'Fahrenheit 9/11' fans welcome hero to hotbed
The man of the hour was more than an hour late.
A group of veterans and soldiers' families waited for Michael Moore in a North End park yesterday, chatting, eating pizza, checking their watches. The bomb-throwing filmmaker had been due at 11, and they were all looking forward to meeting him, and to thanking him for his movie ''Fahrenheit 9/11." The film had gotten the antiwar message out to millions of people, they said.
But as the activists sat on benches waiting, Moore, in town for the Democratic National Convention, was stuck at the FleetCenter, held up by a crush of reporters, and well-wishers who shouted, ''Michael!" and ''Great stuff, Mike, great stuff." His handlers tried to shoo pleading reporters away: ''Don't you understand 'No?' " Even US Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, couldn't get an audience (''He's only a congressman," Moore quipped, by way of apology).
Back in the North End, Hal Muskat, a wiry, gray-bearded member of Veterans for Peace, was getting frustrated.
''He's not the star!" Muskat spat at Moore's assistant. ''It's these people."
But minutes later, Moore arrived, and it was immediately clear that he was, indeed, the star. The cameras closed in. So did the activists. Everybody braced for Moore's next provocation. To tweak President Bush, Moore told the group, he plans to show his film Wednesday on the side of a barn in Crawford, Texas, where the president is spending the week on his ranch.
''There's been anti-Bush momentum since 2000, when he didn't win the election," Moore told a reporter from ''Access Hollywood," as the veterans looked on. ''We're saving [Bush] a front row seat. He's got the funniest lines in the movie. There's talk of running him for best actor, and Dick Cheney would be best supporting actor. Of course, I think it should be the other way 'round."
That is just the kind of combative talk that party officials are trying to avoid during this week's Democratic National Convention. Be positive, they are telling delegates. On the other hand, it is exactly the kind of talk that rank-and-file Democrats -- more fired up against an incumbent president than they have been in decades -- adore.
He had come to town during the convention, Moore said, ''to encourage Democrats to have a backbone." He was not endorsing politicians, he said, though he did defend presumptive nominee John F. Kerry's vote in favor of war in Iraq. (Moore argued that Kerry was betrayed by what Moore calls the Bush administration's false case for war.)
Moore's schedule is jammed while he is in Boston. Between media appearances, he was honored by the Congressional Black Caucus yesterday afternoon, and was to give a private screening of his film for AFSCME union members today. This afternoon, he is to speak at a Take Back America rally of progressive activists, along with former Vermont governor and Kerry primary rival Howard Dean. He plans to leave Boston tomorrow.
But yesterday's North End event was meant to be lower-key than all that, Moore insisted.
''What you have to say is far more important than anything I have to say, because you saw it firsthand," he told the handful of Iraq veterans among the antiwar activists and passersby who had gathered to listen to him in the shady North End park. ''I'd like to hear what you have to say. It's just weird here with all these cameras."
Low-key doesn't happen for Moore since his film was released a month ago. When he and his wife pulled into a restaurant parking lot in a small town in northern Michigan last week to switch drivers, they were waylaid by patrons, Moore said. The changeover took ten minutes. The pesky nobody of ''Roger & Me" -- Moore's debut film, which chronicled his attempts to confront
But he'll take the high profile, Moore said, and the role of outspoken Bush critic. The more successful ''Fahrenheit 9/11" is, the more likely it is that Bush will lose the election, he said yesterday.
And so, standing on the cobblestones in the North End, a green Michigan State Spartans cap on his head, the rumpled Moore was both bomb-thrower and healer -- playing loudly to the cameras, and quietly consoling the veterans and families.
''There has been a continuous coverup by the United States," one tall, sandy-haired Iraq veteran told him. He had seen members of his own Marine unit kill innocent Iraqis, he said. ''Civilians are being killed indiscriminately."
''Well, first of all," Moore told him gently, ''you and the other troops need to know that you were put into a bad situation, and this is not your fault, and you need to know that . . . When you send otherwise good people off to war, and it's a war based on a lie, then you have bad things happen."
But then the other Moore kicked in.
''Where is our media?" he boomed, upbraiding the dozen or so reporters gathered around him. ''When are they going to do their job and ask the hard questions? . . . I wish somebody here, and there are a ton of them here, would take this man aside when we're done, and ask him about this."
Even Muskat, standing at Moore's right shoulder, was impressed with that.
''Thank you for speaking out," he told the filmmaker.
