Dear Mr. Michael Moore,
I have watched you for many years and have been a longtime fan. Your work has inspired me on many levels, as well as taught me incredible lessons about how the world works and how one person is able to change it. The risks you take, professional and personal, what most would consider the bravest acts ever are always out of compassion, ethics, morality, generosity and the need to speak the truth for those who do not have the platform to do so. This holiday season, I hope you are happy in your personal life which I don’t really know anything about. I cannot really picture you anywhere being super holiday oriented. You don’t strike me as the caroling type. I hope that no one cons you into being Santa. I hate when that happens. It always happens to me when I am not paying attention and say “Yeah” to whoever is bugging me about something.
It never occurred to me to send you a fan letter, but here it is. You are a true patriot, even though for some reason I thought you were from Canada. Not that you cannot be an American and a Canadian and be proud of both. Canada is rad. I like it a lot, mainly because great comics of our time (Eugene Levy, especially) are from there, and there also is a French baseline bringing beats everywhere that makes it hotly foreign without the language barrier. But you are not Canadian, you just act kind of Canadian, which is a high compliment.
I was always impressed by your alliance with the truth. All you do is point out what is glaringly obvious in our culture, and for that, I am grateful. The media does try to create a reality for the American public that is so at odds with what is really going on, yet there are heroic figures like you that step up and tell us boldly “Don’t Believe the Hype!”
When you won the Oscar for the brilliant film “Bowling For Columbine” I cheered, and you actually took what most showbiz kids consider the pinnacle moment of life for any filmmaker where mostly it is ok to make out with your presenter or cry or something totally boring and self indulgent (“You like me!”) and used it to make this incredibly bold and important political statement. That anyone wasn’t in absolute agreement with you is incomprehensible to me, and even though the Hollywood machine is seemingly conservative, I have yet to meet an entertainment insider who is. There just seems to be this psychology that protecting the status quo, whatever it happens to be at the moment, is the priority. So values and ethics are compromised constantly, films are made without any intention to educate or enlighten, billions are spent for no reason, standing ovations and boos are possible within seconds of each other. It is all about the Benjamins, but then again, if Franklin himself were to witness the hypocrisy so readily shouted from the rooftops as ‘news’ and ‘terror alerts,’ he would add several more keys to that kite and electrocute himself in protest.
When I think of you, I contemplate all the Patrick Henry dudes that we are supposed to remember with respect and gratitude and I wonder whatever became of that kind of American and how you are bringing it back to us, Constitution style, but without the slavery and with women already able to vote.
Anyway, thank you for all that you have done, the brilliance of your writing and films, the television shows and everything that you don’t have to do to be a Boss Playa, but do anyway, like talking to kids in Iraq, having the first hand information from the front lines, all out of concern for their lives and the truth. It really is sad, how that when earlier in the year, if people had expressed dissent about the war, they had to bear the brunt of the people who might put flags on their car like they are a diplomat. We were not hippies spitting at soldiers our own age coming home from Vietnam, which is really weird to think of hippies having that much saliva. It wasn’t like anyone was against the kids fighting over there, who were mostly made up of the lower class, underprivileged part of society, the needy- yet-determined, who were making money to go to school. If your daddy’s not rich but your mama’s good looking, the armed forces sometimes is the only place to go. ROTC style – seriously though.
Patriotic jingoism became the new religion, which is anything but holy, and the populace was so easily coerced by the inane propaganda fed to us constantly by those whose responsibility it was to bring us the truth.
You are always bringing it. You have been and you will continue to for all of the rest of us. I hope I get to meet you through moveon.org and we get to bring it together.
With truth and gratitude,
mc