Michael Moore and Me

We're just like peas in a pod!

In theory.

Michael Moore was raised in a town only 42 miles southeast of mine.  He was raised in Davison, Michigan near Flint, and I was raised in Bridgeport, smack dab next to Saginaw.

I have been a fan of Michael Moore's works for quite awhile now, from the time I saw his first film, Roger and Me, a year or two after it's initial release.  I knew that he was from near where I grew up, but it wasn't until I recently completed his autobiographical book, Here Comes Trouble, that I realized how much alike we really were.

He is roughly a year older, but close enough that we went through similar cultural experiences and had about the same reaction to them.  The Kennedy assassinations, the so-called race riots out of Detroit, the Vietnam War, MLK - all had major impacts on our lives and our thinking.

He fulfilled about the same role in school as I did in mine.  We were both personally conservative (no drugs, studious, not flashy, polite and shy with girls), but at the same time liberal in our politics.  We both had a reputation for being rabble rousers on occasion, taking stands that risked upsetting our peers and adults.

One of the first girls to show interest in him was impressed by his Nixon impersonation - so was my first true love.  He made his mark in student government, as did I.  He kind of got dis-invited because the school staff student government liaison thought he raised too many questions and uncomfortable issues.  I survived student government, but did get booted from a student business group because i asked too many things and my imagination was just too wild for them.  He thought long and hard about the Vietnam War, and what he would do if he was drafted.  I remember having the same worries.  I could go on and on.

He grew up in an area where the income disparity was not that great, living on the same street with professionals ranging from doctors to teachers, other government employees, retail managers, factory workers and mechanics.  Every body's salary was in a spit shot of everyone else's.  This is what I grew up in as well.    Later, I would see statistics that would show that where we lived had one of the best per capita incomes on the planet - the middle class was huge compared to the rich and the poor.

As I moved south, the income disparities increased, and I found it very disillusioning.  And back home, as the factories moved out to find cheaper labor to exploit, the relative income equality even collapsed back where Michael and I grew up.  Hence the theme of his first excellent documentary, Roger and Me, about the economic decline of Flint, and GM's disinterest in what they had wrought.

As I've seen his work, I can't help but see a bit of me in it as well, maybe enough for us to be friends if we knew each other.

But probably not.

We often think we're closer to our celebrity favorites than we actually are.  We confuse the way we think with the way we think they think.  And who really knows?

If I met Michael Moore, I would like to think that I would be immediately friendly, and we'd be talking like best buds within a day or two.  I would be cool and wouldn't swamp him with fan boy nonsense.

And he's not the only celebrity I delude myself with.  I've read more of Stephen King's words than any other person on Earth, including my own.  I get so wrapped up in his stories, I think we have to be exactly alike.  But we're not.  If I was actually talking with him, I would be just as lost as everyone else.

If I met Nathan Fillion, an actor I admire and identify with, I would like to think we would just jibe each other about the craft table, or when ol' buddy George R. R. Martin is ever gonna come up with the next Game of Thrones book.  But I would probably just babble something about how cool Firefly was, and if he ever thought that he could be Captain Mal Reynolds again....just a like a gazillion other fanboys would.

If I met Stephen King, I probably wouldn't commiserate about raising kids, or how close now he felt to the Episcopalian church.  I would probably just mumble the same stupid question that everyone does...where do you get your ideas?

And if I ever met Michael Moore, I probably wouldn't talk about the good old days back in the Flint/Saginaw area, or how if he went to my school  he never would have wanted to get on the school board in order to fire the principal because my DAD was the principal and was more cool and understanding than his principal...why, I was on the student council and my Dad PUT UP with me being a rabble rouser, even encouraged it a bit.  I wish he could have met my Dad.  Or to know that the last time I was at the movie theater with my Dad was to see Moore's film Sicko, his great movie about our rotten health care system.

But probably not.

Probably be lucky to mutter, "Enjoy your work, Mr. Moore" and move on.

Any rate, thank you for your works, Michael Moore, and thank you for helping remind me what it was like growing up.  It wasn't a perfect world, but there was so much promise.  So much hope.

We dreamed big once.

Maybe we can do it again.