In 1992, Michael Moore decided to go to confession - in twenty different churches. He'd confess the same sin in each one, and see what the priests gave him. The result - a league table for his neighbourhood's Catholics who wanted an easy ride. But Moore's fears of Hell got the better of him. At first he delegated the idea to another reporter on his satirical show TV Nation, then he pulled it altogether. .
To viewers this side of the Atlantic, this seems a strange decision for a satirist to make. Can you imagine Chris Morris being afraid of the Underworld? Hell can't be worse than a place where MPs get angry about imaginary drugs and celebrities believe paedophiles have crab DNA. .
But the reader soon finds that this is an entirely different kind of satire - Stupid White Men is a God fearing book with a strict moral agenda. In it, Moore makes fun of America perhaps more rigorously than anyone has before, but he still insists "I love this big old lug of a country". He is genuinely outraged, and seems to be on an impossible mission to sort it out. .
So every chapter in Stupid White Men addresses a specific problem, but then offers solutions to sort the problem out. In the section on stupidity, he includes basic historical facts for his readers. In his section on the US Election result, he urges his readers to stand for election themselves and take over the Democrat party. .
Huge symbolic stands are something Moore has been doing all his life. On turning 18, he discovered he was eligible to stand for governor of his high school: he was elected and subsequently forced his headmaster to resign. Recently, he has written to Kofi Anan to demand America be liberated from its unelected president. These attacks on the "Thief in Chief" caused a storm in America - Moore's was the first book critical of Bush to be published after September 11th. Although it was in fact written before the event, Moore doggedly refused to change a single word of his manuscript.
