A Guide for the Perplexed
This is Michael Scott Moore, who edits Radio Free Mike.
And this is Michael Moore, the famous director (left). He’s jamming here with Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen.
Three observations:
1) At the age of nine, Michael Scott Moore was heavily into Cheap Trick.
2) He can also play guitar.
3) Oh, and he’s a journalist.
The parallels between him and this documentary-director guy are (we admit) eerie as hell. But they stop when you learn that Michael Scott Moore has never been to Flint, Michigan. He was raised around Los Angeles, first in Northridge and then in Redondo Beach. His mom’s German; his dad was American. His paternal grandfather was a mechanic from Cape Breton named Daniel John Moore, and the grim simple dignity of those three names pleases him.
His friends just call him Mike.
CALAVERAS BEACH, the setting of Mike’s first novel , might remind readers of Mark Twain. But the book has nothing to do with mining towns or jumping frogs. The Spanish word calavera simply means skeleton, or skull.
Here’s a calavera:
“Happy Dance and Wild Party of All the Skeletons,” by José Guadalupe Posada
José Posada drew hundreds of these lively-skeleton cartoons to illustrate satirical sheets written around the Day of the Dead. These broadsheets — also called calaveras — made fun of editors, politicians, society matrons, musicians: people high and low who forgot they were going to die. In this sense, Mike’s novel itself is a calavera.
POLITICALLY, MICHAEL MOORE and MICHAEL SCOTT MOORE don’t always agree. Our editor thought Roger & Me was a pretty good laugh, but long before everyone else was saying it Mike knew his namesake was just an entertainer, a big cartoon character to balance the even bigger goons on the right.
All this entertainment looks less like what Thomas Jefferson would have recognized as free debate in a free society and more like what ancient Romans did for kicks. Americans now think they’re “debating politics” when they send their favorite pundits into battle like gladiators, and roar like overfed morons when one side or the other draws blood.
Here’s a rare snapshot of our editor in France:
