Moore didn't show up until about an hour after the festivities began. We were ushered into a dining room, and onto the stage strode Michael Moore; Geoffrey Colvin, editorial director of Fortune; and Hilary Peck, U.S. marketing director for Remy Martin. The invitation said "Jacket and tie required"; Moore partly complied by wearing a jacket over his t-shirt.
Peck opened with a rather strained conceit comparing Remy with Moore - both were feisty and independent (Remy is the only "independent" cognac maker left). I still can't figure out what either of the sponsors, Remy or Fortune, hoped to get out of this. Nor could I figure out who the audience was. They'd said no press, but the only person I knew there was a fellow hack who was invited by a PR firm. Supposedly invitations were sent to all NYC Fortune subscribers, but that's a pretty big universe. There must have been some filter, but it would have had to be a pretty porous one to let me through.
Anyway, Peck then ceded the floor, and Colvin interviewed Moore, chat-show style. Colvin asked Moore what he'd say if he actually met Roger Smith. Moore said he'd ask Smith what he wishes he'd done differently at GM, what he could have done to protect GM's loss of market share. Colvin asked him if is juxtaposition of the shattered federal office building in Oklahaoma City and a shuttered GM plant wasn't a little unfair; Moore conceded that it was, but said that layoffs are immoral and kill people too. Colvin picked up on the immorality of layoffs, and Moore pressed the point, saying that a profitable company that lays off workers is doing something immoral. He's got a very personalized, moralizing take on capitalism: Smith was bad, immoral, whatever. Not a word about competitive pressures, or pressures from shareholders. He drew upon his Irish Catholic upbringing, quoting the bibilical injunction that we will be judged on how we treat the least among us.
He then launched into another favorite theme - and one that was very effective, given the audience - that far from embracing competition and rejecting socialism, today's capitalists want to be Soviet-style monopolists. "One car company! One newspaper! One radio station!," in a mock Russian accent. The US government hands out $170 billion in corporate welfare every year, more than three times what it spends on real welfare. Colvin agreed that corporate welfare was a bad thing, and then asked him about antitrust. Moore launched into an odd defense of Microsoft, saying that he couldn't understand why the government was going after Gates & Co. Colvin said that Microsoft was the closest thing to a monopoly we've had in a long time, but Moore attributed that to Gates's "genius" - a genius that "has moved society forward."
A few more exchanges, and then it was time for Q&A. I've come to think of incoherent meanderings in question time as an affliction of left gatherings, but most of this audience was inarticulate. After one particularly meaningless eruption, Moore said "I think we have Remy Martin to thank for that last question." The questions were mostly of the "what would you do, wiseguy?" sort. To one, Moore responded that instead of laying off production workers, he'd have fired middle managers. Middle managers may be a socially useless layer, but presumably they'd suffer the same consequences of unemployment that line workers would, but Moore seemed unmoved by this. He'd also have replaced the entire design & engineering department so that GM would make snazzy cars and regain market share - like Chrysler does. He loves his Chrysler minivan. And he'd have developed a mass transit wing of GM, a rather surreal idea.
He closed with another New Testament quote - how it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Himself excepted, apparently.
The evening was a lot like Moore's work. He's very talented - it was a pretty impressive performance, really. But his politics are pretty underdeveloped - extremely personalized and ad hoc.
Oh, and almost as a throwaway, he mentioned that his movies are distributed by Warner Bros., a corporate sibling of Fortune. I don't know if this was one of those Time Warner cross promotions that Mark Crispin Miller gets so excited about, or just some odd promotional menage a trois.
Doug