Forrest Gump (with a big, fat attitude)

HERE COMES TROUBLE: STORIES FROM MY LIFE

By Michael Moore

427 pages

Available at National Book Store

It’s no coincidence that, at the peak of his popularity, having just won an Oscar for his documentary

Bowling for Columbine

, Michael Moore was receiving death threats. Like, every day. Not only that, TV news pundits from the Fox Channel were actually calling for his execution — or at least saying on camera that they would personally enjoy killing him.

What is it about this roly-poly man with a baseball cap, glasses and Midwest twang that causes so many Americans to see red? Moore is the first to admit why: he doesn’t like to keep his mouth shut. He says what he thinks is wrong with the United States. And he has a pretty big pulpit to express those views: the media, at least for a time in the early 2000s, fed on his every word. There was a time when it even seemed that Moore — through his lacerating documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 — was going to tip the presidential election to the Democrats, defeating George W. Bush.

It didn’t happen, of course. But Moore became even more famous. And this fueled an even bigger backlash against him. Thanks to its incendiary rhetoric — basically calling Bush a war criminal — Fahrenheit 9/11 “became the top bootleg among the troops in Iraq,” writes Moore. “It broke the box office record long held by Return of the Jedi for the largest opening weekend ever for a film that opened on a thousands screens or less. It was, in the verbiage of Variety, major boffo, a juggernaut.

“And in doing all that, it made me a target,” he continues. “This movie was now affecting a sitting president of the United States and his chances for a second term.” (No false modesty from Mr. Moore.) “And so,” he continues, “the film — and especially its director — had to be portrayed as so repulsively un-American that to buy a ticket would be akin to an act of treason.”

Moore cheerily lays out the abuse he received — such as when an Oscar stagehand whispered “A**hole!” in his ear just as he left the stage, trophy in hand. Rocks hurled through his windows were common, as was graffiti and physical attacks. People like Fox newscaster Glenn Beck spoke on TV about choking the life out of him. Moore hired a squad of professional bodyguards to fend off people unamused by his political views.

All of this makes good reading fodder, and Moore is an entertaining writer. But in Here Comes Trouble, he does more than just spin political jibes — he lays out a sequence of incidents from his life that begins to explain how he became the provocateur that so many see him to be. Along the way, he paints himself as a kind of well-informed Forrest Gump, a common man who crosses paths with many famous people in his life — Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, John Lennon, Ronald Reagan, Roger Ebert — and learns lessons about himself and the world.

What sort of lessons? Mostly about not judging people by race, creed or color. How the rich get richer by taking stuff away from the poor and middle class. The usual issues that get conservatives foaming at the mouth. To hear Moore tell it, he’s been a Zelig-like figure, always on hand for key moments in history. He describes giving a speech, as a high school senior, to an Elks Club gathering who were expecting a few words on Abraham Lincoln; instead he berates them for not allowing black folks into their country club, then tells them to “keep your stinkin’ trophy.” The story gets picked up by a national wire agency, then CBS, and before you know it there’s a US congressional hearing on the Elks’ discrimination, and legislation is passed outlawing the practice nationwide. He also describes sneaking through seven security checkpoints — using fake press credentials, no less — to unfurl a protest banner at a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany where then-President Reagan was laying wreaths on the graves of SS Nazi soldiers. You’ve got to admire the chutzpah, even if it accomplished basically nothing.

Moore comes from Irish-Scottish stock, people who settled Michigan in the 1700s and had to make peace with the surrounding Native-Americans. He talks about his great-great-grandfather personally delivering medicines and food to American Indians who had contracted lethal flu and smallpox from infected blankets given to them by other settlers. So the roly-poly man has a legacy of family do-goodism to live up to.

Basically, in early chapters, Michael is seen to be an ordinary kid from an ordinary middle-class family — not too popular, not too good, not too bad — who has the brains to observe human behavior and ask questions. Like why are minorities treated differently? Why does the Catholic Church discriminate against women and gays? (His early stint at seminary school was aborted after he kept asking why women weren’t allowed to be priests.) In other words, Moore was a born troublemaker. And he’s made a pretty good living at it.

The “pretty good living” part is what really steams his critics. They decry the hypocrisy of a man who champions the “little people” while driving around in an expensive Prius and having the means to hire thugs to protect him. But since making his first documentary, Roger & Me, in 1984, Michael Moore has, by necessity, had to evolve into a corporation: he has collected a team of staffers and (no doubt) very good lawyers who research the good, the bad and the ugly in the American political landscape. So how does Moore get his muckraking scoops? “One thing I learned as a journalist is that there is at least one disgruntled person in every workplace in America,” he writes. His media mouthpiece began with a small alternative newspaper in Flint, Michigan called The Flint Voice, but it has since expanded to TV shows (TV Nation was an early attempt to capture American inequalities on network television; it was promptly cancelled), talk shows (he’s a frequent, mouthy guest), books (such as this one) and lots of movies.

Moore’s movies tend to be only as good as his subject. Roger & Me, filmed on a shoestring, tried to document how General Motors chairman Roger Smith unapologetically sent some 30,000 auto worker jobs to Mexico, where the daily wage was 40 cents an hour. The key was its title, with “Me” nestled in there: it was clear from the start that Moore was going to marry himself to his subject, become an unapologetic part of every story. It also introduced a new style of documentary filmmaking, one not without controversy — weaving in ironic file footage and humorous commentary. No dry, sober liberal voiceovers here — Moore wanted his audiences to react, to get up from their movie seats and do something.

This may seem like ancient history, but films like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine did actually do something documentaries never had before: they made lots of money. And that gave Moore the freedom to continue his fight — against the healthcare system in Sicko! and, well, capitalism in Capitalism: A Love Story. He is certainly flawed — as a storyteller, as a person with a substantial ego (or at least an unwavering belief in his own right to say whatever he wants) — but his kind seems like an endangered species in the United States. People in bad economic times are way too busy worrying about their next rent payment to think about who’s pulling the levers of, say, the economy, the military, the elections, or environmental abuse. Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart can’t do all the political satire. Moore, still looking as goofy in his baseball cap and glasses as ever, ain’t no superman, but he’s in a better position to remind people of such things than the average Joe Citizen. The book is a funny, engaging, if somewhat self-aggrandizing look at some of those things.