Dude, Where's My Country?

Rating:
Summary: A Must Read
Review: This book is a gift. Michael Moore's analysis is right on. It's also a very enjoyable read. Everyone who cares about America's future should buy this book.

It seems like one strategy now employed by the radical right wing is to flood Amazon's review list with one star reviews for books they don't like. Too bad it won't work with this book. Cream always rises to the top.

Rating:
Summary: This book is great!
Review: Great, in that it's getting people to think, but not take everything at face value, just because it's in a book.

Great, in that it's asking some tough questions of the current administration and asking all of us to start working for a
better world instead of just expecting it handed to us.

Great, in that it's making some people post complete rants in caps, which means they're so disturbed by free speech they crumble into incoherent all caps writing stream of consciousness reviewers.

Moore must be hitting home, on all fronts.

Rating:
Summary: predictable, responce from our average school book text.
Review: I wonder how these people derive a reveiw, with there contexted responce to a noveled writing, and actualy fill proud, I have seen first hand how white men control there own, And I also relate our current times, To a rich History we all share and to often forget,before labeling a Book bad our good I suggest you really find out more about your teachings, Remember this also, Fairtales were desinged to comfort you from the Harsh reality's, Of our Wars and neighbors, Ask a Historian to give you a real text book on US history, then tell me you still believe Mike don't know were he is coming from, Yours Truely, your Average Native American Indian

Rating:
Summary: Who's looking out for you? Michael Moore is!
Review: Michael Moore. Love him or hate him all you want, but the man has a passion and a brain, and he's not afraid to use either of them.

After the massive success of 'Stupid White Men', Moore is back with more ammo against the corporations that try to enforce their ideas onto the rest of the world.

Moore starts off with asking George W. Bush a few questions related to his family's links to the Bin Laden family, Saudi Arabia, and interests by Bush's buddies with the Taliban.

The second chapter deals with debunking the lies the Bush Administration used in their approach to the war in Iraq.

Next, Moore goes on with a chapter that pretty much consists of a dream he had. This is pretty much speculation on how the current (and past) policies will affect our Earth's environment.

Then, a discussion about how the American public is constantly kept in a state of terror for terrorists, while at the same time it deals with the dangers of the US Patriot Act, which pretty much undermines basic constitutional rights, and is blatantly abused under the guise of "ensuring the nation's safety".

The fifth chapter is a list of ways to "stop being terrorists".

Next up is actually not Moore's own doing, but rather a chapter done by God, who objects to various issues related to religion and politics being intertwined in the American society.

Chapter 7 deals with the American Dream. Moore argues that the rich clique can do without having to share a piece of their pie, and that the rich bunch will always make sure they'll be one step ahead of you.

Moore continues with the highly hilarious part of where he donates his tax cut to his readers. His readers will have a chance to decide which political candidates opposing Bush will receive a donation for their campaign. (My personal favorite quote from the entire book: "Every last dime ... is going to trickle down on your pointy little head in the hopes ... you will be sent packing back to the ranch").

Then gasp, shock, horror. Americans are actually more liberal than they think. And the word liberal doesn't seem to have that nasty taste it always has when people opposing your views make you think it has. In fact, nothing wrong with being liberal.

Moore offers some ideas you can use to actually engage in a meaningful argument with that conservative friend, brother-in-law, neighbor, or acquaintance everyone seems to have in chapter 10. Instead of them pulling an O'Reilly on you (Meaning they'll start disagreeing with everything you come up with, labeling it as 'lies', 'propaganda' or 'wrong'), maybe make them see how they, too, could benefit even if they don't vote Republican, or defend conservative points of view at all times.

The last chapter was a very interesting one. Michael Moore provides some candidates he thinks could defeat Bush at the next elections (Wesley Clark stepped forward since), while simultaneously trying to make sure that we, the people, understand our civil duty. If we want to live in a democracy, we should not even consider NOT voting. Every voice will be heard. It doesn't even matter WHAT they vote. Just THAT they vote.

The book concludes with about thirty-seven (!) pages of material where Moore got his facts from. Let me repeat that. THIRTY-SEVEN pages. Let's see conservatives and republicans label 'Dude, where's my country?' a work of fiction with that many sources. (This excludes the first chapter, by the way, where Moore chose to directly show his sources on the very pages he quotes them).

To sum things up: Yes, Moore is very outspoken, and probably has a general idea of where he wants to take things. No, that's not necessarily a bad thing. He does so with razor-sharp wit, and by providing ample sources to prove he did his homework.

All in all, I highly enjoyed the book, and if Chapter 1 functions as a trailer to his upcoming documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11 - The temperature at which freedom melts", than I can't wait.

Moore is like the O'Reilly of the liberals. Except Moore is funny. And able to back up his facts. And not telling you to shut up if you disagree with him. And he doesn't think every negative comment is a personal attack on his person.

P.s. One thing I found funny while reading earlier reviews? There are a lot of 1-star reviews that pretty much consist of personal attacks against Moore's physical appearance. While that's fine (though unfair) with me, what baffles me is that these reviews don't mention anything mentioned in the book anywhere. While that is also fine (It is probably more important to these people to bash Moore as a person, rather than attack the ideas and the opinion he poses in the book), I'm surprised by the fact others bother voting for the reviews as being helpful. I thought the point of a review was to discuss the article. Is a review really useful to you when it consists of nothing more than a degrading comment?

Rating:
Summary: Love it
Review: After 9/11, after our economy tanked, after Enron, after the California Energy crisis, after the Iraq war I have been asking myself "What the hell happened?" What happened is that I was under the illusion that America was flawless.

Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine helped me shed my illusions that this country is perfect. America is the best thing going in this world and yet we do not live up to our own values. Since then I have absorbed as much information as possible to see the dark side of America. Michael Moore's accusations might turn out to be false, but we still need to stand back and think about what he is saying. Even his most outrageous claims about big business and the Bush adminstration, though they might sound paranoid, are still worth considering. He connects things that are worth thinking about. He shows the potential for conflicts of interest worth looking at.

But this book.

Rating:
Summary: This important book is a weapon of mass instruction
Review: STUPID WHITE MEN had been on the New York Times bestseller list for 52 consecutive weeks, and, in late April of this year, Michael Moore was giving a dinner to celebrate.

Moore should have been over the moon with joy. After all, STUPID WHITE MEN had been condemned to a premature death by his publisher, which had planned to release it on September 11, 2001, and, that day, decided no one would want to read it. Then the book was revived in a most unlikely way: a letter-writing campaign engineered by librarians. And then the public embraced STUPID WHITE MEN so enthusiastically that it became America's biggest-selling non-fiction book of 2002. At this rate, there'd be no paperback edition for years --- for a writer, it doesn't get sweeter than that.

To my surprise, Michael Moore was gloomy. (How do I know this? I was there. Disclosure: Like a lot of media folk in New York, I've known Michael for years. And I've interviewed him several times.) He wasn't bummed about STUPID WHITE MEN or his new book --- he was depressed about the country. Where was the Democrat who would lead us out of the wilderness? And even if a liberal candidate emerged, how could he (or she) beat the massively-funded President?

Only one person at the table was upbeat. "The wheels are coming off this Administration," he said. "The wheels are coming off."

And now, six months later, it seems that dinner guest was prescient. Iraq hasn't turned out quite as President Bush imagined. It appears the government may need $600 million more in order to find the weapons of mass destruction that it once insisted were poised to be used in minutes (though now the Administration denies Bush or Rice ever said that). The Administration may get a special prosecutor as its reward for leaking the identity of a CIA agent married to a dedicated public servant who failed to serve Bush's interests. The President's poll numbers are falling faster than consumer confidence. A Democratic candidate has emerged who actually fought in a war or two. Al Franken kicked Bill O'Reilly's ass.

And now Michael Moore's new book is out.

Moore is often funny, but never subtle. Here he is not particularly funny --- readers hoping for STUPID WHITE MEN II should be warned. For Moore's purpose is nothing less than the removal of George Bush from the White House.

As he writes, "I don't know how to put it any gentler than to say that these bastards who run our country are a bunch of conniving, thieving, smug pricks who need to be brought down and removed and replaced with a whole new system that we control."

Michael Moore would settle for Bush's defeat in the '04 election.

But he'd much prefer impeachment.

So DUDE, WHERE'S MY COUNTRY? is a weapon of mass instruction --- the rough draft of the case of The People of the United States v. George W. Bush. It begins with seven questions for "George of Arabia." To readers of the liberal press, they're not new; to those in the heartland who aren't political junkies, they will probably be individually disconcerting and collectively upsetting. For they suggest why this Administration would encourage us to believe Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 --- oops, sorry; the Administration now insists it didn't; 70% of us must have come to that conclusion on our own, in a collective dream, I guess --- when, as Moore reminds us, Saudi fingerprints are all over this attack.

Two facts I didn't know: The Saudis have a trillion bucks invested in our stock market (yikes!) and another trillion in our banks (yowser!), and, forty-eight hours after 9/11, the President smoked a cigar to relax with...his favorite Saudi prince. No wonder the President's promise to tell us everything about 9/11 somehow meant: everything but those 28 pages about the Saudis in the official report which he thoughtfully had whited-out!

Moore is also the first to ask the question we all should have thought of a long time ago: If the White House believed Air Force One was a terror target on 9/11, why did the President fly around the country all day in it? I mean, why not land the damn thing and hunker down in a fortified building?

Much of the book is a primer of America's bad behavior over the last half-century: a laundry list of dictators we've supported, etc. Moore offers a pretty sharp analysis of the ways the White House uses the fear of terrorism to strip us of our rights --- terrorists pay in cash and use disposable cell phones, so who's the real target of the government's desire to collect credit card and cell phone data? There's a pointless chapter allegedly written by Jesus Christ and an excellent chapter on how to talk to your conservative brother-in-law at Thanksgiving (hint: Conservatives aren't really Republicans, they just don't like high taxes).

And then, finally, there is a call to action --- Michael Moore's checklist of things you can do to stop bitching about the way things are and to help change them. Which ends on a hopeful note: "Dude, where's your country? It's right outside your window, just waiting for you to bring it home."

So call him names if that's what gets you off: bombastic, over-simplified, doctrinaire. Get personal if the O'Reilly/Coulter style suits you: slovenly, ill-mannered, crude. But dismiss him at your peril. Because Michael Moore --- once a poor kid from Flint, Michigan --- still knows how to talk to us with a directness and power no politician can match.

And, this time, instead of easy jokes, he delivers the goods.

--- Reviewed by Jesse Kornbluth

Rating:
Summary: I'm as liberal as they come, but, uh...
Review: Moore's book was at times downright DISTURBING to me--and not in the Molly Ivans "I can't believe the astonishing facts I'm reading!" way. No, more like "I'm a bit worried that Moore has gone off the field."

I'm a Moore FAN who's met the man several times, visited with him, and read all his books (I just finished this one today; I'm one of those rare reviewers who actually READ the books before submitting a review). But this book seems to offer us a lot of what we already knew, a hefty dose of NEW research, but wrapped in the decoration of conspiracy theory.

For example, Moore excels at researching and documenting his grievances about Bush's handling of terrorism, war, the conomy, the envioronment, civil rights, etc. Moore has been taken to task before about playing loose with facts, so he covers himself well by offering us specific sources for each claim this time. At least the facts won't be as easy to dispute.

But Moore sways a bit too flexibly toward his own dastardly conspiracy theories, and that nudges him toward rhetoric that becomes ever-more aggressive and shocking, rather than cunning and witty as when he's at his best. He'll cite Michael Savage as an example of conservative hate speech that "liberalism is a mental disorder," but a few pages later joke about no effective mental health treatment being developed for conservative thinking. He'll title a book "Dude, Where's My Country?" to complain that conservatives have stolen the America he once knew, and then climax the book with a chapter about how conservatives are a minority in an America that really prefers liberal social agendas.

One chapter troubles me deeply. I'm not a fundamentalist about religion, but Moore interrupts his book to include an entire chapter written by "God," ostensibly to "set us straight" about how God wants us to think. Even when I agree with some of the thoughts Moore suggests in that chapter, I am more uncomfortable than amused with the daunting arrogance of presuming to possess God's own voice, for the sake of telling us that God's voice endorses Michael Moore's will. Such a tactic smacks of the very attitudes Moore is condemning among Bush's allies.

It's an excellent book for people needing fast facts with their relevant sources. It won't present new concepts, but it will help liberals make their routine arguments with better data.

One final thought: Beware of ANY reviewer here who's obviously never read the book, and yet posts a review simply as an opportunity to advance a personal political view, bash their ideological adversaries, or post a personal message about how great Bush is/how bad Moore is, etc. Any review that either supports or criticizes this book should be investigated by the readers for evidence of insight into the book's actual content, and not just the writer's own personal rhetoric published to Amazon.

Rating:
Summary: Why Republicans hate so much?
Review: Living in Europe, I have to like Michael Moore. He is so honest. So interesting. So unlike George W. Bush. But at the same time i pity him, as I pity millions of americans who have to live in a country manipulated by a bunch of rich greedy people who own the media and destroy the world.

But although i loved is book, what aroused my curiosity in "Dude" was a very simple question: why are those republicans so bad? Were they beaten by their parents? Physically abused? Where does all that hate, that evil come from?

That is not a normal thing, to hate so much. To hate muslams. To hate french. To hate agnostics. To hate gays. To hate people who try to save the world from global warming and polution. To hate people who fight for justice equal to us all. Whats the problem with republicans?

Is it possible that the US are a nation of sociopaths?

Mr. Moore, please keep writing these wonderfull books, because i need to know there is someone normal in the other side of the Atlantic.

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable Read
Review: Another of Moore's fine books aimed at those interested in changing the status quo and stirring the fence sitters. Lots of interesting facts and many true "if the shoe were on the other foot" comparisons to Clinton and his administration--all spot on. Bush and his cronies get away with the most outrageous actions and get called on them very few times. It's nice to see Moore write a book that exposes the tawdry side of the Bush connections and demands that Bush take responsibility for his actions. Recommended reading.

Rating:
Summary: Dude - by the way - it's not your country!
Review: The country that Moore would have us believe has been lost never actually existed. Americans - not the media or the left coast show biz mouthpieces or the New York know it alls - but the real go to work, pay the bills, raise the kids, too busy for this nonsense Americans, don't buy into the claptrap espoused by the Michael Moores and the Al Frankens of the world - any more than they buy into the frenzied pronouncements of the Rush Limbaughs or the Ann Coulters. While these "pundits" take turns smearing each other, the rest of us are going about our lives without book or movie deals. We work and pay our bills while, as part of an ever increasing background noise, small minds with big mouths ramble on about Hillary and Bill this and George W. that. Bottom line - they're all inherently bad for us. Why? Because who of any worth would want to be part of the circus that is elective office in 2003. And it's been that way for a very long time. People like Moore - show biz anarchists - just add to the din.

Michael, go on a diet, take a shower and shave or, better yet, just go away. A lot of the great unwashed - like you - tried to sell this pot culture induced baloney in the 60's. Since then, the media has tried to make us believe that it's the majority view. It's not and never was - any more than are Limbaugh's equally drug induced rantings. These kind of books are nothing more than literary self gratification. Nobody reads them except the already convinced.

Dude where's your country? I don't know, but it ain't anywhere I want to be.