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You have to hand it to Michael Moore for bravery. At a time in which dissent has been sent to the back of the bus, Moore is insisting on his front-row seat. 

Stupid White Men and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! (Regan Books, $24.95), a deliciously wicked read for those who like to see the comfortable hung, drawn and quartered, is the latest book by the blue-collar big mouth whose best known work is the documentary Roger & Me. With characteristic relish, Stupid White Men takes aim at “Thief-in-Chief” George W. Bush, fat-cat executives, general American ignorance, self-satisfied whites and Democrats who might as well be Republicans.  

Berkeley fans will get a chance to see Moore on Mar. 6 when he will be appearing at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley at 7:30 PM. Moore told the Planet he is looking forward to coming back to Berkeley, a place he admires for its “rich history of dissent and of politics and of ideas, though it’s not the place it used to be.” 

“I like Berkeley,” said Moore. “It reminds me of a city back home – Ann Arbor.” 

Moore’s book Stupid White Men is full of the same wisecracks. Social commentary is served up with the same funny-yet-disturbing “What Gives?” humor we have come to love in Moore’s work. In a prayer to “Lord (God/Yahweh/Buddha/Bob/Nobody),” for example, he writes, “We beseech You to make the children of every senator in the Mountain Time Zone gay–really gay.”  

Stupid White Men’s humor is even more biting because Moore has done his homework. When Moore writes, “Never, ever let someone fly you up in the air who’s making less than the kid at Taco Bell,” he knows what he is talking about. His research confirmed that commuter plane pilots’ starting pay can be as low as $13,000, which comes to about $9,000 after pilots pay for their own flight training and uniforms. 

Moore, who was writing the book last spring, also pointed the finger at Enron long before Kenneth Lay was publically outed. His book slams the energy company for running a big scam – and taking advantage of California in particular. 

“Look, Bush and Kenny Boy have a map of the state of California for target practice,” Moore told the Planet. “It’s the home state of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, but they hate it. They wrote it off in the last election. They knew it was going to go to the Democrats.” 

Moore’s essay on race relations, “Kill Whitey” is not as sharp as other parts of his book, however. Moore rightly points out that white people need to take more responsibility for slavery, the programming on FOX and the invention of the punch card ballot. But the mea culpa strikes an almost self-righteous note in parts. 

He also focuses mainly on blacks, to the exclusion of other minorities in today’s underclass, because, he writes, “African-Americans have been on the lowest rung of the economic ladder since the day they were beaten and dragged here in chains.” But recent scholarship has suggested that race and class do not map so neatly among color lines as they used to. In fact, by 1980, Harvard Professor William Julius Wilson had already written a landmark sociological study of urban blacks called The Declining Significance of Race. 

Moore’s most controversial chapter, though, is the “Dear George” letter in which Moore asks if the president if he is an illiterate, a drunkard and a felon. This sharp criticism almost prevented his book from being published at all. 

Stupid White Men was due to be shipped on Sept. 11 for sale on Oct. 2 when hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Moore and his publisher, Regan Books, an imprint of Harper Collins, both felt it was best to hold the book. 

But when his book had not been published by Dec. 2, Moore said he was wondering, “Where’s my book?” Turns out, Regan Books wanted Moore to rewrite up to 50 percent of his book because it was too harsh on the president. 

“I said, ‘I’m not rewriting 50 percent of one word. I feel the same way now as I did then. If you want me to rewrite it, I’ll just make it harsher,’” said Moore. 

Luckily some librarians from New Jersey came to his aid when they heard him speak at a private event. They organized an internet campaign, posting on list-serves and barraging the publishers with e-mail complaints. When trade magazines and the New York Post picked up the story, the publishers relented. 

Moore said he is very pleased that the book has been published without a single irreverent word of it altered, though he will be soon posting an additional chapter called “The Sad and Sordid Whereabouts of bin Cheney and bin Bush” on his website (www.michaelmoore.com). “People were nervous. That’s why I was afraid to put my book out,” explained Moore. “But it’s not good in a democracy to be afraid of dissent,” he added.  

“My biggest motivation for writing the book was to get people fired up and tell them not to give up.”