a humorous film about a depressing subject, The Atomic Café. In Detroit, at the Art Institute, I saw the cinema verité classics by

D. A. Pennebaker (Don't Look Back), and Richard Leacock and Robert Drew (Primary), and the radical work of Emile d'Antonio (Point of Order). Later, I would see the films of Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line) and Ross McElwee (Sherman's March) and an outrageously experimental nonfiction film with Barbie dolls by a young Todd Haynes called Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. And one day, without the use of any substances, long after I had dropped out of college, while collecting $98 a week on unemployment after being fired during Labor Day week by a rich liberal, and having just spent the scariest weekend of my life in Acapulco — my mind brought all these films and filmmakers together and gave me an idea unlike anything that I had seen before, a film that began to unspool in my head and simply started to project itself onto my imaginary screen in my frontal lobe. I was broke, depressed, shunned, and three thousand miles from home. I was on Mount Parnassus in San Francisco living under a giant microwave telecommunications tower, and I wanted to leave and go back home and make a movie! It was nuts, I knew it, but the bus had already pulled out of the station and there was no turning it around, no going back. I did not have a day of film school in me, let alone much of any college schooling at all. I didn't care. I had my idea. And I had a new friend. His name was Kevin Rafferty.

Kevin was a documentary filmmaker. He made The Atomic Café, a smart, funny film, in the early 1980s. He and his brother Pierce, and friend Jayne Loader, put together ninety minutes of scenes and clips from the archives of the U.S. government, defense contractors, and the television networks of the Cold War era. With no narration, they strung the footage together in such a way that made the arms race and fear of the Red Menace look exactly like the madness that it was. Footage showing how you could survive an atomic attack in your basement or at school, by ducking and covering your head under your desk, said more about the stupidity of the two superpowers than any political speech or op-ed. The effect was both hilarious and debilitating — and when you came out of the theater you were certain of two things: (1) never, ever believe at face value anything a government or corporation tells you; and (2) these Rafferty brothers are not only great filmmakers, they proved to me that a documentary could be both funny and profound.

Ronald Reagan had been president for just a year when The Atomic Café came out. The American and Russian people were tired of spending billions on the Cold War, and this movie hit that raw nerve. It became a big hit on college campuses and among those who loved good movies. When the political history of an era is written, the honest recorders of that history will write about the impact that the culture had on the political changes that took place and how it shaped the times. (You can't tell the story of the Civil Rights and Vietnam eras without mentioning the impact of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, or Harry Belafonte.) I would like to now say, for the record, that for every "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" there was also a "Born in the U.S.A." and an Atomic Café. Art has a searing impact in a thousand simple, unnoticed ways. This work by Kevin and his brother and friends had that kind of impact on me.

Flint was the Forgotten City in the 1980s. Once a vibrant, thriving metropolitan area that was the birthplace of the world's largest, richest company — General Motors — it was now an evil science experiment for the rich. Question: Can we increase our profits by eliminating the jobs of the people who not only build our cars but also buy them? The answer was yes — if you kept the rest of the country working so they could buy your cars. What the mad scientists didn't count on was that those car workers would not only stop buying the cars once they were jobless, they would also stop buying televisions, dishwashers, clock radios, and shoes. This in turn would cause the businesses which made those items to either go under or make their products elsewhere. Eventually, those who had the remaining jobs would have to try to buy the cheapest stuff possible with their drastically reduced wages, and in order for manufacturers to keep that stuff cheap, it would have to be made by fifteen-year-olds in China.

Few foresaw how the taking of just one itsy-bitsy little thread and pulling it out of the middle-class fabric would soon unravel the entire tapestry, leaving everyone struggling in a dog-eat-dog existence, a weekly battle to keep one's head simply above water. On one level, it was pure political genius, because the electorate, so consumed with its own personal survival, would never be able to find the time or energy to politically organize the workplace, the neighborhood, or the town to revolt against the mad scientists and politicians who had engineered their demise.

In the 1980s, though, it was just that first tiny thread that was being removed — but it was coming out of the place where I lived: Flint, Michigan. The official unemployment rate hit 29 percent. This should have been the canary in the American coal mine. Instead, few noticed. Sure, there were those who cared about our plight and sought to tell its story. There was a solid BBC story about Flint being the jobless capital of America, and then there was the...ah...the...um... Well, OK, that was about it. The BBC. From five thousand miles away. Not many others came to Flint to tell our story. They were too busy talking about the Reagan Revolution and how great it was that some people were prospering with the trickle-down economy. And they were right. Those who did well in the '80s did very well, and, frankly, there weren't that many places that looked like Flint, Michigan. Other than the steel towns of the Ohio Valley that had their comeuppance a few years earlier, and the textile mills in the northeast a few years before that, the country was still doing pretty well, a middle class still existed, and nobody paid much attention to the grimy, gritty towns that built their cars. The Brits from the BBC knew what a town on its knees looked like, and their DNA allowed them to not mince many words as to the cause of what was going on when they did their piece on Flint. But who saw that? Oh well, tallyho! Out of sight, out of mind. If you lived in Tampa, in Denver, in Houston, in Seattle, in Vegas, in Charlotte, in Orange County, in New York, Flint's fate would never be yours! You were doing great and you would continue to do great. Yes, of course, poor Flint. Poor, poor Flint. Pity. Pity. Tsk-tsk.

One day in 1984, I was sitting at my desk at the Flint Voice and there was a knock on the door. Two men who did not look like they were from these parts were standing on the porch, peering through my screen door to see if anyone was home.

"Hi there," I said. "Can I help you?"

"Sure," said the taller one with the accent. "Is this the Flint Voice?"

"Sure is," I said. "C'mon in."

The two of them walked in.

"My name is Ron Shelton," the American one said. "I'm a screenwriter. I wrote Under Fire. It came out last year."

We shook hands. "Um, yes, I, I loved the movie," I said, a bit startled and thinking, Is this guy lost?

"And I'm Roger Donaldson," the Aussie said.

I knew him, too. "Uh, you didn't make Smash Palace?"I asked.

"That didn't play here, did it?" he asked, perplexed that there would be someone in Flint who had seen his indie film from New Zealand.

"No, I drive to Ann Arbor a lot," I replied.

I was trying to collect myself. What were these guys* doing in my office? In Flint, Michigan? Not exactly Hollywood. I was in a bit of shock, but trying to stay cool.

"Well, you're probably wondering what we are doing at the Flint Voice," Donaldson said.

"Not really," I responded with a straight face. "Writers and directors pass through here all the time. Last week Costa-Gavras stopped by with Klaus Kinski." He laughed. I offered them each a chair and they took a seat.

"I'm writing a screenplay," Shelton said, "a sort of a modern-day version of The Grapes of Wrath. We've heard about the hard times Flint has been having, about the many people who've lost their jobs and have had to pack up everything and leave the state. So, the story follows a family who loses everything here in Flint and throws together what's left into the truck and heads to Texas in search of work."

"And when they get to Texas," Donaldson added, "they are treated the way the Joads were treated when they got to California."

I sat and looked at them and, goddammit, if I just didn't want to get up and hug them right there. Somebody — from Hollywood, no less — wanted to tell our story! I thought we'd been ignored, forgotten. Not so.

"So the reason we stopped by to see you is that we're collecting information and stories and research, and someone mentioned you would be a good person to talk to. And that your paper was really the only paper in town covering this story from the side of the workers."

"Well, I don't know what to say," I remarked, trying to find the right words and be cool at the same time. "First off, thank you. I can't believe you are actually here and give a shit. That means a helluva lot."

"We do give a shit," Donaldson said. "We think there really is this shift taking place in America, where those with the money want to turn the clock back to a time when everybody else has to scrape and scrap and beg for the crumbs. And we think that this will make for a powerful movie."

They talked to me for an hour, asking me to tell them some stories about life in Flint and what would I do if I were them to keep the story "authentic." I spoke a mile a minute, sharing everything I could think of and giving them my advice as to what I thought would make for a good movie. They took notes and seemed very pleased.

"We'd like to get a bunch of back copies of your paper and take them with us," Shelton said as we were wrapping up. "And we'd also like to subscribe to it. Can I pay for a subscription?" (I made sure to frame this subscription slip and hang it on my wall.)

"We'll be in touch if there's anything else we need," Donaldson said. "We're going to do the drive from Flint to Texas, scouting along the way. Thanks for your time. We'll be in touch."

They left as they came in, and I got on the phone and called everyone I knew. "Hollywood was just here!" I shouted into the phone a dozen times that day. I just couldn't believe the randomness of this encounter — and the fact that Flint was going to star in a movie, a real movie!

Around that same time, Nina Rosenblum, the documentary filmmaker from New York City, was making a number of trips to Flint. She, too, decided that Flint was a worthy subject for a film — and in her case, a documentary. I and others spent a lot of time with her, and she seemed ready to put our story down on film. This was exhilarating; we were glad that we were no longer going to be ignored. The movie people had shown up!

For whatever reason, neither film got made and, as fate would have it, I would soon leave Flint myself. Within a month of having made my move to California for the dream job of a lifetime, I was sitting in San Francisco both without a dream or a job and collecting unemployment. Dejected, I returned home to Flint to think about what course my life should take. Should I try to restart the Flint Voice? Should I run for office, like maybe mayor of Flint? Maybe I could get a job . . . well, there was nowhere to get a job.

When I wanted to be alone in those jobless days in late 1986, I would head to downtown Flint, which was like a ghost town within a ghost town. I would take a newspaper or a book or my legal pad into Windmill Place, a failed urban renewal project designed by the people who built the South Street Seaport in New York City. They promised to do for Flint what they had done for the Lower East Side of New York. But, alas, the Flint River was not the East River, and a few other things were missing, too. Nonetheless, a half-dozen restaurants struggled to stay open inside the food court that was empty for most of the day. My next-door neighbor from childhood worked behind the counter of the bakery in Windmill Place. I would go in there and she would warm up a chocolate croissant for me. The Chinese take-out place a few counters down made a mean moo goo gai pan, and that was what I was enjoying a few minutes before noon on Thursday, November 6, 1986, when, on the overhead TV screen in this desolate food court, the regularly scheduled program was interrupted by a live feed from the world headquarters of the General Motors Corporation in Detroit. Roger B. Smith, the CEO of General Motors, was standing before a podium, and he had an important announcement to make:

"Today, we are announcing the closing of eleven of our older plants. We will eliminate nearly thirty thousand jobs, with the largest cuts happening at our Flint facilities, where nearly ten thousand of these thirty thousand jobs will be eliminated."

I looked at this man on the TV screen, and I thought, You motherfucking cocksucking son of a bitch. You're a fucking terrorist. You're going to kill another ten thousand jobs here after you've already killed twenty thousand others in Flint? Really? REALLY?

I had forgotten about my moo goo gai pan. I calmed down and thought: I need to do something. Now. What could I do? I had an unemployment check in my pocket. I had a high school degree. I had about a quarter tank of gas in the car.

And then the idea came to me.

I walked over to the one working pay phone and called my friend Ben Hamper. Ben was the autoworker/writer I had put on the cover of Mother Jones before they fired me.

"Did you just see Roger Smith on TV?" I asked.

"Yeah. More of the same," Ben replied.

"I can't take this anymore. I have to do something. I'm going to make a movie."

"A movie?" Ben asked, a bit surprised. "You mean like a home video or something like we did for your going-away party?"

"No. A real movie. A documentary. About how they've fucking destroyed Flint."

"Why not just write a story about it somewhere, like in a magazine or something? I dunno."

"I'm done with magazines and newspapers. I need a break. They don't want me anyway. A movie seems better."

"But how you gonna make a movie when you don't know how to make a movie?"

"I've seen a lot of movies."

"Yes, you've seen a lot of movies."

"I've seen everything."

"No one will dispute that. I don't know anyone who goes to as many movies as you. What'd you see last night?"

"Jumpin' Jack Flash. No, wait — that was the night before. It was Soul Man."

"Jesus, why do you waste your time on such crap?"

"You're missing the point. I think I've seen enough movies to figure out how to make one. And I can make this movie. And I know someone who can help me."

My next call was to Kevin Rafferty.

"I'd like to come to New York and talk to you about something."

"Can't you just tell me over the phone?"

"No, I want to do it in person. You around this week?"

"Sure."

"OK. I can be in the city by tomorrow night."

I borrowed my parents' car and drove the twelve hours to New York. I met Kevin in a bar in Greenwich Village.

"I want to make a movie," I said to him straight up. "I want to make a documentary on Flint and GM. But I don't know the first thing about how to do that. And I was wondering if you could help me."

Asking Kevin Rafferty for help was a crazy move; yes, he was an award-winning documentary filmmaker, but he was clearly broke. It was like me asking a homeless guy to dig a quarter out of his pocket cause I wanted a latte. I had no idea what Kevin's situation was financially, but suffice it to say that I looked like I was dressed by Saks Fifth Avenue compared to Kevin. With him it was always the same torn black T-shirt, the same plaid shirt over it, the same worn-out loafers. Making documentaries made no one any money, even if you made great ones like Kevin. His mop of red hair looked like he cut it himself. Understandable, considering his chosen low-paying profession. He was tall and lanky, the latter a condition I assumed to be the result of not having the money to eat three solids a day. I was glad to be taking him out for a meal, even if it was in a bar I couldn't afford. His one luxury seemed to be the constant stream of cigarettes he was smoking, the brand of which was unfamiliar to me.

"Well, that sounds like a great idea," he responded, making that the first time anyone had said they liked my outrageous plan. "What would you need me to do?"

Uh, everything?

"Well, for starters," I said timidly, "you could show me how the 16mm camera works."

"I could come to Flint and shoot some of it for you," Kevin said out of nowhere. I wanted him to repeat that, but I was afraid if he did, it might turn out that he had actually said, I'll have another Heineken, please, from the tap.

"Really?" I asked, fingers crossed.

"Sure. I could bring my equipment, and maybe some of my crew would come. I think even Anne Bohlen [his codirector on their American Nazi film, Blood in the Face] might come."

This was way beyond what I was expecting, and, if truth be told, I was really thinking a "good luck" and "see you next time" would be all I'd get.

"Wow," I said, my face feeling flush, "that would be so incredible. I mean, I wasn't expecting that, but . . ."

"No, it would be fun. And I can show you what you need to know. I could give you a week of my time."

A whole week? In Flint?

"Kevin, I'd be happy with whatever you could do. Do you think you can teach me this stuff in a week?"

"It doesn't take long to know how the equipment works. The most important part about making a movie is what's in your head, your ideas, and then the beats and rhythms it moves to. Knowing how to say more with less. Having a sharp eye. Listening for the stuff happening between the lines. Having some balls. I watched you when we came to Michigan. You'll do fine."

At some point it dawned on me that I would have to pay him for his time, plus his crew and equipment. I was on the public dole, so I was hoping for a little mercy.

"Of course, you know, I'll pay you for this," I said. "Maybe we can work out something?"

"Not necessary," he replied. "You did us a big favor with our film and we didn't pay you. So we'll return the favor. You don't have to pay us anything."

The table did not break when my jaw hit it.

"Um, wow — I don't know what to say. Thank you. Thank you so much. I've had nothing but one door after another shut in my face for the past two months. This is really beyond necessary. I can't thank you enough."

I wanted to break down right there, but I was in New York sitting at a table in the Village with a top filmmaker, and I wanted to act as cool as possible. So I smiled. A big smile.

Kevin took me over to his edit room which was in (and I will be polite here) some back-alley location you have to walk on 4 x 12s to get there. It was in a basement on MacDougal Street. The place looked like the kind of room where a cheap Chinese restaurant might store its garbage, or maybe a dead body. No, strike that — no one would do this to the deceased, not here, no matter how rotten they were or who they owed money to.

He saw the look on my face and said that the owner of the building did some deal with him that didn't cost him that much to put his Steenbeck editing machine down in the basement. In addition to the Steenbeck, there was what he called a "rewind table," a few "trim bins," and stacks and stacks of developed film. He turned the machine on and showed me some of the scenes from the Nazi film he was working on. It was cool to see the things he had shot in Michigan, and even weirder to hear my voice and see my mug on this little screen. Other than my parents' home movies, this was the first time I'd ever seen myself in a film. I hated it and I loved it.

"You made a lot of this possible," Kevin said. "All your best stuff will be in here."

I went back to Flint and started to think about what I would shoot. I had to get back to San Francisco where my wife was packing us up to move to Washington, D.C., where we both had found jobs. We arrived in D.C. in January 1987, and while I was happy to have the work and the income, my thoughts were on the movie I wanted to make.

I got word that the UAW in Flint was going to hold a rally on February 11 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike. I thought this might be a good place to start shooting. I called Kevin to see what he thought about that.

"Good plan," he said. "I'll get everybody together, we'll bring all the equipment with us, and I'll go buy the film and put it on my credit card. You can pay me back when we get there."

I wanted to say, You have a credit card?! but I didn't want to offend him. I was just glad that he had one.

"Thanks," I said.

"It's about $200 for a ten-minute roll of Kodak. I'll bring about sixty rolls. That'll be about $12,000. Can you handle that?"

"Um, yeah," I said, lying.

"Good. You don't have to develop the film right away, but it's best if you do. That'll cost you about $12,000 more to do the developing and sound transfers."

Gulp.

I had some money saved from my four-month job in San Francisco, but that would not be enough. I would have to sell the building that was the office for the Flint Voice. It was a four-bedroom house with a yard in a nice part of town.

The depressed economy in Flint would get me a whopping $27,000 for it. I was all set.

Kevin, Anne, and the others arrived from New York the day before the first shoot was to begin. A friend offered his home as a place for them to stay. We met that night in his house and invited a few Flint people over to discuss ideas for the movie. Everybody had a good idea about what this movie should be. I was getting a little overwhelmed and Kevin motioned me to step outside so he could have a smoke — and a talk.

"Movies are definitely a collaborative process," he said to me outside in the cold. "But they are not a democracy. This is your movie. You don't hold meetings and have discussions. We shoot your ideas. We just need to get out there tomorrow and start shooting."

Kevin's philosophy was to just film whatever happens, cinema verité style.

"I do have an outline of the things I'd like to get," I said, pulling the list out of my pocket.

"I don't use shot lists," he said. "I just shoot. But this is your movie, so we'll do it your way." He did not like my idea of having a little bit of a plan, but he was willing to go along. "Let's just call this meeting to an end and get some sleep and get to work in the morning," he said as his cigarette concluded.

"Roger," I said — which reminded me of the title that I had come up with for the film. I decided to wait for another time to tell him. I figured he wouldn't think much of titling something before you knew what you had.

But I knew what I had. I'd been living it for thirty years, all the while taking notes in my head. I'd been writing about Flint and GM for over a decade. I was already operating at 24 frames per second, even though I had not yet encountered a woman who raised bunnies to sell for "pets or meat," or a deputy sheriff who evicted people from their homes on Christmas Eve, or a future Miss America parading down Flint's main street on top of a convertible and waving at the boarded-up stores, or the elite of Flint dressing up at a party like the Great Gatsby and missing the irony, or one tourism scheme after another to convince people to spend their vacations in Flint. And I was yet to meet a man named Roger Smith.

None of that was known to me as the very first roll of film made its way through the sprockets of Kevin's Aaton 16mm camera on that cold February day in 1987. We filmed the Sit-Down Strike remembrance, and we shot thirty other scenes in the next seven days. The plasma center where the unemployed sold their blood, the free cheese line, the GM flak who said GM was only in the business to make money and not to help out its hometown. We filmed from sunup to long after dusk.

I watched what Kevin and Anne did as they pointed out things to me about how it's sometimes the little moments that you grab with your camera or microphone that tell the bigger story. They talked about how, with only ten minutes of film in the camera (after which you would have to stop and reload, thus shutting the shoot down for a few minutes), you had to operate as a sort of on-the-set editor and do it all in your head. This discipline would not only save you from wasting film, it would force you to think about what exactly it was, this story you were trying to tell. They did not see the ten-minute restriction as an impediment; they saw it as a creative benefit.

"Imagine if we had an hour's worth of film in the camera and film was as cheap as paper," someone on the crew observed. "We'd just get lazy and shoot everything. Wouldn't have to think about it while shooting. Worry about it later!"

"I want to go down to GM headquarters and see if Roger Smith will speak to us," I told Kevin. "Are you up for that?"

"Are you kidding?" he said with his typical droll, sarcastic voice. "I was wondering when things were going to get interesting."

And so we drove down to Detroit and entered the lobby of General Motors. I went straight to the elevator and hit the button. The doors opened and we went inside. I pushed the button for the fourteenth floor, where Smith's office was. The button wouldn't light up. I kept pushing but nothing happened. The doors wouldn't shut. And that was when a security guard asked us to step outside. He was a polite, older man and he told us to hang on while he called someone. He came back and said that we needed an appointment, and to come back when we had one.

For the next two-plus years I tried to get that appointment. And when I couldn't, I made numerous trips to Detroit to just show up and see what would happen. The search for Roger, to get him to come to Flint so I could show him the damage his decisions had caused, became the thread of the movie. But the real mission of the film had nothing to do with Smith or GM or even Flint. I wanted to make an angry comedy about an economic system that I believed to be unfair and unjust. And not democratic. I hoped that would come through.

Our week with Kevin was up. I thanked him profusely for all that he and Anne and the others did to give me my start.

He said he would help in any way he could, just give him a call. I showed him an application I had received to apply for a grant from the Michigan Council for the Arts. I asked him if he could help me fill it out, as I assumed this was something he had to do all the time.

"What do I put in this box here," I asked him, pointing to the line that asked for my "occupation."

"Filmmaker," he said without missing a beat.

"I'm not a filmmaker," I responded. "I haven't made a film."

"I'm sorry," he replied curtly. "You write down that you're a filmmaker. You were a filmmaker the second that film started rolling through this camera."

And so I wrote "filmmaker." And for the next two and a half years, I made a film. There would be over a dozen more shoots. Kevin connected me to friends of his in the documentary community, most importantly to a couple from San Francisco, Chris Beaver and Judy Irving. They, too, came to Flint and shot for me for a week. The rest of the time it was just me, my wife, and a few friends (plus a cameraman or two from Detroit) bumbling around with the equipment, trying my best to make a movie. There were never more than four of us in the car as we drove from shoot to shoot. Left on our own, we would constantly screw up the camera and the sound recorder — so many times in fact that by the end of shooting in 1989, only about 10 percent of the footage we shot was usable.

I was having a hard time staying above water financially and so the film lab, DuArt in New York, said I could defer payment until I was done. It was run by an old lefty, and he liked seeing the footage as I shipped it in. I heard about an event in New York where distributors and funders came together to look at films in progress. If you paid them a fee, you could show them fifteen minutes of what you had. But none of my footage had been edited together because, well, I didn't know how to edit. Again, Kevin to the rescue.

"I'll put a reel together for you," he said. "When can you come to New York?"

"Whenever you say," I said.

Three weeks later I revisited his editing "suite" in the Village. I sat down and watched the fifteen minutes of my movie he had put together. I was blown away. It looked like a movie! He showed me how the Steenbeck worked. He showed me his editing system and how I could create my own. I spent hours watching him as he worked on his Nazi film, how he made decisions, how he knew just how long to hold a scene and when to get out. He did not believe in narration, or himself being on camera, or using music.

One day in the edit room, I asked him how he learned how to do all this.

"Well, I got a film degree."

"From what film school?"

"I didn't really go to film school," he said.

"So where did you go?"

He paused. "Harvard."

"The Harvard?" I asked, dumbfounded.

"Yes, that Harvard," he answered, not wanting to.

"Shit. I mean, wow. Cool."

How on earth did this guy get into Harvard? I didn't want to pry, especially into matters like how the hell could he afford it. After all, Harvard has scholarships, too. Not everyone who goes there is rich. Don't be a bigot! One thing was clear: the dude was smart, very smart, and so that was clearly his ticket.

I set up an edit room in Washington, D.C., and hired a close friend from Flint and a local woman from suburban Maryland to be my editors, even though neither of them had ever edited a movie. So the three of us taught ourselves, with Kevin's guidance, how to edit a movie. Our edit room was a cut above the ambience of Kevin's, yet we did have our own cockroach-and-rodent problem. We had a room on the ninth floor of a dilapidated building on the corner of Pennsylvania and Twenty-first Street, about four blocks from the White House. There was a Roy Rogers burger joint next door to us, and the exhaust from that spewed into our edit room on a daily basis (that alone should have made the three of us vegans on the spot, had such a thing existed in those days).

Bit by bit, we figured out how to put the movie together. My two friends became amazing editors. The film was funny and it was sad. We stopped making a "documentary" and decided to make a film we'd take a date to on a Friday night. It would have a point of view, but not the point of view of the rigid, unfunny Left. I felt no need to fake the sort of "objectivity" that other journalists deceitfully hid behind. And I could sit there in our cramped edit room and see an imaginary audience in a big dark theater howling, cheering, hissing, and leaving the movie house ready to rumble.

We were working 'round the clock in the edit room, trying to finish the film before the bill collectors shut me down. And then, on a cold morning in January 1989, a new president was to be inaugurated at noon that day. His name was George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan's vice president.

I couldn't think of a better way to spend the day, so I bundled up and headed over to the National Mall, where anyone from the public could watch the swearing-in of President Bush and Vice President J. Danforth Quayle. It was not very crowded, and I found a way to get closer to the Capitol steps than I thought would be possible. Looking up at the stage, at all the muckety-mucks sitting behind the new president, it was there that I saw Kevin Rafferty.

"Jesus," I thought, somewhat in shock. "I think that's Kevin up there!"

It did, in fact, look like him — but this guy was dressed up in a suit and tie and a fancy winter overcoat. There was no way this was him. Or if it was him, well, he's got a good gig for the day, filming an inauguration! But I didn't see any equipment.

A few days after the inauguration of the elder Bush as president of the United States, I tracked down Kevin at home. I had to know if that was him.

"Kevin," I said into the phone, "I was at Bush's inauguration the other day and I could have sworn I saw you up by the podium. Was that you?"

Silence.

"You were there?" I pressed.

More silence, then a drag off his cigarette, then the exhaling of the smoke. "Yes, I was there."

"On the stage?"

Another drag. "Yes."

"Jeez! How cool! What the hell were you doing up there? How'd ya get in?"

A sigh.

"My uncle is the president of the United States."

"Hahaha. That's a good one. My uncle's Dan Quayle!"

"No. I'm not kidding," he interrupted. "My uncle is George Bush, the president. My mom and Barbara Bush are sisters. His four sons and his daughter are my first cousins. I'm a member of the family. That's why I was there."

I've had many things told to me over the years: personal things, shocking things, the kinds of things everyone gets to hear at some point or another from someone — "I'm gay." "I'm leaving you." "Only Austrians may depart this plane." — but nothing in life had prepared me for this piece of news. What Kevin was saying to me was that he had been working with me for nearly three years, first with me helping him with his movie, then him shooting my movie, then editing the first part of my movie — but, more important, being my mentor, my one and only teacher, a one-poorlydressed-man film school — and now he was telling me that his uncle was the President of the United Friggin' States of America??????????????????????????????????????????

My head was spinning.

"Look," he said, "I know you're probably pissed at me for not telling you. But try to look at it from my vantage point. Whenever someone finds out who I am, they immediately start acting different, treating me different, judging me, wanting something from me — you name it, it's a drag to have this around my neck. And frankly, I thought you knew. I thought I told you — or tried to tell you. But you wouldn't believe it. I thought Anne might have told you or someone had or you figured it out — but when it became clear to me that you didn't know, well, I liked it that way. Because right now, now that you know, you're sitting there thinking, He's one of those fucking Bushes!"

I jumped in. "No, no, none of that! I don't make those judgments. But Kevin — shit, man! You could have told me."

"Yeah, well, I thought I did."

"I mean, so during this whole time, your uncle was the vice president and now he's the president? What were you thinking whenever I said something negative about him or Reagan?"

"Nothing. I agreed with you. I don't share his politics. And to be honest, the family stuff is complicated. Personal. And I don't want to talk about it."**

"Sure, I get it. This is still fucking me up a bit. I'm just being honest. A member of the Bush family has been a significant part of not only making this movie but also teaching me how to be a filmmaker. Whew. Fuck. I mean, really, fuck!"

"Well, there you have it. Do with it as you will."

"This changes nothing, Kevin. Don't worry. And I'm glad you finally told me."

Seven months later I finished the film. I had shown a cut of it to three film festival selection committees — Telluride, Toronto, and New York. They all liked it and accepted it to be shown at each of their festivals in September 1989. I had also shown an early rough cut of the movie to my two sisters. They sat with me in our parents' home and watched it. They said nice things to me and encouraged me to keep working on it. What they didn't tell me (until years later) was that they were mortified about how poorly put together they thought the film was. They spoke quietly to one another — "What should we say to him? How can we let him down easy?" —but they couldn't find a way. They didn't want to burst my bubble as I seemed so excited about what the final film would look like. So they said nothing. But they did make a pact with each other to be there at the first film festival screening so that I wouldn't be alone in my moment of public humiliation.

The first festival turned out to be in Telluride, Colorado, over Labor Day weekend. The festival paid my way (as I was truly broke by then). Some of my crew got out there and back on the money they'd raise by hawking handmade silk-screened T-shirts and buttons of the movie's logo on the streets of Telluride.

The week before the festival I went into a panic that I had picked the wrong title for the film. I called up the festival organizer, Bill Pence, and told him that I was changing the name of the film to Bad Day in Buick City.

"No, you are not," he said quite forcefully into the phone. "The name of this film is the one you gave it — Roger & Me — and that's the perfect name. You're not changing it.

Besides, we already sent the program guide to the printer." I was bummed out but afraid to say anything else. I hung up the phone.

When I arrived in Telluride and was handed the program guide, I noticed something awful: the festival had decided to schedule my opening at the same time as their big opening night gala film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover by the British director Peter Greenaway. The opening gala film would be held in the town's historic Opera House. My film would have its "world premiere" in Masons Hall down at the other end of town. Masons Hall! Was I supposed to feel good about this? Like, be thankful it's not the Kiwanis? Or, God forbid, the Elks Lodge? I tried to see all the positives in that. Well, I mean, after all, who was I? No one here knew me, I had never made a movie, and, let's be honest: it was a documentary! So I guess I understood why its opening was being buried. Oh well.

Before the Telluride Opening Night Gala, the town blocks off the main street and throws an opening night party for all the filmmakers and passholders to the festival. My sisters and their husbands and kids had driven all the way from San Diego — they were following through on their promise to each other to be there in Telluride to catch me when I fell. My crew and I showed up to the party early and availed ourselves of the free food (while selling more buttons and T-shirts). It was then that I spotted the film critic, Roger Ebert, who, along with his TV co-host Gene Siskel, were the most well-known film critics in the country. I decided to approach him and invite him to my movie.

"Hi," I said. "My name is Michael Moore. I'm from Flint, Michigan, and I have a film here in the festival. It's called Roger & Me. And I'd really love for you to see it!"

"I am going to see it — tomorrow at noon at the Nugget Theater," Ebert responded, as he reached for another hors d'oeuvre. I was impressed that he already knew about me!

"Well, it's going to have its world premiere tonight, in about an hour, at Masons Hall. I'd love for you to be there."

"Thank you, but I have tickets for the opening night gala at the Opera House."

"That's what I figured, but I think you should be at the very first screening of my movie. I think you'll really like it. And you can say you saw it here first!"

"Like I said, I have tickets to the opening. I've already spent something like eight hundred dollars for them."

"But Roger," I pleaded, using his first name as if we knew each other, something that he clearly didn't like. "I just know you will want to be at the premiere of this. You haven't seen anything like it. It's about the Midwest where we're both from. It —"

He cut me off.

"Listen," he said pointedly, "I said I would see it tomorrow and I will, and that is that. And now if you'll excuse me." And with that, he walked away from me, perturbed, annoyed, maybe even pissed: Who was this jerkoff from Flint bugging the shit out of me?

I felt like an idiot. Now, I'd be lucky if he even came tomorrow, let alone end up liking the movie. Why did I have to slide into that stalker voice? Oh, the desperation that was painted like a billboard across my face!

One of my buddies who worked on the film, Rod Birleson, tried to console me. "Don't worry, Mike. He said he'd come tomorrow and he will. He probably appreciated your enthusiasm."

"Yeah," I said. "The enthusiasm of a serial killer."

The street party was drawing to a close, and the well-heeled were heading into the Opera House for the gala. The rest of us wandered down to the end of Main Street, to where the Order of Masons meet, to unspool our masterpiece.

Remarkably, when we got to the "theater," even though we were put up against the opening night film, the place was packed.

About five minutes before showtime, I looked out the window of the hall and saw a lone figure, a stout man, waddling down the street toward Masons Hall. It was none other than Roger Ebert. He walked in the door and saw his stalker standing there.

"Don't say a word," he ordered, putting his hand up and averting his eyes from mine. "I'm here. That's all that needs to be said."

"But —" I said, disobeying him — and being cut off by him in the same instant.

"I'm only here because there was this strange look in your eyes, a look that told me maybe I better be there. So here I am." He went into the theater and took the last available seat, three rows from the back. No pressure now.

I went in and took my seat in the last row. My sisters had positioned themselves on each side of my seat so they could both sit directly next to me, to comfort me in their role as the good sisters that they were (and are), to be there for me in my moment of impending embarrassment and failure. The lights in Masons Hall began to dim, and as the theater went dark, Anne and Veronica each grabbed a hand of mine and held it tightly. All would be well, no matter what.

At that moment, the music began and the title of the film appeared on the screen...

* Ron Shelton would go on to write and direct Bull Durham and White Men Can't Jump, and Roger Donaldson would direct the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty ("The Bounty") and the Kevin Costner thriller No Way Out.

** When the movie was released, the White House called the production office and asked if a print of the film could be sent up to Camp David for the weekend, as the president wanted to have a screening for the family of the movie Kev worked on. I tried to get invited to this, but that was not going to happen. I later asked Kevin if he'd heard anything. "I think they admired my camera work," he said in typical fashion. "Otherwise I guess it was pretty silent." I told him that someone from the studio heard that there was one family member who really loved it and was howling hysterically throughout. "Apparently it was one of Bush's sons," he said. And apparently the laughter may have had some pharmaceutical assistance (yes, his name was George, too). I told the studio rep, "It must be sad to be the son of the president and then end up never amounting to much?"