If Michael Moore speaks for the forgotten working class, why did
stage hands at the Oscars boo him so loudly? In Moore’s oddball
Op-Ed in Thursday’s Los Angeles Times (“I’d Like to Thank
the Vatican…”), he blames a couple of stage hands for starting
the “melee.”
They “started some loud yelling,” he says. Then some people in
the bleacher seats — also presumably from the ranks of the obscure
— joined in the jeers, leading Moore supporters, according to
Moore, to counter-boo “the booers.” The orchestra didn’t want to
end his speech, he says, but had to strike up “its tune” to stop
the “cacophony of yells and cheers and jeers.”
Aren’t the stage hands and the bleacher-seat booers supposed to
be Moore’s people? Not for the purposes of this Op-Ed. Moore,
without recognizing the irony of it, ignores their reaction and
takes solace in the support of the Beautiful People in the room.
They didn’t boo him, he notes. “The entire main floor rose to its
feet for a standing ovation,” he says. This left him “immeasurably
moved and humbled.”
Like that other millionaire outsider, rapper Eminem, Moore’s
alienation has the approval of the rich. He speaks for the wealthy
stars on stage not the anonymous drudges in the back. They would
prefer it if he just shut up.
But Moore intends to speak for them anyway, whether they like it
or not. After the Oscars, Moore flew home to Flint, Michigan, he
relates, and “two flight attendants told me how they had gotten
stuck overnight in Flint with no flight — and wound up earning
only $30 for the day because they are paid by the hour.” These
working folk “have no voice. They don’t get to be commentators on
cable news like the bevy of retired generals we’ve been watching
all week…They don’t get to make movies or talk to a billion
people on Oscar night. They are the American majority who are being
asked to send their sons and daughters over to Iraq to possibly die
so Bush’s buddies can have the oil. Who will speak for them if I
don’t?”
Ask the stage hands, Mr. Moore. They will give you a few
names.
Moore also considers himself a credible voice for the Catholic
Church. His Oscar speech, he said, drew inspiration from a Mass
earlier in the day and the words of Pope John Paul II: On the
morning before the Oscars, he says he found himself “at the Church
of Good Shepherd on Santa Monica Boulevard, at Mass with my sister
and my dad.” The Mass got him “thinking all these crazy thoughts
like how it is wrong to kill people and that you are not allowed to
use violence upon another human being unless it is in true
self-defense. The pope even came right out and said it: This war in
Iraq is not a just war and, thus, it is a sin. Those thoughts were
with me the rest of the day…”
What papal allegiance from a social liberal who usually
disregards the pope’s remarks. Just a few paragraphs after praising
the pope, Moore praises a majority of Americans for supporting
Roe vs. Wade. Abortion doesn’t count as violence for
Moore. But killing Saddam Hussein and his surrogates? That is out
of the question in Moore’s mind, because “we are there to get the
world’s second-largest supply of oil.”(Moore hasn’t absorbed the
Church’s teaching on lying either.)
Imagine if Pope John Paul II were as outspokenly pro-war in Iraq
as he is anti-war. We would then hear the Michael Moores of
Hollywood say that the pope was guilty of right-wing clericalism.
But left-wing clericalism is fine with them. It even brings them
back to church.
It is funny that Moore should mention Good Shepherd parish as
his source of inspiration before the Oscars. That parish should be
called Bad Shepherd. California Governor Gray Davis, the loudest
supporter of abortion and state financing of abortion in
California’s history, is one of its parishioners. In open defiance
of Catholic teaching, Davis receives Communion there. Father Colm
O’Ryan, its pastor, welcomes Davis. “He’s a very private person,
he’s a very faithful Catholic, he and his wife come to Mass very
faithfully when they are in town,” he told the San Francisco
Faith newspaper recently.
Moore could get in the Communion line there behind Gray Davis.
The Beverly Hills parish is perfect for them: it allows them to
play at Catholicism like they play at working-class politics — and
without any fear of ever getting booed.
