Yeah, he means it. He got elected to school board at 18 on the platform 'fire the principal.' I've sort of followed Moore since the Michigan Voice days--in the early 80s when he was a fellow small independent publisher. He founded and edited that for 10 years (started it as the Flint Voice), and then went through the whole Mother Jones fiasco where Adam Hochschild hired him and not long after wanted him to print some Paul Berman piece about the Contras (not such bad guys, said Berman) and Moore refused, losing his job as a result. I thought he might revive MoJo and subscribed...oh well.
Yeah, he's not a grand theoretician, but he has a really good pro-working class, pro-people stand and I for one am willing to see correctitude in every area sacrificed once in a while for some basic, decent class consciousness. He's good at showing up contradictions, without necessarily claiming to resolve them. On Charlie Rose the other night he made the point that I was thinking after the movie, it doesn't really have an ending cause the ending is up to all of us.
He spoke here (Gainesville) on the book tour for "Downsize This!" that later became "The Big One," to a huge crowd, mostly fans of TV Nation, I think. Since it was at a university venue (University of Florida) we couldn't charge but he gave our little grassroots Civic Media Center his royalties on the book sales there and made it so the university would let us collect money outside as people left (and we netted quite a lot with our bells, buckets, and "Information Army" pith helmets.) He told me he's a member of four unions. (And he gave several thousand dollars to the Labor Party at our '98 convention, as well as speaking there.) His talk in Gainesville is partly transcribed here: http://www.afn.org/~iguana/archives/1997_01/19970101.html
My review '98 of "The Big One," with some biographical detail, is here: http://www.afn.org/~iguana/archives/1998_07/19980702.html
I also thought The Awful Truth and TV Nation were pioneering in that they were TV shows trying to deal with the class war (you know, the one where they're shooting and we're mostly ducking) without being preachy; sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, but it was never boring.
Jenny Brown