Two Mikes

Michael Moore and Michael Scott Moore aren’t the same guy

A Guide for the Perplexed

This is a picture of Michael Scott Moore, who edits Radio Free Mike:

Mike reads an excerpt from Too Much of Nothing

And this is Michael Moore, director of Roger & Me:

Michael Moore (left) jams with Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen

Two observations:

1) At the age of nine, Michael Scott Moore was heavily into Cheap Trick.

2) He can also play guitar.

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 paternal grandfather was a mechanic from Cape Breton named Daniel John Moore. 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 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 started saying it, our editor was insisting that Moore was just an entertainer — a Rush Limbaugh of the left. The left as a whole, in Mike’s opinion, went wrong more than a century ago, when George Bernard Shaw (among others) turned away from Henry George. Henry George was the last pure American voice of the non-Marxist left, a guidepost for Einstein and Tolstoy, and a San Francisco journalist who made economics sensible to the masses with Progress and Poverty, for at least a generation, until his book was ploughed into obscurity by the rise of Bolshevism. In the meantime, of course, Marx has also gone down the toilet. But his turgid sensibility clings like a winding-sheet to the radical and academic left — in the form of political correctness, identity poltitics, and obsessions with class — most of which Mike considers bullhonkey.

Here’s a rare snapshot of our editor in France: