[lbo-talk] Why do they hate Moore?

[Liza Featherstone]

I'm not sure which lefties hate Michael Moore. I live in upper Manhattan and
love his work. Snarky New Yorker writers don't like him, but they are hardly
"lefties": they hate him because they hate his left politics. With this new
movie, he is more than ever getting the praise he deserves, even, however
grudgingly, from liberals like Paul Krugman. (Folks who have worked with him
hate him because he is personally an asshole, but so are most famous
geniuses, and the left needs all the geniuses we can get.)  If any lefties
do hate him, they are probably jealous of his success and suspicious of his
non-marginality and popular appeal...but I would hope that people like that
would be a deservedly insignificant minority.

Liza


> From: joanna bujes <jbujes at covad.net>
> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2004 08:45:47 -0700
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Why do they hate Moore?
> 
> 
> 
>> 
>> 
>> MSNBC is supposed to be goddamnleftwingliberalmedia, right? They
>> seemed to trash Moore left and right that night.
> 
> Are you kidding? MSNBC left? Left of what?
> 
>> 
>> Can someone explain to me why lefties hate Moore so much? I've never
>> paid much attention to any of it, because it struck me as upper
>> Manhattan gossip among left glitterati.
>> 
> Hypothesis: they hate him because they like to have their class
> privilege and their squeaky-clean righteous ideas all at once. They also
> claim that the situation is hopeless because the hoi polloi can never
> rise to the lofty heights of their squeaky clean ideas. Moore, who makes
> a point, of looking like and speaking to the common man has proved that
> a) you can move the common man and even b) make money doing it.
> 
> You can actually DO something if you care.
> 
> (Please, spare me the million posts of how Moore foments racism etc...
> I'm perfectly well aware of his limitations. At the same time, he has
> done more to revive muckraking in this country and to revive the notion
> that the working class is entitled to something than anyone else I can
> think of.)
> 
> Joanna
> 
> 
> 
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