Michael Moore in Liberty Hall last night

Tuesday December 10, 2002 15:03

by Ray

There was a packed audience last night for Graham Linehan's interview with Michael Moore.

The interview was originally supposed to held in the Royal College of Surgeons, 2 (?) weeks ago, but was moved to the main theatre in Liberty Hall. The room was completely full, with around 2-300 people attending, and as I entered there was a substantial queue of people without tickets waiting for vacancies.

The interview started by talking about the circumstances surrounding the publication of 'Stupid White Men'. The book was published last September, and was due to go out to bookshops on the 11th. Moore agreed to a delay in shipping, but he was eventually told that the book wouldn't be distributed without major changes - the 50,000 copies that had already been printed and were sitting in warehouses were going to be pulped. Word got out, and librarian-led protest (librarians have a massive book budget) persuaded HarperCollins to release the book unchanged. SWM has been the biggest-selling non-fiction book in the US this year - but HarperCollins have never publicised it, and never even sent out review copies.

Most of the interview was about how the book (and the movie, Bowling for Columbine) have been treated by the media. In the US especially they've been largely ignored apparently, and the reviews that have appeared have been full of disinformation. Interestingly, Moore argued that the coverage he does get is almost entirely focussed on the gun issue. Apparently no-one talks about race in the US anymore, and those bits of his films/books just aren't mentioned.

As the meeting was opened to the floor (and after an over-enthusiastic speaker from the balcony), somebody brought up the Shannon protest on Sunday, and the contrast between the hundreds of people coming to a talk and less than a hundred people who went from Dublin to Shannon, so there was a bit of a discussion about how to go from persuading people of an idea to getting them out on a protest.

Moore's answers were entertaining (talking about his experiences at an Arsenal football match), but not that convincing. Basically he argued that activists shouldn't talk down to people, should try to be more engaging. While this is true enough - lecturing people about the dialectic, or how bad they are if they don't go on a protest, generally isn't helpful - it was a bit of a straw man. Sure, some people see themselves as 'professional revolutionaries', but most activists I know don't think of themselves like that. His argument was also weakened by using himself as an example - his point was that people listen to him because he's an ordinary slob they can relate to, but his audience was just the crowd of college students and 20-30 year old graduates you'd expect, not ordinary slobs.

Anyway, it was an entertaining enough evening. Moore is a good speaker, who can handle a crowd well, and he is quite interesting and entertaining. The only depressing thing - and its not his fault - is how many of last nights attendee's probably do just think of it as entertainment. How many left Liberty Hall glad they'd had a laugh, and happy to have their right-on credentials confirmed, and how many left determined to do something about the problems Moore raised?