Book: Dude, Where’s My Country

Author: Michael Moore
Publisher:

Michael Moore’s new book “Dude, Where’s My Country” has just come out after a booming success of his earlier book “The Stupid White Men”, see my article on Chowk, Regarding the Stupid White Men, April 15, 2002. It may not be very much off the mark to suggest that the current book is the result of the after-shock of 9/11. In its introduction, the author wrote “..life as we knew it changed for ever” and followed it up with his commentary as follows:

“Meanwhile, in faraway Washington, D.C., life is changing too. Taking advantage of our grief, and our fear that ‘it’ may happen again, an appointed president uses the deed of 9/11 as a convenient cover, a justification, for permanently altering our American way of life. Is that why they died, so that George W. Bush can turn the country into Texas? We’ve already conducted two wars after 9/11, and an upcoming third or a fourth is not all that unlikely…. I know Bill Weems (a line producer friend of Michael Moore who died in a 9/11 plane crash) didn’t die so he could be used as an excuse to bomb innocents overseas. If his death, his life is to have a greater meaning from this moment forward, it is to make sure that no one else like him will have to lose his or her life in this insane, violent world, a world we now seem hell-bent on running any way we damn well please.”

The title of the first chapter is “7 Questions for George of Arabia” in which the author shows Bush family’s close ties with Osama bin Laden’s family before 9/11. The war on Afghanistan was not completely patriotic or to root out terrorism, it had a business motive as well in the form of oil interests through Unocal and Enron. Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan, and an American lackey, is reported to have been a Unocal staffer. Immediately after 9/11, 24 members of the Osama family were not only allowed but also assisted both by the Saudi embassy and FBI to fly out of America.

The second chapter “Home of the Whopper” opens up with the question:

What is the worst lie a president can tell?

I did not have sex with that woman – Miss Lewinsky.

Or,

He has weapons of mass destruction – the world’s deadliest weapons – which pose a direct threat to the United States, our citizens, and our friends and allies.

Moore describes in this chapter ten whopper lies, which are attributed to the President. Without going into details, just see some of the captions.

#1. The Original Whopper: Iraq has nuclear weapons!
#2. Whopper with Cheese: Iraq has chemical and biological weapons.
#3. Whopper with Bacon: Iraq has ties to Osama bin Laden.

……………………….

So on and so forth. The last one is:

#10. Triple Whopper: Biggie Size. We didn’t lie. And we’re not lying now to cover up the lies we told you before.

Chapter 7 titled “Horatio Alger Must Die” opens up with:

Perhaps the Biggest Success in the War on Terrorism has been its ability to distract the nation from the Corporate War on Us. In the two years since the attacks of 9/11, American businesses have been on a punch-drunk rampage that has left millions of average Americans with their savings gone, their pensions looted, their hopes for a comfortable future for their families diminished or extinguished. The business bandits (and their government accomplices) who have wrecked our economy have tried to blame it on the terrorists, they have tried to blame it on Clinton, and they have tried to blame it on us. But, in fact, the wholesale destruction of our economic future is based solely on the greed of the corporate mujahedeen….Their singular goal is to take enough control over our lives so that, in the end, we’ll be pledging allegiance not to a flag or some airy notion of freedom and democracy, but to the dictates of Citigroup, Exxon, Nike, GE, GM, P&G, and Philip Morris….You are no longer in charge. You know it and they know it and all that remains is the day when it will be codified onto a piece of paper, the Declaration of Corporate States of America.

The book ends with a chapter titled “Bush Removal and Some Other Spring Chores”. This discusses the serious problems that the Democratic Party is facing. Michael Moore believes that the Democratic Party seems to have already conceded the 2004 election to the Republicans because they don’t have a candidate strong enough to beat the incumbent president. They seem to be conserving their energies for the 2008 election when Hillary Clinton would enter the field.

Michael Moore says of the Democrats, “No One – and I mean no one – trusts the Democrats’ ability to get this done. They are the professional losers.”

The book is published by Warner Books, an AOL Time Warner Company. His “The Stupid White Men” was also published by the same company and they had tried to stop the distribution of the book out of a ‘holy’ or ‘sordid’ sense of patriotism. Now according to the author, “..I have to say, they seem to be behind me here 100 per cent, 1000 per cent!! Not once they have said I was ‘trouble’.” That’s how things unravel in real life.

The book’s frontispiece is a note of approval under the names of Tom Ridge, Secretary of Homeland, and George W. Bush, Commander in Chief of the Fatherland. The note states, “This book has been approved by the Department of Homeland Security. It contains no seditious acts or acts of treason….”

The book, like its predecessor The Stupid White Men, is saucy and racy, and fun to read.