Downsize This!

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Downsize This!

I've never seen any of Michael Moore's celebrated documentaries, nor his short-lived television show, TV Nation, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from this book. The back cover talks about Moore being "an irrepressible new humorist" and a "great satirist", so I guess I expected him to be something like Al Franken, whose own book, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, entertained me last year.

However, I can't really say that I found Downsize This! particularly funny. Although Moore shares Franken's style of taking real events and trands and making them appear ludicrous, he lacks Franken's biting wit and judgment about what is funny and what is not. Moore is much more intent on making a serious point and bringing hidden truths to light. While this is a laudable goal, and much of what Moore discusses is worth discussing, his method is very fractured.

The opening chapter, "What Is Terrorism?", is perhaps the best of the book. It opens with two photos, one of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which was bombed in 1995, and another of an automotive plant in Flint Michigan, being demolished in 1996. The photos look nearly identical, and Moore draws the analogy that downsizing and plant relocation are as much a form a terrorism - corporate terrorism - as bombing is.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the chapter entitled, "Germany Still Hasn't Paid for Its Sins - and I Intend to Collect". In this chapter, Moore seems to completely lose sight of exactly who has responsibility for Germany's actions in World War II as he proposes we put the screws to Germany and Germans for the actions of the Third Reich. He argues that "there are over 12 million Germans still kicking around who were fifteen years or older during World War II", although he doesn't tell us much about these Germans. Were they willing accomplices in the Holocaust? Were they soliders on the front lines? Were they forced in some way to cooperate? (I'd find it hard to condemn someone who was coerced through threat of his own death or the deaths of his family.) Germany as a nation seems acutely aware of the crimes committed in its history in this century (far more so than, say, the United States), and I felt that Moore's 'discussion' of the subject here quickly devolved into ranting and raving.

The rest of the book falls between these two extremes, from ireelevancies such as "Show Trials I'd Like to See", to more substantial essays on NAFTA and the profit margin of large companies. One of his tactics is to fully adopt an opponent's strategy and carry it to its logical extreme to show how silly it is, but since I tend to find "logical extreme" arguments to be themselves silly, chapters such as "A Sperm's Right to Life" and "O.J. Is Innocent" just made me grimace.

Moore is at his best when he's discussing his forte: Corporate misdeeds in modern America. ("Why Doesn't GM Sell Crack?" and "Balance the Budget? Balance My Checkbook!" are both good chapters.) When he tackles more purely social or cultural issues ("My Forbidden Love for Hillary"; "Pagan Babies"), he comes off seeming more like a fruitcake than anything else. Although the research he's done is impressive, Downsize This! is a far less interesting book than <Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot.