When I first saw Roger and Me in 1989, I could barely hold it together. It was as if someone was giving voice to everything I had felt for much of the 1980s. He not only re-invented a film genre, he shattered a growing silence about working people. I've been a fan, a critical one perhaps, ever since. I know he tools with his narratives, plays with facts, and inserts a lot of needless film tricks, which makes him an example of "left wing irrationality" for some as Kevin Mattson called him in Dissent (and for which I wrote a defense of Moore).
So, it's slightly awkward that when MichaelMoore.com asked me to blog, I ended up using as my subject conservative intellectual David Frum, who seems to be struggling to reject the growing irrationality of the right in favor of an honest discussion. Frum also wrote one of the first outings on the 1970s back in 2000 before trudging off to be a soldier in the Bush White House. So, I've always thought Frum and I had something to talk about.
You can read my blog on David Frum here: Reason Frum the Right? | MichaelMoore.com
A footnote on Moore: I've had the chance to interact with a lot of political guests at Cornell, from people like Jim Hightower to AFL-CIO heads, including a full day with Michael Moore. What was unique about Moore was not (at all) his detailed knowledge of social and political life like most of them, but it was his ability to stand two jarring things next to each other, each simultaneously exposing the contradictions in the other. His world may be that of the postmodern collage and not that of the modernist's encyclopedia, but it is quite distinct, I would argue, from the type of craziness that Frum is trying to drive out of the right today.
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