Stupid White Men

The government has been seized by a ne'er-do-well rich boy and his elderly henchmen . . . Our great economic expansion is unraveling faster than a set of Firestones . . . Our water is poisoned, the ozone's in shreds, and the SUVs are advancing like a plague of locusts . . .

Remember when everything was looking up? When the government was running at a surplus, pollution was disappearing, peace was breaking out in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, and the Bridge to the Twenty-First Century was strung with high-speed Internet cable and paved with 401K gold?

Well, so much for the future. Michael Moore, the award-winning provocateur behind Roger & Me and the bestseller Downsize This!, now returns to size up the new century -- and that big, ugly special-interest group that's laying waste to the world as we know it: stupid white men. Whether he's calling for United Nations action to overthrow the Bush Family Junta, calling on African-Americans to place whites only signs over the entrances of unfriendly businesses, or praying that Jesse Helms will get kissed by a man, Stupid White Men is Mike's Manifesto on Malfeasance and Mediocrity. Among his targets:

• George W.: "President" of the United States. The Thief-in-Chief. A trespasser on federal land, a squatter in the Oval Office. Send in the Marines! Launch the SCUD missiles! Bring me the head of Antonin Scalia!
  

• Bill Clinton: One of the best Republican presidents we've ever had.
  

• The Former Yugoslavia: Bring back Marshall Tito! Nobody in America liked him much when he was alive, but now he looks like Lady Bird Johnson.
  

• The Idiot Nation: A friggin' stain on a blue dress. That's what captured our attention in the nineties -- along with slow-moving Broncos, six-year-old strangled beauty queens, and Hugh Grant's dating habits.
  

• Corporate America: There is no recession, my friends: no downturn, no hard times. The rich are wallowing in loot -- and now they want to make sure you don't come a-lookin' for your piece of the pie.

The polls indicate that 60 percent of Americans are "upset or angry" about this land in which we now live -- a land where crooked courts select the president and money rules the day. So if you're feeling the same way and you're wondering what's going to give out first -- the economy, Dick Cheney's pacemaker, or your new VW Beetle -- here's the book for you.

Excerpts

Chapter One
A Very American Coup

The following message was intercepted by U.N. forces on 9/1/01, at 0600 hours, from somewhere within the North American continent:

I am a citizen of the United States of America. Our government has been overthrown. Our elected President has been exiled. Old white men wielding martinis and wearing dickies have occupied our nation's capital.

We are under siege. We are the United States Government-in-Exile.

Our numbers are not insignificant. There are over 154 million adults among us, and 80 million children. That's 234 million people who did not vote for, and are not represented by, the regime that has placed itself in power.

Al Gore is the elected President of the United States. He received 539,898 more votes than George W. Bush. But he does not sit tonight in the Oval Office. Instead our elected President roams the country without purpose or mission, surfacing only to lecture college students and replenish his stash of Little Debbie's Snack Cakes.

Al Gore won. Al Gore, President-in-Exile. Long live El Presidente Albertooooooo Gorrrrrrrrrrre!

So who, then, is the man that now occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? I'll tell you who:

He is George W. Bush, "President" of the United States. The Thief-in-Chief.

It used to be that politicians would wait until they were in office before they became crooks. This one came prepackaged. Now he is a trespasser on federal land, a squatter in the Oval Office. If I told you this was Guatemala, you'd believe it in a heartbeat, no matter what your political stripe. But because this coup was wrapped in an American flag, delivered in your choice of red, white, or blue, those responsible believe they're going to get away with it.

That's why, on behalf of 234 million Americans held hostage, I have requested that NATO do what it did in Bosnia and Kosovo, what America did in Haiti, what Lee Marvin did in The Dirty Dozen:

Send in the Marines! Launch the SCUD missiles! Bring us the head of Antonin Scalia!

I have sent a personal request to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to hear our plea. We are no longer able to govern ourselves or to hold free and fair elections. We need U.N. observers, U.N. troops, U.N. resolutions!

Dammit, we need Jimmy Carter!

We are now finally no better than a backwater banana republic. We are asking ourselves why any of us should bother to get up in the morning to work our asses off to produce goods and services that only serve to make the junta and its cohorts in Corporate America (a separate, autonomous fiefdom within the United States that has been allowed to run on its own for some time) even richer. Why should we pay our taxes to finance their coup? Can we ever again send our sons off into battle to give their lives defending "our way of life" -- when all that really means is the lifestyle of the gray old men holed up in the headquarters they seized by the Potomac?

Oh JesusMaryAndJoseph, I can't take it! Somebody pass me the universal remote! I need to switch back to the fairy tale that I was a citizen in a democracy with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals. The story I was told as a child said that I mattered, that I was equal to every one of my fellow citizens -- and that not a single one of us was to be treated differently or unfairly, that no one was to wield power over others without their consent. The will of the people. America the Beautiful. Land that I love. Twilight's...last...gleaming. Oh, say, can you see -- are the Belgian peacekeepers on their way? Hurry!

The coup began long before the shenanigans on Election Day 2000. In the summer of 1999 Katherine Harris, an honorary Stupid White Man who was both George W. Bush's presidential campaign cochairwoman and the Florida secretary of state in charge of elections, paid $4 million to Database Technologies to go through Florida's voter rolls and remove anyone "suspected" of being a former felon. She did so with the blessing of the governor of Florida, George W.'s brother Jeb Bush -- whose own wife was caught by immigration officials trying to sneak $19,000 worth of jewelry into the country without declaring and paying tax on it...a felony in its own right. But hey, this is America. We don't prosecute felons if they're rich or married to a governing Bush.

The law states that ex-felons cannot vote in Florida. And sadly (though I'm confident that Florida's justice system was always unimpeachably fair), that means 31 percent of all black men in Florida are prohibited from voting because they have a felony on their record. Harris and Bush knew that removing the names of ex-felons from the voter rolls would keep thousands of black citizens out of the voting booth.

Black Floridians, overwhelmingly, are Democrats -- and sure enough, Al Gore received the votes of more than 90 percent of them on November 7, 2000.

That is, 90 percent of those who were allowed to vote.

In what appears to be a mass fraud committed by the state of Florida, Bush, Harris, and company not only removed thousands of black felons from the rolls, they also removed thousands of black citizens who had never committed a crime in their lives -- along with thousands of eligible voters who had committed only misdemeanors.

How did this happen? Harris's office told Database -- a firm with strong Republican ties -- to cast as wide a net as possible to get rid of these voters. Her minions instructed the company to include even people with "similar" names to those of the actual felons.

2nd Excerpt:
"As white people, we've been lulled into thinking it's safe to be around other white people. We've been taught since birth that it's the people of the other color we need to fear. They're the ones who'll slit your throat!

Yet as I look back on my life, a strange but unmistakable pattern seems to emerge. Every person who has ever harmed me in my lifetime - the boss who fired me, the teacher who flunked me, the principal who punished me, the kid who hit me in the eye with a rock, the other kid who shot me with his BB gun, the executive who didn't renew TV Nation, the guy who was stalking me for three years, the accountant who double-paid my taxes, the drunk who smashed into me, the burglar who stole my stereo, the contractor who overcharged me, the girlfriend who left me, the next girlfriend who left even sooner, the pilot of the plane I was on who hit a truck on the runway (he probably hadn't eaten in days), the other pilot who decided to fly through a tornado, the person in the office who stole checks from my checkbook and wrote them out to himself for a total of $16,000 - every one of these individuals has been a white person! Coincidence? I think not!

I have never been attacked by a black person, never been evicted by a black person, never had my security deposit ripped off by a black landlord, never had a black landlord, never had a meeting at a Hollywood studio with a black executive in charge, never seen a black agent at the film/TV agency that used to represent me, never had a black person deny my child the college of her choice, never been puked on by a black teenager at a Motley Crue concert, never been pulled over by a black cop, never been sold a lemon by a black car salesman, never seen a black car salesman, never had a black person deny me a bank loan, never had a black person try to bury my movie and I've never heard a black person say, 'We're going to eliminate ten thousand jobs here-have a nice day!'"

End Excerpt.