http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/07/michael-moore-hated-man-america/print

Michael Moore: I was the most hated man in America

In his 2003 Oscar acceptance speech, Michael Moore denounced President
Bush and the invasion of Iraq. Overnight he became the most hated man
in America. In an exclusive extract from his new book, Here Comes
Trouble, he tells of the bomb threats, bodyguards and how he fought
back

    Michael Moore
    guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 September 2011 20.00 BST


'I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I
could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it …
No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you
know, and I could just be choking the life out [of him]. Is this
wrong? I stopped wearing my 'What Would Jesus Do?' band, and I've lost
all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, 'Yeah, I'd
kill Michael Moore', and then I'd see the little band: What Would
Jesus Do? And then I'd realise, 'Oh, you wouldn't kill Michael Moore.
Or at least you wouldn't choke him to death.' And you know, well, I'm
not sure."

Wishes for my early demise seemed to be everywhere. They were
certainly on the mind of CNN's Bill Hemmer one sunny July morning in
2004. Holding a microphone in front of my face on the floor of the
2004 Democratic National Convention, live on CNN, he asked me what I
thought about how the American people were feeling about Michael
Moore: "I've heard people say they wish Michael Moore were dead."
Hemmer said it like he was simply stating the obvious, like, "of
course they want to kill you!" He just assumed his audience already
understood this truism, as surely as they accept that the sun rises in
the east and corn comes on a cob.

To be fair to Hemmer, I was not unaware that my movies had made a lot
of people mad. It was not unusual for fans to randomly come up and hug
me and say, "I'm so happy you're still here!" They didn't mean in the
building.

Why was I still alive? For more than a year there had been threats,
intimidation, harassment and even assaults in broad daylight. It was
the first year of the Iraq war, and I was told by a top security
expert (who is often used by the federal government for assassination
prevention) that "there is no one in America other than President Bush
who is in more danger than you".

How on earth did this happen? Had I brought this on myself? Of course
I had. And I remember the moment it all began.

It was the night of 23 March 2003. Four nights earlier, George Bush
had invaded Iraq. This was an illegal, immoral, stupid invasion – but
that was not how Americans saw it. More than 70% of the public backed
the war. And on the fourth night of this very popular war, my film
Bowling for Columbine was up for an Academy Award. I went to the
ceremony but was not allowed, along with any of the nominees, to talk
to the press while walking down the red carpet into Hollywood's Kodak
Theatre. There was the fear that someone might say something – and in
wartime we need everyone behind the war effort and on the same page.

The actress Diane Lane came on to the stage and read the list of
nominees for best documentary. The envelope was opened, and she
announced with unbridled glee that I had won the Oscar. The main
floor, filled with the Oscar-nominated actors, directors and writers,
leapt to its feet and gave me a very long standing ovation. I had
asked the nominees from the other documentary films to join me on the
stage in case I won, and they did. The ovation finally ended, and then
I spoke: "I've invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage
with us. They are here in solidarity with me because we like
non-fiction. We like non-fiction, yet we live in fictitious times. We
live in a time where we have fictitious election results that elect a
fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us
to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it's the fiction of duct tape
or the fiction of orange alerts: we are against this war, Mr Bush.
Shame on you, Mr Bush. Shame on you! And anytime you've got the Pope
and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up! Thank you very
much."

About halfway through these remarks, all hell broke loose. There were
boos, very loud boos, from the upper floors and from backstage. (A few
– Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep – tried to cheer me on from their
seats, but they were no match.) The producer of the show ordered the
orchestra to start playing to drown me out. The microphone started to
descend into the floor. A giant screen with huge red letters began
flashing in front of me: "YOUR TIME IS UP!" It was pandemonium, to say
the least, and I was whisked off the stage.

A little known fact: the first two words every Oscar winner hears
right after you win the Oscar and leave the stage come from two
attractive young people in evening wear hired by the Academy to
immediately greet you behind the curtain. So while calamity and chaos
raged on in the Kodak, this young woman in her designer gown stood
there, unaware of the danger she was in, and said the following word
to me: "Champagne?" And she held out a flute of champagne.

The young man in his smart tuxedo standing next to her then
immediately followed up with this: "Breathmint?" And he held out a
breathmint.

Champagne and breathmint are the first two words all Oscar winners
hear. But, lucky me, I got to hear a third. An angry stagehand came
right up to the side of my head, screaming as loud as he could in my
ear: "ASSHOLE!"

Other burly, pissed-off stagehands started toward me. I clutched my
Oscar like a weapon, holding it like a lone man trapped and surrounded
in the woods, his only hope being the torch he is swinging madly at
the approaching vampires. All I felt at that moment was alone, that I
was nothing more than a profound and total disappointment.

That night I couldn't sleep, so I got up and turned on the TV. For the
next hour I watched the local TV stations do their Oscar night wrap-up
shows – and as I flipped between the channels, I listened to one
pundit after another question my sanity, criticise my speech and say,
over and over, in essence: "I don't know what got into him!"

"He sure won't have an easy time in this town after that stunt!" "Who
does he think will make another movie with him now?" "Talk about
career suicide!" After an hour of this, I turned off the TV and went
online, where there was more of the same, only worse – from all over
America. I began to get sick. I could see the writing on the wall – it
was curtains for me as a film-maker. I turned off the computer and I
turned off the lights and I sat there in the chair in the dark, going
over and over what I had done. Good job, Mike. And good riddance.

Bombarded with hatred

When we got back to our home in northern Michigan, the local
beautification committee had dumped three truckloads of horse manure
waist-high in our driveway so that we wouldn't be able to enter our
property – a property which, by the way, was freshly decorated with a
dozen or so signs nailed to our trees: GET OUT! MOVE TO CUBA! COMMIE
SCUM! TRAITOR! LEAVE NOW OR ELSE!

I had no intention of leaving.

The hate mail after the Oscar speech was so voluminous, it almost
seemed as if Hallmark had opened a new division where greeting card
writers were assigned the task of penning odes to my passing. ("For a
Special Motherfucker …" "Get Well Soon from Your Mysterious Car
Accident!" "Here's to a Happy Stroke!")

The phone calls to my house were actually creepier. It's a whole
different fright machine when a human voice is attached to the madness
and you think: "This person literally risked arrest to say this over a
phone line!" You had to admire the balls – or insanity – of that.

But the worst moments were when people came on to our property. These
individuals would just walk down the driveway, always looking like
rejects from the cast of Night of the Living Dead, never moving very
fast, but always advancing with singleminded purposefulness. Few were
actual haters; most were just crazy. We kept the sheriff's deputies
busy until they finally suggested we might want to get our own
security, or perhaps our own police force. Which we did.

We met with the head of the top security agency in the country, an
elite outfit that did not hire ex-cops, nor any "tough guys" or
bouncer-types. They preferred to use only Navy Seals and other
ex–Special Forces. Guys who had a cool head and who could take you out
with a piece of dental floss in a matter of nanoseconds. By the end of
the year, due to the alarming increase of threats and attempts on me,
I had nine ex-Seals surrounding me, round-the-clock.

Fahrenheit 9/11: the fightback

After the Oscar riot and the resulting persona-non-grata status I held
as the most hated man in America, I decided to do what anyone in my
position would do: make a movie suggesting the president of the United
States is a war criminal.

I mean, why take the easy road? It was already over for me, anyway.
The studio that had promised to fund my next film had called up after
the Oscar speech and said that they were backing out of their signed
contract with me – if I didn't like it, I could go fuck myself.
Fortunately, another studio picked up the deal but cautioned that
perhaps I should be careful not to piss off the ticket-buying public.
The owner of the studio had backed the invasion of Iraq. I told him I
had already pissed off the ticket-buying public, so why don't we just
make the best movie possible, straight from the heart – and, well, if
nobody liked that, there was always straight-to-video.

In the midst of all this turmoil I began shooting Fahrenheit 9/11. I
told everyone on my crew to operate as if this was going to be the
last job we were ever going to have in the movie business. This wasn't
meant to be an inspirational speech – I really believed that this was
going to be it. And so we spent the next 11 months putting together
our cinematic indictment of an administration and a country gone mad.

The release of the film in 2004, just a little more than a year after
the start of the war, came at a time when the vast majority of
Americans still backed the war. We premiered it at the Cannes film
festival, where we were awarded the top prize, the Palme d'Or, by an
international jury headed by Quentin Tarantino. It was the first time
in nearly 50 years a documentary had won the prize.

This initial overwhelming response to Fahrenheit 9/11 spooked the Bush
White House, convincing those in charge of his re-election campaign
that a movie could be the tipping point that might bring them down.
They hired a pollster to find out the effect the film would have on
voters. After screening the movie with three different audiences in
three separate cities, the news Karl Rove received was not good. The
movie was not only giving a much-needed boost to the Democratic base
(who were wild about the film), it was, oddly, having a distinct
effect also on female Republican voters.

The studio's own polling had already confirmed that an amazing
one-third of Republican voters – after watching the movie – said they
would recommend the film to other people. But the White House pollster
reported something even more dangerous – 10% of Republican females
said that after watching Fahrenheit 9/11, they had decided to either
vote for John Kerry or to just stay home. In an election that could be
decided by only a few percentage points, this was devastating news.

The movie would go on to open at No 1 all across North America. And,
to make matters worse for the White House, it opened at No 1 in all 50
states, even in the deep south. It opened at No 1 in military towns
such as Fort Bragg. Soldiers and their families were going to see it
and, by many accounts, it became the top bootleg watched by the troops
in Iraq. It broke the box office record long held by the Star Wars
film Return of the Jedi for the largest opening weekend ever for a
film that opened on 1,000 screens or less. It was, in the verbiage of
Variety, major boffo, a juggernaut.

And in doing all of that, it had made me a target.

The attacks on me that followed were like mad works of fiction, crazy,
madeup stuff that I refused to respond to because I didn't want to
dignify the noise. On TV, on the radio, in op-eds, on the internet –
everywhere – it was suggested that Michael Moore hates America, he's a
liar, a conspiracy nut and a croissant-eater. The campaign against me
was meant to stop too many Republicans from seeing the film.

And it worked. Of course, it also didn't help that Kerry was a lousy
candidate. Bush won by one state, Ohio.

There was a residual damage from all the hate speech generated toward
me by the Republican pundits. It had the sad and tragic side-effect of
unhinging the already slightly unglued. And so my life went from
receiving scribbly little hate notes to fullout attempted physical
assaults – and worse.

Living with bodyguards

The ex–Navy Seals moved in with us. When I walked down a public
sidewalk they would have to form a circle around me. At night they
wore night-vision goggles and other special equipment that I'm
convinced few people outside CIA headquarters have ever seen.

The agency protecting me had a threat assessment division. Their job
was to investigate anyone who had made a credible threat against me.
One day, I asked to see the file. The man in charge began reading me
the list of names and the threats they had made and the level of
threat that the agency believed each one posed. After he went through
the first dozen, he stopped and asked: "Do you really want to keep
going? There are 429 more."

I could no longer go out in public without an incident happening. It
started with small stuff, such as people in a restaurant asking to be
moved to a different table when I was seated next to them, or a taxi
driver who would stop his cab in mid-traffic to scream at me. The
verbal abuse soon turned physical, and the Seals were now on high
alert. For security reasons, I will not go into too much detail here,
partly on the advice of the agency and partly because I don't want to
give these criminals any more of the attention they were seeking:

• In Nashville, a man with a knife leapt up on the stage and started
coming toward me. The Seal grabbed him from behind by his belt loop
and collar and slung him off the front of the stage to the cement
floor below. Someone had to mop up the blood after the Seals took him
away.

• In Fort Lauderdale, a man in a nice suit saw me on the sidewalk and
went crazy. He took the lid off his hot, scalding coffee and threw it
at my face. The Seal saw this happening but did not have the extra
half-second needed to grab the guy, so he put his own face in front of
mine and took the hit. The coffee burned his face so badly, we had to
take him to the hospital (he had second-degree burns) – but not before
the Seal took the man face down to the pavement, placing his knee
painfully in the man's back, and putting him in cuffs.

• In New York City, while I was holding a press conference outside one
of the cinemas showing Fahrenheit 9/11, a man walking by saw me,
became inflamed, and pulled the only weapon he had on him out of his
pocket – a very sharp and pointed graphite pencil. As he lunged to
stab me with it, the Seal saw him and, in the last split second, put
his hand up between me and the oncoming pencil. The pencil went right
into the Seal's hand. You ever see a Navy Seal get stabbed? The look
on their face is the one we have when we discover we're out of
shampoo. The pencil-stabber probably became a convert to the paperless
society that day, once the Seal was done with him and his 16th-century
writing device.

The lone bomber

And then there was Lee James Headley. Sitting alone at home in Ohio,
Lee had big plans. The world, according to his diary, was dominated
and being ruined by liberals. His comments read like the talking
points of any given day's episode of The Rush Limbaugh Show. And so
Lee made a list. It was a short list of the people who had to go. At
the top of the list was his No1 target: "Michael Moore". Beside my
name he wrote, "MARKED" (as in "marked for death", he would later
explain).

Throughout the spring of 2004, Headley accumulated a huge amount of
assault weapons, a cache of thousands of rounds of ammunition, and
various bomb-making materials. He bought The Anarchist's Cookbook and
the race-war novel The Turner Diaries. His notebooks contained
diagrams of rocket launchers and bombs, and he would write over and
over: "Fight, fight, fight, kill, kill, kill!"

But one night in 2004, he accidentally fired off a round inside his
home from one of his AK-47s. A neighbour heard the shot and called the
police. The cops arrived and found the treasure trove of weapons, ammo
and bomb-making materials. And his hit list.

I got the call some days later from the security agency.

"We need to tell you that the police have in custody a man who was
planning to blow up your house. You're in no danger now."

I got very quiet. I tried to process what I just heard: I'm … in … no
… danger … now. For me, it was the final straw. I broke down. My wife
was already in her own state of despair over the loss of the life we
used to have. I asked myself again: what had I done to deserve this?
Made a movie? A movie led someone to want to blow up my home? What
happened to writing a letter to the editor?

As the months wore on, even after Bush's re-election, the constant
drumbeat against me only intensified. When Glenn Beck said that he was
thinking of killing me, he was neither fined by the broadcasting
regulator nor arrested by the NYPD. He was, essentially, making a call
to have me killed, and no one in the media at that time reported it.

And then a man trespassed on our property and left something outside
our bedroom window when I wasn't home. It terrorised my wife. He even
videotaped himself doing this.

When the police investigated, he said he was making a "documentary".
He called it Shooting Michael Moore. And when you went to his website,
and the words Shooting Michael Moore came on the screen, the sound of
a gunshot went off. The media ate it up, and he was asked to appear on
many TV shows (such as Fox News host Sean Hannity's). "Coming up next
– he's giving Michael Moore a taste of his own medicine! Moore now has
somebody after him!" (Cue SFX: KA-BOOM!) He then provided video and
maps of how to illegally get on to our property.

I will not share with you the impact this had, at that time, on my
personal life, but suffice it to say I would not wish this on anyone.
More than once I have asked myself if all this work was really worth
it. And, if I had it to do over again, would I? If I could take back
that Oscar speech and just walk up on the stage and thank my agent and
tuxedo designer and get off without another word, would I? If it meant
that my family would not have to worry about their safety and that I
would not be living in constant danger – well, I ask you, what would
you do? You know what you would do.

President Bush to the rescue

For the next two and a half years, I didn't leave the house much. From
January 2005 to May 2007, I did not appear on a single TV show. I
stopped going on college tours. I just took myself off the map. The
previous year I had spoken at more than 50 campuses. For the two years
following that, I spoke at only one. I stayed close to home and worked
on some local town projects in Michigan where I lived. And then to my
rescue rode President Bush. He said something that helped snap me out
of it. I had heard him say it before, but this time when I heard him,
I felt like he was speaking directly to me. He said: "If we give in to
the terrorists, the terrorists win." And he was right. His terrorists
were winning! Against me! What was I doing sitting inside the house? I
opened up the blinds, folded up my pity party, and went back to work.
I made three films in three years, threw myself into getting Barack
Obama elected, and helped toss two Republican congressmen from
Michigan out of office. I set up a popular website, and I was elected
to the board of governors of the same Academy Awards that had booed
me.

I chose not to give up. I wanted to give up, badly. Instead I got fit.
If you take a punch at me now, I can assure you three things will
happen: 1) You will break your hand. That's the beauty of spending
just a half hour a day on your muscular-skeletal structure – it turns
into kryptonite; 2) I will fall on you. I'm still working on my core
and balance issues, so after you slug me I will tip over and crush
you; 3) My Seals will spray mace or their own homemade concoction of
jalapeño spider spray directly into your eye sockets while you are on
the ground. As a pacifist, please accept my apologies in advance – and
never, ever use violence against me or anyone else again.

Eventually I found myself back on The Tonight Show for the first time
in a while. As I was leaving the stage, the guy who was operating the
boom microphone approached me.

"You probably don't remember me," he said nervously. "I never thought
I would ever see you again or get the chance to talk to you. I can't
believe I get to do this."

Do what? I thought. I braced myself for the man's soon-to-be-broken hand.

"I never thought I'd get to apologise to you," he said, as a few tears
started to come into his eyes. "I'm the guy who ruined your Oscar
night. I'm the guy who yelled 'ASSHOLE' into your ear right after you
came off the stage. I … I … [he tried to compose himself]. I thought
you were attacking the president – but you were right. He did lie to
us. And I've had to carry this with me now all these years, and I'm so
sorry …"

By now he was starting to fall apart, and all I could think to do was
to reach out and give him a huge hug.

"It's OK, man," I said, a big smile on my face. "I accept your
apology. But you do not need to apologise to me. You believed your
president! You're supposed to believe your president! If we can't
expect that as just the minimum from whoever's in office, then, shit,
we're doomed."

"Thank you," he said, relieved. "Thank you for understanding."

"Understanding?" I said. "This isn't about understanding. I've told
this funny story for years now, about the first two words you hear
when you're an Oscar winner – and how I got to hear a bonus word! Man,
don't take that story away from me! People love it!" He laughed, and I
laughed.

"Yeah," he said, "there aren't many good stories like that."

Extracted from Here Comes Trouble: Stories From My Life by Michael
Moore, to be published by Allen Lane on 19 September at £20. To order
a copy for £16 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call
0330 333 6846. Moore will be performing live dates in the UK and
Ireland from 16-25 October. See www.michaelmoorelive.com for details.

=====================================================================================================================================================
-- 
-Laye
==============================
"With fair speech thou might have thy will,
With it thou might thy self spoil."
--The R.M

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