Kategori: Moore, Michael

I snuck a reread of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in between here, so don’t go thinking I’ve come over all serious and such and have vowed to never read fiction again. Actually, come to think of it, the whole of HP, and especially OotP, is scaringly appropriate in relation to current world politics.

Dude, Where’s My Country? confirmed my opinion on several issues, the least significant of which is that I really don’t think Michael Moore is particularly funny. The only things in Dude that made me laugh were quotes from right-wing nuts and then mostly in a «can you hear yourself at all?» sort of way. Other opinions I had confirmed were more along the lines of «Please, dear God, do not let Bush get ‘elected’ this time around».

Moore talks a lot of sense. Even his idea to get Oprah elected president is not as far fetched as I originally thought. I mean, I’m somewhat sick of Oprah myself, but at least she seems to be interested in making money by helping people and getting them to read books and stuff rather than by blowing them up or polluting their drinking water and so on. And that has to be an improvement. But I suppose it’s getting a little close to the election now?

Anyway. Not the best read ever, but certainly not the worst. And quite definitely not the most worthless of reads. Go buy (then read, obviously). Then go vote – whereever you are (Canada, for example, we could really do without Canada following the example of the US and voting in a Bush-clone) – and follow Moore’s suggestion and persuade other sensible (if lazy) people to come with you to vote. Thank you.

In which Robin fails to laugh.

I found Stupid White Men in a Stockholm bookshop at a reasonable price (the shops here seem to have marked it up, for some reason), and it was pretty quickly devoured. It’s hard to know what to say about books like these, I think. It’s very good, of course, and Moore definitely has a point or two (or a hundred). I am puzzled, though, at how it can be described as «funny». The quote on the back from the San Francisco Chronicle is pretty typical of the sort of thing you hear about Moore: «Hysterically funny. The angrier Moore gets, the funnier he gets. Sensational.» Well, I mean, no, not really. I think I might have laughed once during the whole book. That’s not what I’d describe as hysterically funny. The Observer seem to have got the point, though: «Caustic, breakneck, tell-it-like-it-is… He’s a genuine populist; a twenty-first-century pamphleteer.»

I am not being very helpful about this, am I? Well, here’s some advice for you: Read this book. It’ll make you think even if it doesn’t make you laugh.