Michael Moore's Nightmarish World

Today I came across a YouTube video of Michael Moore complaining about how the Occupy Wall Street movement isn't getting enough attention, and I decided to google him, which I haven't done in a while. Maybe, I thought, his rantings would help me better understand the angry leftist mindset that is driving these protests. I found his old 1997 book, Downsize This, available for free, and I had a chance to read through it (it's only 122 pages long).

This man is motivated by anger, and he fantasizes about taking revenge on his political opponents. In my favorite chapter he complains that the Germans haven't sufficiently atoned for their crimes during World War II and the Holocaust. Not only did they kill a lot of people, he writes,

The map of the world is forever screwed up by World War II, and whether it's Bosnia or the Middle East or skinheads terrorizing the residents of Idaho, you can trace the roots of these conflicts back to what the Germans did.

And now (after they've ruined Idaho and convinced Saddam Hussein to invade Iran, apparently) the Germans have had the gall to become rich. Even worse, many of the dirty krauts who were alive during World War II have had the nerve to move to Florida.

This brings us to one of Moore's fantasies. Florida, you see, is a bad place because it's hot and it has lots of bugs, people with guns, and those rotten Cuban exiles who dared to flee Castro's paradise. So actually it's good that

all these ex-Nazis are moving there to terrorize the people of Florida. Serves them right. The Right-Wing Cubans versus the Geriatric SS in a fight to the finish! I'd pay money to watch that one on Pay-Per-View.

From peaceful immigration to televised gladiatorial death matches in a few paragraphs.

It's probably obvious that Moore hasn't had any dreams of old members of the KGB and the Stasi fighting each other to the death. On the contrary, he admires communists. The Red Chinese, for example, put on great show trials, and he likes to dream about the show trials he'd like to see. In these fantasies, the accused stand on the fifty yard line in Giants Stadium while eighty thousand "rabid citizens" demand blood (or, as Moore calls it, "justice"). In one of the dreams, after the gun lobby is found guilty of committing crimes against humanity,

the board of directors of the National Rifle Association are given a five-second head start. A gang of disenchanted youths whips out its automatic weapons and chases the NRAers across the field with a spray of bullets. 

That's the gist of the book. It's supposed to be funny. Aren't you laughing? 

In another particularly "funny" passage, Moore denounces William Safire for calling Hillary Clinton a liar and for daring to have written speeches for Richard Nixon. "In a more just world," he writes, "weasels like Safire would be spreading manure on a collective farm somewhere in North Dakota."

I guess a lot of people think he's kidding when he writes this stuff, but there's no punch line.

I have little doubt that if this man got the chance, he would gladly serve as America's Lenin. Then all his dreams of a "more just world" would come true.