Here Comes Trouble

by Michael Moore

“Oh, you!” was all she could say, and walked away.

  A few months later, I noticed the school district was handing out contracts for services and construction without taking competitive bids.

  “It’s illegal not to do it,” I said, using their favorite “I” word. “State law requires us to have competitive bidding that’s fair for all concerned and will get the best price for the school district.” I sat and wondered why was I having to give people who claimed they loved capitalism and free enterprise a lesson in the competitive marketplace being a good idea for all. But they ignored me, saying it was impractical and unnecessary.

  A few days later I set up an appointment with the state attorney general’s office and drove down to Lansing to meet with an assistant attorney general about this illegal practice.

  The assistant attorney general looked at the records I brought him and he agreed: the Davison Board of Education was breaking the law.

  “Why don’t you tell them?” I suggested. “I think they’re tired of hearing that from me.”

  “I intend to do just that.”

  Word spread through town that now the top law enforcement men in Michigan were investigating the Davison school board. And sure enough, at the next meeting, it was announced that a competitive bidding process was being instituted. We were also told, bitterly, that “being forced to take the lowest bid will not guarantee the best work, and this may end up costing us more in the long run.”

  So, what does one do when he is looking to bring the level of animosity down? He writes a one-act play in his spare time and enters it in the school district’s annual community talent show to be held at the high school. And what would that play be about? Oh, say, a little avant-garde number about Jesus’s crucifixion. At the last minute on Calvary, Jesus, high up on a cross wrapped in aluminum foil, decides he doesn’t want to die crucified like this.

  “This is where you people want me?” Jesus shouted to the audience on the talent show’s opening night. “Just nailed to a cross? So you don’t have to listen to me anymore about caring for the poor or the sick or the downtrodden? So you can stick little replicas of me on your walls at home, while I’m hanging on this cross, suffering? Well, I say NO!”

  And with that, Jesus yanked the nails straight out of his hands and flew down off the cross.

  I had a bunch of my friends planted in the audience and, with that as their cue, they randomly stood up and started yelling at Jesus.

  “Get back up on that cross where you belong!”

  “We don’t want you alive, we like you dead!”

  “Back on the cross! Back on the cross!”

  Then they all started to charge the stage. One man pulled out a “gun” and “shot” Jesus. The now-dead-again Son of God was dragged back to his cross and left there. The actors then exited the stage cheerfully.

  The election to recall and remove me from the school board was set for the first Friday in December. There would be only one question on the ballot: Should Michael Moore be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail? Actually, I believe the official wording was: “Should Michael Moore be removed from the office of trustee of the Davison Board of Education?”

  That was it. Just one question on the entire ballot—and the whole town was to show up and vote on just that question. Not exactly a confidence booster, to be sure.

  To my credit, it was not easy for the recall committee—consisting of businessmen and friends of the school board members—to gather the necessary signatures in the required amount of time to put the question on the ballot. In fact, when the deadline arrived, they were hundreds of signatures short. So the school board gave the group an extra ten days. When the ten days were up, they were still short by quite a bit. So the board granted another (illegal) ten-day extension. And when those ten days were up, guess what? Still not enough names of people wanting to remove me! So, unbelievably, the board gave them a third ten-day extension.

  I went and got myself an attorney. By the end of the third ten-day extension, they finally had the signatures they needed. Or did they? As I combed through the names on the petitions, I came across at least a half-dozen people who had died, and a number of people who had signed their names twice. And then there was Jesse the barber. He signed it three times! He sure did want me gone.

  I sued in the county court to overturn this entire circus. The judge, who shaved his head bald each morning to convey a Kojak-like appearance, issued the following ruling:

  It appears that both the recall committee and the board of education have committed a number of irregularities and possible violations of the law. But it does seem to me that the people of Davison want their day at the polls regarding you, Mr. Moore. So, I’m going to go ahead and let the election take place. If the election goes against you, Mr. Moore, then you can come back here to this court to seek relief.

  My head was spinning. The judge had just pointed out numerous instances of the law being broken—but he was still going to let the election take place. I was doomed.

  Scheduling the election on a Friday during the Christmas season was a genius move by the school board. Have you ever gone to vote on a Friday? Exactly. So who would even know when this particular Friday rolled around that it was “election day”? The haters who wanted me out of there, that’s who.

  Each side got to write something on the official ballot. The recallers had a hundred words where they outlined my “crimes.” And I had a hundred words to answer their charges. I decided it wasn’t worth wasting my time. I wrote, simply, “The question that is placed before you on this ballot is a moral question that must be decided between you and your conscience. I sincerely trust that you will make the best decision possible for you and your children. Love, Mike.” In addition to being the youngest elected official, I might have been the first person to inscribe the word love on an election ballot.

  On recall day I was back in the same gym where I had won the seat two and a half years earlier. When I arrived at 7:00 a.m., the citizens recall committee was already in action. The school board clerk allowed them to sit at the table where the voters sign in and check off who had shown up and who hadn’t. Every half hour or so, they would hand off the names and go call those who hadn’t come in to vote yet. It was quite the operation to watch, and once again I had been outsmarted (and outspent). In the weeks leading up to the election I did what I had done before to win. I wrote up a “Letter to the people of Davison” and went and knocked on every door in the district.

  The line snaked the length of the gym to the back by the doors, out through the hallway, and to the front of the school. By the time the polls closed thirteen hours later, it was clear this was a huge turnout.

  In the middle of the gym they set up four long lunchroom tables to form a square on which they dumped out the paper ballots. The count began with the “YES” ballots placed on one table and the “NO” ballots stacked on the other. For the next hour and a half, who had the highest pile went back and forth. Higher and higher, neck and neck they climbed. And then something happened. The pile of “NO” ballots kept growing: 100 higher. 200 higher! 300 HIGHER! The final ballot was placed atop the pile favoring me and the clerk declared that the recall had failed and I had won.

  On the bleachers on the south side of the gym, where a hundred or so student supporters had taken perch, there was a scream from someone, and then more screams followed. A spontaneous party broke out and there was jumping and dancing all across the gymnasium floor. Me, I was just relieved. The TV cameras were there to record the event and I went live with the anchorman at 11:00 p.m. I thanked the people of Davison, declared the local Republican Party dead, and promised to remain who I was. I also apologized to my parents for putting them through this. It had been especially hard on my mother. The recall committee was made up of the people she had lived with in Davison her whole life. The head of the committee—my dad was his coach in junior high football. The copies of the recall petitions I was able to obtain in court revealed the n
ames of many we thought were family friends. The guy my dad ushered with in church signed it. My mom’s friend from high school signed it. The girl I sat next to in band—her, too. They were all there. And to this day, if you ask my dad (now ninety) if “so-and-so” had signed the petition, he would be able to tell you in an instant.

  They call it “Irish Alzheimer’s”: you forget everything—except holding the grudge.

  I served out the rest of my term, always voting the way I wanted, but worn down from the whole experience. I was asked to speak to the students at the high school, and I used the opportunity to read an expletive-filled poem I wrote about the genocide of the Native Americans. That resulted in me being banned from the high school for life (I have, to this day, never returned).

  I lost my bid for reelection and retired from public office at the age of twenty-two—to pursue a more quiet life. I kept in mind that it took the consent of only twenty people to start me on this road. I realized that this was the big secret of democracy—that change can occur by starting off with just a few people doing something. You don’t need a whole movement or even a whole school district. It can start with just twenty people. Even twenty stoners. It was a good, but dangerous, lesson to learn at such an early age. The intimidating thing about democracy is that it seems so impossible, so unmanageable, so out of reach to the average person. By twenty-two, I knew that to be a myth. And I was grateful to Davison for teaching me what a great country this is.

  But I never got my hair cut at Jesse’s Barber Shop again.

  Raid

  I BECAME A NEWSPAPERMAN at the age of nine. St. John the Evangelist Catholic Grade School did not have a student newspaper, so I thought I would start one. I did not ask the nuns for permission. Why would I? I only wanted to cover our sports teams—mostly. I also wanted to write about what happened during science class last Friday. Mrs. LaCombe had wheeled the school’s one TV set in on a movable cart and turned it on so we could watch a science lesson on NET (National Educational Television), a special channel devoted for use in the classrooms across America (it would later become PBS).

  I loved these special days when we got to watch TV in school. It seemed like we were getting away with something. And I loved the science shows, especially when they would blow something up in a test tube.

  As we were watching the lesson, the picture on the screen was abruptly interrupted and all of a sudden Chet Huntley, the anchorman on NBC News, broke in with a bulletin.

  “We have just learned that President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas…”

  Mrs. LaCombe let out a gasp and left to get the Mother Superior. She came in and watched the report with us. When they said he was still alive and had been taken to the hospital we were all instructed—and the other classrooms were alerted—to head directly over to the church, get on our knees, and pray, pray, pray that he would live.

  Proving once again that either God has a great mysterious plan that none of us can alter, or he does indeed occasionally take a day off, Kennedy succumbed. We were all sent home early. When my dad got home from the factory, my mother went outside to greet him. It was raining. We ate fish silently that night.

  Two days later, as I was sitting on the living room floor watching the live broadcast of the Dallas police transferring the alleged assassin, Lee Oswald, I saw Jack Ruby put a gun in Oswald’s abdomen and fire a shot. My mother was vacuuming.

  I screamed at her, “Turn the vacuum off! They’ve shot Oswald!”

  She couldn’t hear me so she kept vacuuming. I reached over and pulled the vacuum’s plug out of the wall.

  “They shot Oswald! I just saw it.”

  Not all nine-year-olds get to watch a real person being killed, live on TV. Over the weekend I decided I wanted to write about that. I asked my dad if I could start a newspaper.

  “How exactly would you do that?” he asked me. We were a GM factory family. We didn’t start newspapers.

  “I was thinking I could write it up on a piece of paper. You said you have a new machine where you work that will print pages of paper. So if I wrote something on a couple pieces of paper, could you make thirty pages of that?”

  He thought about that for a minute.

  “Well, it’s called a mimeograph. And it’s in the foreman’s office. I’d have to type it up for you and get permission. Let me see.”

  The following Monday Dad came home and said he could make twenty-five copies of my two-page paper. Excited by the prospect, I sat down with my pencil and wrote up Page One: my thoughts on why we no longer had a seventh-and-eighth-grade football team, what our upcoming basketball season would look like, and my favorite baseball stats from the backs of my Topps bubblegum baseball cards.

  Page Two was about how I felt about Kennedy’s death and what it was like to watch Oswald get shot.

  The next day my dad made the twenty-five copies of the St. John Eagle at AC Spark Plug and brought them home from work. He had personally typed, printed, and stapled each copy together himself. It was like an early Christmas present, and I could see it made him happy to see me so happy to have in my hands my very first newspaper.

  The following morning I took the St. John Eagle into my fourth-grade classroom and handed them out to the classmates I thought would read it. Mrs. LaCombe saw this and asked for a copy. A big smile came across her face.

  “Why, look at you!” she said. “This looks quite good.”

  Would that the Mother Superior felt the same way. For when Mrs. LaCombe showed her my paper, she requested my presence in her office.

  “Can you tell me what this is?” she asked bluntly.

  “It’s our new student paper—the St. John Eagle!” I said proudly, not expecting any blowback.

  “We don’t have a student newspaper, Michael,” she said. “And we don’t need one. This is not authorized and we cannot approve it. So you will have to collect the copies you’ve passed out and hand them over to me.”

  I was crushed. It made no sense to me. What did I do wrong? But I dared not object, so I offered up a “Yes, Mother,” and went back to my classroom to gather the contraband.

  The following year, still wanting to publish a newspaper, I started a new one called the Hill St. News, this one intended not for school but for our neighborhood. Again, my dad made the copies for me at work on GM’s dime, and this periodical lasted a whole three issues before a neighborhood parent called my mom, furious that I had listed her house for sale in my Want Ads section.

  “But they have a FOR SALE sign in their yard,” I pleaded. “I was just trying to help.”

  Of course I had no idea what houses cost, so I went ahead and listed theirs for $1,200—which, to a ten-year-old, is a helluva lot of money! No matter; the Hill St. News was shut down.

  Two more times I would attempt to start a school paper at St. John’s – in sixth grade and eighth grade. And each time the plug was pulled. I got the message and retired from the newspaper business for the next nine years.

  When you live in a company town like Flint, nearly all the media is bought and paid for and controlled by that company or its lackeys (aka the local elected officials). In the case of our one and only daily paper, the Flint Journal, it provided for a particularly pathetic situation. The Journal was so in love with General Motors, it never would turn a critical eye on its operations. It was a cheerleading newspaper: the company could do no wrong!

  The working people of the Flint area hated this rag, but it was our only daily so you read it. Everyone called it the “Flint Urinal.” Editorially, the paper had historically been on the wrong side of every major social and political issue of the twentieth century—“the wrong side” meaning: whatever side the union workers were on, the Urinal took the opposite position. In the early years it attacked the socialist mayor whom the people of Flint had elected. It attacked the formation of the UAW and the Great Sitdown Strike of 1936–37 that forced General Motors into its first contract with the union. It endorsed the Republican candidate for president whil
e the workers voted for the Democrat. It supported the Vietnam War. And it would become an unapologetic booster of boondoggle downtown developments that would leave the city devastated.

  By 1976, my friends and I had complained enough to each other about the state of the newspaper in Flint that we decided to start one ourselves. At first, we called it Free to Be, but that sounded too hippie, so we changed it to the Flint Voice in honor of the great alternative weekly we received in the mail each week from New York, the Village Voice. There were seven of us, between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five, who founded the Voice, but only three of us had any journalism experience: Doug Cunningham, who had an underground paper in high school, the Mt. Morris Voice; Alan Hirvela, who helped run an alternative paper on the campus of Central Michigan University; and me, with my history of four failed grade-school newspapers. Only Al had a college education.

  Our first issues came flying out of the gate pointed directly at the established order in Flint. There were stories of Flint’s hangin’ judge, who gave blacks longer sentences than whites, county commissioners fleecing the treasury, Buick rigging the test cars they sent to the EPA in order to show better gas mileage, and some other issues that rang familiar to me: another school board in Flint holding secret meetings, students in Flint being paddled 8,264 times in one school year, and a poll showing the majority of Catholics no longer believing in hell. There were also stories that seemed ahead of their time: an op-ed from a local Palestinian entitled “Where Is My Promised Land,” a story on how processed sugar was poison (with an accompanying recipe for a “natural food” snack), and a warning that GM, then employing eighty thousand people in Flint, had a master plan to leave the city bone dry. That last story established me firmly as the local crazy guy.

  The paper quickly became a must-read for those who paid attention to the politics of Flint. The Flint Voice was a true muckraking paper that didn’t care who it pissed off. We did not do cover stories on the “Ten Best Ice Cream Places in Town” or “Twenty Day Trips You’ll Want to Take.” Our journalism was hard-hitting and relentless. We did sting operations on establishments that would not hire black employees. We chronicled how General Motors was taking tax abatement money and using it to build factories in Mexico. One night, we caught them literally dismantling an entire GM assembly line, loading it on a train, and sending it off to be shipped to a place called China. Many could not believe a story like that—“What on earth would China do with an automobile assembly line?! Michael Moore is nuts!” I suffered much derision for exposing such goings-on.