c01.qxd 3/16/06 1:39 PM Page 9 PART ONE CLASS STILL MATTERS COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL c01.qxd 3/16/06 1:39 PM Page 10 c01.qxd 3/16/06 1:39 PM Page 11 1 ROOTS oore” is the ninth most common surname in the United States, and its etymology is simple: it is derived from “moor,” meaning “a fen” or “a bog,” and it implies M that the ancestors of the person carrying the name were poor and powerless, confined to the marginal land that the rich folk didn’t want. To the extent that the United States is an Anglo-Saxon country, the prevalence of this name says a lot about the roots of its people and about the role of class (along with its American concomitant, the denial of class) in its sociology. An American, regardless of origin, is more likely to identify with the working man than with the aristocrat, yet—paradoxically—to insist, against all the evidence, that the accident of birth played no role in his personal fate. Michael Moore is an anomaly in this latter regard. His identity seems to be drawn from folk memories of the New Deal 1930s, a much more radical time when working people were developing a self-conscious culture. Moore knows that class is important, if not determinative, in life prospects. He presents himself as just an ordinary working stiff who could have ended up as a factory worker, who dropped out of college and doesn’t have any fancy degrees, yet 11 c01.qxd 3/16/06 1:39 PM Page 12 12 FORGIVE US OUR SPINS who’s managed to figure it all out. He’s the descendant of Irish immi- grants, the son of an auto worker and a clerk, who grew up near Flint, Michigan. ⅢⅢⅢ Michael Moore, with humor and a certain antistyle, exists to make it clear that class does matter. There’s some history here, some back- ground, and even if Moore himself is now a multimillionaire who never actually worked on a production line—well, class is more than a matter of income, more even than a matter of occupation. It’s a mat- ter of background, consciousness, and identity. Moore’s parents, Frank and Veronica, and his older sisters, Anne and Veronica, were not deeply involved in politics, but the family was devout in the religion of the Irish-descended American working class. Frank and Veronica went to Mass every day and raised their children in the faith, and they were one of the founding families of a new neighborhood Catholic church. They came from a socially progres- sive, blue-collar Catholic tradition that found inspiration in the social justice encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius XI, and this gave them an awareness of class and the importance of union solidarity. They were almost certainly aware of, and influenced by, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin’s Catholic Worker movement. The family took up collections for César Chávez and the United Farm Workers and for Daniel and Philip Berrigan and their religiously inspired, nonviolent, anti–Vietnam War protests. Michael himself attended a training seminary while he was in high school, and for a brief period he seriously considered entering the priesthood. Years later, he proposed a segment for his TV Nation television show in which a correspondent goes to confessionals in twenty different Catholic churches and ranks the punishments meted out, call- ing the results “A Consumer’s Guide to the Confessional.” But even then he was still enough of a Catholic to have doubts about this very funny and sharp idea. Moore and his wife, Kathleen Glynn, would later write, “When the segment was finished, Mike was confident he would burn in eternal Hell if this segment ever ran, so he spiked it.”1 Although Moore didn’t join the priesthood, he had a sense of mis- sion from a very young age and was an enthusiastic agitator long before Flint’s decline. Although he has wrapped himself in Flint’s c01.qxd 3/16/06 1:39 PM Page 13 ROOTS 13 labor history, he didn’t actually grow up there; he was raised in Davi- son, a bedroom community just to the east of Flint proper, an open and sunny place that bills itself as the “City of Flags” and the home- town of Ken Morrow, a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic champion hockey team. There is no public mention of a much more famous native son. As a matter of fact, Moore is in the unusual position of being a worldwide celebrity who is apparently banned from his home- town high school’s Hall of Fame. His candidacy has been vetoed by Davison school board members who believe it would cost the district private donations. Moore’s critics have made much of the fact that Davison is white, comfortable, and clean, with many more white-collar workers (middle managers at General Motors) than gritty, working-class Flint. All of this is true, yet the criticism is still a little off. Davison was an adjunct of Flint, and it was no playground of the leisure class. Its modest sub- urban charms were well within the reach of the line workers at GM’s plants in Flint, among them Moore’s father, who made spark plugs for thirty years. Davison—nearly mall-less and mostly undeveloped in Moore’s youth—has come up considerably since that time, while Flint has gone down precipitously. If Davison has a higher average income than Flint, dramatically lower unemployment, and is almost entirely white, at least part of this is due to the aftershocks of GM’s withdrawal from Flint, starting in the late 1970s, which separated those who could afford to leave Flint from those who could not. Moore’s father had his place in Davison long before this happened. Moore himself had left Davison long before this happened. In high school, Moore had already established a penchant for outspoken politics that predicted much that was to follow. Coming up at a time in which the Vietnam War was boiling through American political life, he was always an agitator. He started his first anti- establishment news sheets in grade school, while in high school he won a public-speaking contest with a speech condemning the local Elks lodge for barring black people from membership. He started a campaign to ban the Homecoming Queen contest, which he consid- ered silly and sexist. When the voting and office-holding age was lowered in 1972 from twenty-one to eighteen, Moore ran for the Davison school board and won, becoming the board’s youngest member. From this position, he c01.qxd 3/16/06 1:39 PM Page 14 14 FORGIVE US OUR SPINS set about lobbying the board to fire the principal and vice principal, whom he clearly despised. The two submitted their resignations soon after Moore’s election to the school board, and he would later take credit for forcing them out. It’s not at all clear why Moore was so intent on getting rid of these men. Moore writes of feeling oppressed by deadening routine—not a remarkable memory of high school. In his own words, he has only nice things to say of the principal whose removal he sought: I had known this man, the principal, for many years. When I was eight years old, he used to let me and my friends skate and play hockey on this little pond beside his house. He was kind and generous, and always left the door to his house open in case any of us needed to change into our skates or if we got cold and just wanted to get warm. Years later, I was asked to play bass in a band that was forming, but I didn’t own a bass. He let me borrow his son’s.2 This passage has understandably been seized upon by right-wing critics of Moore; there’s something shocking and unseemly about it, for Moore himself is writing that his antiauthoritarianism trumps any consideration of loyalty or human feeling or the character of his tar- gets. The reader is left to assume that, to Moore, anyone in a position of authority—or who can be presented as being in a position of authority—is an enemy. Even politics at the school board level was for Moore a zero-sum game: teachers (except for the popular antiestab- lishment ones) were the enemy, students the victims of an oppressive system. Moore’s instincts were to trust the students always to know what was in their own interests. He did not get along well with the other board members and did not hesitate to invoke the legal system, at one point threatening to sue the board for the right to tape-record board meetings, an issue that was, typically, couched in the highest language of public accountability. His confrontational style led to a recall effort, which failed. The Davison school board was too small a stage for a talented social activist, and Moore soon expanded his work. He and his friend Jeff Gibbs started the Hotline Center, an emergency phone line that took calls and made referrals for unwanted pregnancies, drug overdoses, and suicide attempts, and they soon branched out into broader social c01.qxd 3/16/06 1:39 PM Page 15 ROOTS 15 issues like police brutality. The hotline led to a community newspaper named, in best early-1970s style, Free to Be. The pompous sense of self-importance of Moore and his young staff was written in the wet cement of the sidewalk they installed outside the hotline’s office in the Flint suburb of Burton: WE SHALL STAY FREE! followed by Article I of the First Amendment.