http://www.guardian.co.uk/michaelmoore/story/0,13947,1055591,00.htmlThe notion of Moore as a reluctant controversialist is a difficult one to swallow. This is the journalist who held a mock funeral of a dying man outside the offices of the healthcare provider that had denied him the transplant that would save his life. (The man got his transplant.) He is the film-maker who turned up at Kmart's headquarters in Bowling For Columbine with two young boys who'd been shot, asking if they could return the bullets still in their bodies and demanding that the store stopped selling handgun ammunition. (Kmart finally complied.) In short, political tumult is not something that gatecrashes Moore's otherwise quiet life. He courts it, flirts with it, engages it and is ultimately wedded to it.
As an activist, polemicist and journalist, Moore occupies a unique space in the US media and politics. He does so not because he is dissident - America has many dissenting voices, even if most are rarely heard - but because of the combination of what he says, and the way he says it, on television, film and in books. He is a choir of one with little in the way of back-up vocals.
He has equivalents on the right in America, such as the columnist Ann Coulter and the radio shock jock Mike Savage, but they have a rightwing administration, Congress and media to back them up. He has equivalents on the left in Britain, but they have a long-established liberal network and a public understanding of satire to sustain them. Moore has no such tradition to fall back on. He is like Mark Thomas in a journalistic culture that has produced no John Pilger or Paul Foot; like Tony Benn in a political culture that never produced a Labour party; at his most scathing, he is like Julie Burchill in a nation that couldn't cope with Spitting Image. Then, suddenly last year, he had lots of company. Stupid White Men became the bestselling non-fiction book of the year and Bowling For Columbine became a hit. Through them, he bypassed the cultural and political gatekeepers, and established a link with a huge swath of Americans whose voices were not being heard.
For Moore, this is not just a personal achievement, but a political triumph. "Only that British woman, JK Rowling, has sold more books than me this year," he says gleefully. "Think about that. It's Harry Potter and it's Michael Moore. In fiction it's her and in non-fiction it's me. So the American public, during a time when everyone was supposedly rallying behind George Bush, was buying something called Stupid White Men, which essentially trashes George Bush." His detractors have branded his work "Chomsky for children", but my guess is that he would consider that a compliment. Chomsky reaches thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Moore reaches millions, maybe tens of millions.
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