[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/01/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/30/' filename='exclusive-interview-michael-moore-on-american-sniper-sarah-palin-and-ptsd-body-image-1422654514.jpg' id='23010']
Michael Moore at the Oscar Celebrates Docs reception in 2013. Photo by Tommaso Boddi via Getty.
On January 18, two days after the release of Clint Eastwood's
American Sniper, Michael Moore tweeted: "My
uncle killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shoot
u in the back. Snipers aren't heroes. And invaders r worse,"
followed by: "But
if you're on the roof of your home defending it from invaders who've come 7K
miles, you are not a sniper, u are brave, u are a neighbor." The backlash
from the right was swift and loud.
Breitbart
called
the tweets "pathetic trolling," John McCain said they were "idiotic" and
"outrageous," and Kid Rock wrote on
his website, "Fuck you
Michael Moore, you're a piece of shit and your uncle would be ashamed of you."
But the most dramatic reaction to the tweets came from Sarah Palin, who posed
alongside Medal of Honor recipient Sergeant Dakota Meyer
with a sign reading "Fuc_
You, Michael Moore." The two
0s in
Moore's name had been replaced with crosshairs.
After drawing criticism from both the right and the left, Palin
stood behind the photo during her
bizarre,
rambling speech
at the Iowa Freedom Summit on Saturday, saying "what the
poster said is what the rest of us are thinking." Moore, for his part, has not
made any TV appearances or reacted to the controversy outside of a few tweets
and Facebook posts, but he was willing to speak to VICE's Eddy Moretti at
length about his thoughts on
American
Sniper
, snipers in general, Sarah Palin, PTSD, that time Clint Eastwood
threatened to kill him, and a whole host of other issues swirling around the
media circus at the moment.
VICE: Hi, Michael. Let's start with your tweets, before we get into the reaction to them, and give you an opportunity to clarify what you meant, what inspired you to write them, and how you felt emotionally when you wrote them.
Michael Moore: Well the first thing I would say is that I feel really no need to clarify or defend what I wrote. I'm proud of what I wrote. I take nothing back, and in fact I've only added more to it. I am not bullied by these people who bullied a whole nation into a senseless, illegal war. So really, in terms of impact, this has none on me. I say what I say. Of course if I were wrong, or made an error, I would certainly correct it, but that's not the case here. And it really kind of grinds me when I see on TV or hear from other people, you know, Michael Moore, he walked that back, and it's just like, well, that hasn't happened. I have no apologies for my very strong beliefs in how I want the war mongering in this country to stop.
And I think that the reason we're having this conversation too—and
I've shared this with nobody else, I've turned down all requests for TV shows—is
that the problem with Twitter and why you do need to, we'll use the word
clarify, is because 140 characters can't
really convey things that have enormous depth to them. So Facebook and talking
to you gives me a really good chance to add on further to what I had said on
Twitter.
One thing that struck me
is that there are two things you're talking about in different media. On
Twitter you were talking about the issue of snipers, which is a fascinating
topic that deserves some more discussion, and then there's the film called
American Sniper—and it seems like you're
talking about two different things. Am I right?
That's correct. I purposely didn't say anything about American Sniper in my original tweets. I
certainly wrote what I wrote because that weekend there was a lot of talk about
snipers because of the movie, but also because it was Martin Luther King
weekend and I just found it uncomfortable that something called
American Sniper, a film about a sniper,
would be released on the weekend where we're honoring a great American who was
killed by a sniper. And if anybody doesn't see anything wrong with that, how
would you feel then if it were announced tomorrow that
American Sniper 2 would be released on November 22?
Yeah, you wouldn't do
some kind of disaster type attack movie and release it on September 11, for
instance.
Exactly. The appliance store doesn't take out a Holocaust Day
ad for you know,
today, ovens on sale.
I mean that would be the most extreme and bizarro example, but it just shows a
bit of a tin ear. Or does it? Maybe the plan was,
well, you know, Selma has
just been released, are white people going to go see that movie? Let's give
white people something to watch on Martin Luther King weekend
. I don't
know, but it felt really uncomfortable. It got me thinking about snipers, and
you had to have grown up in my family to understand the intense sort of raw
nerve that the idea of a sniper created.
My uncle's name was Lawrence Moore, but they called him Lornie.
Uncle Lornie was someone I never met because I was born nine years after the
war, but it was very clear to me at a young age that his death had impacted the
family greatly. It impacted my grandmother quite intensely. When they finally
shipped his body back and they buried him at the Catholic cemetery in Flint,
she convinced her husband to leave their home. They moved from their home to a
house two doors down from the cemetery. And she would go over there every day
and visit his grave.
And to add insult to injury, the military marker sent to the
grave by the War Department—its name before it was called the Pentagon—did not
have Lornie's name, not Lawrence Moore's name, but Herbert Moore, who was her
husband, my grandfather, was Herbert (and they also had a son, another one of
my uncles, who was named Herbert). So it's not even his name on the grave.
It was a two- or three-time a year ritual for all of us kids to
go there and put flags on the grave. He was a beloved sibling. To all the aunts
and uncles, he was the loved one, the kind one, the one they all turned to, and
it really impacted the family.
You see the battle was over in the Philippines, and they had
essentially won. They were in the Luzon Province and they were marching down
this road back to the base. Japanese soldiers were known for not giving up, and
a sniper up in the tree shot him in the back of his head and killed him
instantly. They just couldn't fathom that if it was over, why would—what a
cowardly, cowardly act.
I also sent a second tweet out right away because I wanted to
clarify what I meant by "sniper." A sniper, to me, is the person in the
invading force. That's the soldier and the people who are doing wrong, who
climb to the tops of buildings or trees and hide themselves and take out people
without them knowing, without them having a chance to fight back. If troops
from another country were marching down Broadway and someone were to climb to
the top of a building to try and stop them, by any means, that's not a sniper.
That's a defender of his or her home. Just as the person who was the sniper—the
Arab sniper in
American Sniper—what
was he doing? He was trying to stop the invading force.
Snipers were first called sharpshooters or marksmen, they
weren't called snipers until World War I, and it was really the Germans in World
War I that perfected the concept of the sniper, not the Allies. And then that
really carried over. In WWII, I think you can look this up, but two thirds of
all kills from snipers occurred from German and Japanese soldiers. And as the
war went on the Russians figured it out and how to do it. What Eisenhower did
in 1956, 1957—we had the US sniper school in Fort Perry in Ohio—and he closed
it down.
People should practice saying it. We will be better off in the future when we say we lost Vietnam, we lost Iraq, we lost Afghanistan.
Why?
I don't know. I mean I've been doing some research this week. It
remained closed for 30 years until Reagan reopened it in 1987 at Fort Benning.
There was a lot of talk after Korea, a vet told me this story, saying that it
just didn't feel like the American way. Snipers are really needed by the
invading force. As defenders, you know, there's all kind of preying that goes
on—like if we were actually attacked we would all, as such, become snipers, if
you wanted to use that word. But when the liberators come, it's the snipers
that's taking out the liberators. And that's the confusion of course when you
watch FOX news. I mean, talking about
American
Sniper
—they're talking about American soldiers as the liberators of Iraq!
We didn't liberate anything. In fact, we made it worse and we lost the war!
Write that in the loss column. And people should practice saying it. We will be
better off in the future when we say we lost Vietnam, we lost Iraq, we lost
Afghanistan. Why do we invent this fairy tale about ourselves? It does no good
and it is only going to get us into more trouble in the future.
The right wing in this
country is championing this film, and the film is doing really well. If you
assume a film does well because people love the main character, you could say
that Americans are loving this sniper, right? Why do you think that is? You're
right that generally snipers have always been menacing. It's always the poor
guy caught in the square who gets picked off and the sniper is always hiding,
and it's a sneaky move. But what is this sniper doing for popular American consciousness
that is satisfying people so much and driving them into the theaters?
There's some incredible psycho-drama
happening around this film at a national psychic level.
Yes, and it has to do with the fact that psychically, we know
we were wrong. We know that there were no weapons of mass destruction. We know
that 4400 American kids lost their lives and countless tens of thousands of
Iraqis. We know all this and really, underneath it is a deep-seated guilt.
Plus a lot of the Cold War republican types that go to the
movies too, you know they don't live in a bubble. They have family members or
they have neighbors, they have people who have come back from this war messed
up. We have a huge PTSD problem. We have a huge mental issue here with the
soldiers that have come back from this war. And I have to tell you the two
times that I've seen it, it's very quiet at the end. Nobody is cheering. Even
when Bradley Cooper takes out Mustafa, the Arab sniper, no
whoop went out, and believe me, I saw this in an audience of people
who are not on my side of the political fence. And they were very affected;
they felt very sad. Every main character in the movie ends up either messed up
by the war or dead. And it's not a celebration of this. People may go into the
movie thinking
ra ra!, but they don't
walk out
ra ra.
The final thing I'll say is that a lot of people want to see it
now because of the controversy and also because it got nominated for Best
Picture, and people want to see the best picture. Also it's Clint Eastwood,
he's made some of the greatest films. So there are lots of reasons people are
going, but I'll tell you, I saw it on the second night in Union Square, and
there wasn't a single person who lives in the village in that movie theater. It
was all people who took the train in from New Jersey or Long Island. And the
research has been done—the studio wants to know who's going to the movie—and
this movie's audience is made up of people who go to see one movie a year or
people who never go to the movies. It is the
Passion of the Christ crowd that is in these movie theaters.
Let's go back to snipers
for a minute, and the distinction you're making between comments on snipers verses
the film
American Sniper. You have a
real personal connection to snipers and their effects, and there aren't very many
modern sniper stories that resonate in the American consciousness, except maybe
if you go back to World War I or II, like you were saying.
Except even then, just off the top of your head you can't name a
sniper that society has agreed over time is an American hero. It's just not in
our culture. There's the famous story of Jesse James and the coward who shot
him in the back. He was hanging a picture on the wall in his home when a guy
comes up to the window and shoots him and kills him. Jesse James is not
remembered as the scoundrel. He was a robber and a killer, but the guy who killed
him is a scoundrel in the story that was told.
We grew up with stories like that. Our dads told us—at least
the boys—that to cold clock somebody was a chicken shit thing to do. To hit
somebody without them seeing you, to come up from behind, is just considered
wrong. The word
sniper itself, have
you ever heard the word
sniping used
in a good way?
No, I haven't
It has a negative context to it. I didn't invent this the other
day on Twitter. It is a commonly held belief and it's why we were never known
for our so-called snipers. In the wars we've been in, it's been the other side
that's had the snipers. And it's not that we haven't always had sharpshooters
or marksmen. For crying out loud, I won the NRA marksmen award when I was a kid.
But I think that the sniper is usually associated with the evil side, the one
that's doing the harm, whether it was the Germans in either war or the Japanese
in my uncle's case.
There's another film out
right now called
Fury. Have you seen
that?
Yep, I saw it.
There's a sniper in that
film too, and at the end he takes out the American hero. So it seems like the
value of the sniper is in the eye of the beholder. It's the bad sniper
camouflaged and taking out Brad Pitt, who was destroying a battalion of SS
soldiers.
I liked that movie. It was a well-done war movie and really had
me on the edge of my seat. And earlier in the movie when they come into the one
town there's another German sniper, which was the problem for all Americans who
went into these towns. The invading force, the Germans, were occupying the town
and trying to stop the liberators. They can't win in a fair fight, and you can
say that Americans had more troops, more money, and more firepower, but I also
look at it in a more Zen way: That the oppressor, the invader, the occupier,
pretty much—not always, but pretty much—throughout history is defeated. In other
words, good does triumph over evil. With a few exceptions, Native Americans
being of course an obvious one.
I get all these emails from people going
Chris Kyle, he protected our troops and he saved lives. Well what
does that mean he saved lives? The lives of our soldiers shouldn't have been
there in jeopardy in the first place. We were the ones in the wrong, we were
the invading force and eventually we lost. We were there under false pretenses
and we left the place much worse off than when we got there.
Taking your personal
history and emotions around the concept of a sniper into account, can you
describe how you felt when you walked into the film, and also when you walked
out?
Well I went there on the second night of the opening. It was
only in four theaters in the country. I like Clint Eastwood, and I wanted to
see this movie. Frankly it had the best trailer and best TV ads of any movie of
the year. But when I got there, from the popcorn line to inside the theater, I
said, "Oh my god. Look around, we're in the Village and no one from the Village
is here." Then some people saw me and one person said, "Hey, it's great you're
here," and thanked me for my stuff.
I was so happy sitting with this audience because they were very affected by it. There were tears.
It was clear we were in a theater with 800 vets, or active duty,
or family members or friends, and we were with people who never go to the
movies. In fact, the person I was with was laughing because I was sort of like
a de-facto usher. Going to a movie in New York is different from elsewhere, and
people would come in and look around, they couldn't find seats together and get
how the whole system worked. They were so out of their element. I can't tell
you, a dozen times I probably said "hey, look, there's a balcony." And they
looked stunned because they hadn't caught it on their own. And I asked people, "Could
you move those coats? Could you let this couple sit down?" They looked so
flustered and had this look on their faces that I probably would have if I were
seating myself at the Oxford Debating Society.
Anyway, I was so happy sitting with this audience because they
were very affected by it. There were tears. People were having a reaction to it.
The closing credits have no music, very somber. Every main character in the
film either ends up messed up by the war, turns against the war and becomes
anti-war, or dies. There's not some American victory to cheer at the end and
there's no instance of
go look what we
did
, or like at the end of Saving
Private Ryan
, where you see Tom
Hanks die but in the back of your head you're going,
well, he didn't die for no reason. There is none of that in this
film. There is no catharsis.
I talked to Deb, who runs my film festival back in Traverse
City, and she said the same thing. She went to see it at the mall. She said it
was just sad from beginning to end. She said there was a lot of talking during
the movie, mostly people asking each other questions because they didn't
understand the politics, they didn't understand the Shia-Sunni thing and they
would ask
whose side is he on? There
was a lot of ignorance in the audience.
But it's interesting; I just saw today that it's going to break
the all-time box office R-rated movie record, which was held by
The Passion of The Christ. And I think
they're finding the demographics for this are very similar. These are not
people that usually go to the movies, and if they do they don't go very often.
Fifty percent of the American public never goes to a movie theater. And then
the next 25 percent who do go, go once a year. The movie-going public is that
last 25 percent. It just felt like a real
Passion
of the Christ
crowd. People who would normally wait for it to go on video
or see it on TV but wanted that collective feeling of sitting there with
others.
[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/99k3u9ay1gs' width='640' height='360']
Trailer for 'American Sniper'
Putting your issues with
snipers and the politics of war aside, would it be fair to say that you have no
issues with the filmmaking itself?
The film itself. I don't usually comment if you follow my
Twitter. I, like most filmmakers and directors—there's sort of an unwritten,
unspoken code that we don't criticize each other's films. If we don't like a
film by another director we just say nothing. If we do like something then we
talk loudly about it and encourage people to go see it. That's why it's rare to
find a filmmaker attacking another filmmaker for the film they've made. Because
we all know how hard it is to make a good movie. The only time I've done it in
the past is when I felt really bad that so many people, especially working
people, were going to shell out money to see something they've been told is one
thing and then it's not, and then they're going to be miserable. They work hard
all week and it's a lot of money now to go to the movies and buy candy and
stuff for the kids. That's just how I feel. So as a movie, I didn't say
anything about the movie in those first two tweets. And then when I finally
went more than 140 characters, when I went onto Facebook saying,
well, I'm not going to say anything about
American Sniper but I'll say this,
Bradley Cooper—one of the best performances of the year.
Hands down. How he
transforms himself... you don't even think it's Bradley Cooper.
Steve Carell just did
the same thing in
Fox Catcher. After just
a moment that guy "Steve Carell" is just gone and this monster is there in his
place.
Exactly right. That's the sign of a good actor, so that's my
first positive comment about the movie. The second thing is that technically,
it's a well-made movie. I think there were some good choices made in terms of—it
was very bold to not have a closing song, no music whatsoever, just credits
rolling in the dark. Black and quiet. As a story, I think that this is where
the film gets a little messy for me because Clint basically just wants to make
an old-style western; you know, keep things really simple and don't complicate
matters. For instance the Twin Towers were hit, they get called up, and
suddenly they're in Iraq.
If you haven't paid attention to
anything, basically the film says
we were
attacked, so then we attacked back in Iraq
. Of course we know Iraq had
nothing to do with 9/11, but the film implies that it does, and that that's the
mission he's on to defend our country. But we weren't being defended by his
being in Iraq. You can make the case that by going into Afghanistan to stop
them, and to try and get Bin Laden and all that, that it had some legitimacy to
it. But before it was being run by an incompetent commander-in-chief, and it
took the new commander-in-chief 13 months—if that—to do Bush's job that Bush
had eight years to do, to get the mass murderer. So there are storyline
problems in the film and I think that's why people in the audience were
talking, because they were confused.
American
Sniper
covers what looks like about five or six years or three or four
tours of Iraq, and it was like,
how does
he keep ending up in the same town with that one same guy
? It was just dumb
in the old-school western way. It was like a B-movie in that way. And then of
course there's all the historical things that are wrong, but we don't really
want to get into that. It's a movie; I'm not watching it as a documentary.
But I think people are really affected by what we did, and
we're going to continue to be affected by it. Where I live in Traverse City
I've set up these PTSD programs for veterans. I have these conferences for
finding jobs, I started the first affirmative action program to specifically
hire Iraq and Afghanistan vets, and any active-duty military and their families
can go to my movie theaters for free any day of the year—they don't pay a dime.
Not many businesses offer their things for free every day of the year to active-duty
military. And I have these three theaters that I've restored; they're all
non-profit. I set them up to be owned by the communities they're in.
You're showing the film
in your own theater, right?
Yeah, I'm showing the film in one of the three theaters. And
that's because I think that it's part of the American discussion and people
should see it. You can't talk about it if you haven't seen it. I saw John
McCain criticizing me yesterday for what I said about snipers in general and a
reporter asked him if he's seen the movie and he says
No, I haven't seen it yet. And it took me right back to when he
went on
Letterman and criticized 9/11, and Letterman goes, Did you see the movie? And he says No, I haven't seen it yet. And Letterman
says
Senator, do you think it's right to
criticize things you haven't seen?
And he goes No, you're probably right. I should see it.
I wouldn't show
Transformers
5
, because that's just a crap movie. But this isn't a crap movie and in
fact Clint Eastwood has even said there's a very strong anti-war sentiment in
this film. You tell me, Eddy, when you came out of that film did you think to
yourself,
this is a great recruiting film
to get young boys to join the military?
I think I kind of
prepared myself for a piece of right wing propaganda when I went into the film.
When I saw it I was frightened because I felt like I was in a first-person
shooter video game, and I thought that was potentially a very dangerous thing,
if people were finding that titillating, that they'd think,
Wow, Iraq is this real-life version of this
video game that I'm playing. Cool
. So that was a scary moment. I was
totally glued to every second of the film, though. I didn't take my eyes off
the screen once. So yeah, I went in worried, and I thought the film did warrant
the worry, but after talking to you now there is potentially a real anti-war message
in there.
OK first of all he runs into his brother on the tarmac. He's so
excited to see his brother, who is getting on a plane to get out of there. You
can see the poor boy is completely shell-shocked. The American sniper dude,
Chris Kyle, is all excited to see him and then his brother finally says the
truth to him: "fuck this place." How often have I heard that from guys
returning from there?
Fuck this place.
And then his best friend is killed and he goes to the funeral with his wife and
his friend's widow reads his last letter home, an anti-war letter. You know,
war is wrong.
[body_image width='1279' height='853' path='images/content-images/2015/02/01/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/01/' filename='exclusive-interview-michael-moore-on-american-sniper-sarah-palin-and-ptsd-261-body-image-1422822652.jpg' id='23138']
Clint Eastwood at the 2007 Academy Awards. Photo via
Wikicommons
Clint Eastwood is not a right wing ideologue; he's a mixed bag
of nuts, politically. And really if anything he's a libertarian. If you wanted
to put a label on him, that's probably what he believes politically. I don't
think he believes the United States should be the policeman of the world. It
took a lot to show that the brother is against the war, his best friend is
against the war, and Chris seems like he's the only one to be like
Woo hoo! Everyone else is looking at him
like,
Are you crazy? Let's keep our heads
down and get the fuck out of here as soon as we can
.
Everybody knows the lie that Chris keeps telling himself, that
this is worth it, he has to keep saying because he probably knows deep down in
his heart that it's not worth anything—it has nothing to do with defending the
United States of America, which is their only job. That's what we pay our taxes
for. So if we are attacked or something is threatening us, we are protected.
This was not threatening us. Iraq was not attacking us and they weren't
planning to attack us.
I put out a book of letters from soldiers actually, because I
got so many from people who had signed up after 9/11, just wanting to do their
part, and two years later they got sent to Iraq and they're like
What the fuck am I doing here? I didn't sign
up for this
.
It sounds like you're
saying that the film is less one-dimensional than the discourse around the
movie and the backlash against you, which is almost more myopic than the film
itself.
Yeah, exactly. Then the question has to be asked, why? How did I become—why the hot button
on this one? I mean I've read what Noam Chomsky has written about this. I've
read Matt Taibbi, I've read Chris Hedges... I've read what the thinkers on the
far left have said, and I mean they are brutal and vicious about the movie. And
I agree on a lot of what they're saying, but they don't go after them, they go
after me. I figured this out a long time ago—the reason they go after me and
the reason they
went after Seth Rogen, is because we reach deep into the mainstream
of Middle America. My base, and obviously the church of the left, loves my work
and buys my books and goes to my movies, but if it were just them, I'd be
doomed. My movies play in shopping malls and cineplexes, and that's a very
unusual thing for someone on the left—to have our work, our art, reach that
deep into the mainstream of America. So that then makes me dangerous to them,
because they know that I have this audience. I love that sometimes I get these
comments like, "how did he get two million followers on Twitter? Somebody
explain that to me? What kind of world are we living in?"
I don't have a nightly show like Rachel [Maddow], I don't have
a weekly show like Bill [Maher]. My last movie was five years ago and my last
book was a couple. I'm not out there on a daily basis. I don't go on TV. And
yet I have this enormous fan base that extends way beyond the church of the
left, and obviously Seth Rogen does too, to an even greater extent because he's
not a political person. He's really, really in the mainstream, especially with
the younger generation. And that makes him dangerous and they have to stop him
immediately. He didn't think anything really political by it, I thought it was
a very astute, funny observation that he made. But now there's a restaurant in
Michigan and Seth Rogen and I can't eat there. I started a hashtag
#tableforsethandmike for any restaurant that will feed us to please send us
your name. [
Laughs]
[tweet text="Here's a tribute to you
@MMFlint Michael Moore.
Share it and make it trending
#michaelmoore pic.twitter.com/1UN9KJfPPJ" byline="— Dakota Meyer (@Dakota_Meyer)" user_id="Dakota_Meyer" tweet_id="558544679570911232" tweet_visual_time="January 23, 2015"]
Obviously you saw the
poster that Sarah Palin held up—Michael Moore with the crosshairs in the two
Os.
The one that ended her political career on Saturday?
Yeah.
Yeah, I tweeted those two Tweets on Sunday, and on Monday I
figured I better do a Facebook post because I live in a nation where a lot of people
can't comprehend, and plus 140 characters isn't a lot. So I did the Facebook [post] and then I decided I'm
going to be silent now until Friday. And I didn't tweet anything about this,
didn't talk about it, didn't do anything, just decided to play rope-a-dope with
these crazies and let them scream all week and they won't see me fighting back,
which will elevate their screaming and nuttiness and essentially let them punch
themselves in the face. This is what I hoped would happen. Think about this—the
vast majority of her base is made up of born-again Christians. Good Christian
people. They were stunned to see her holding a sign that said fuck you.
She got so mad at me that she let her guard down to reveal who she is, and the Christian right saw that and were all kind of horrified.
This is someone who portrays
herself as a real proper American mother.
Yeah, family values and apple pie, and she says things like golly gee wiz. She got so mad at me that
she let her guard down to reveal who she is, and the Christian right saw that
and were all kind of horrified. She got a lot of immediate blowback on social
media, and then again on Saturday before she stood up to give her speech. My
theory is she thought her own people turned against her in that time and it
rattled her, and then I guess the prompter went out, right? She wasn't able to
recover and she was right in the middle. I should go back and have a look at
this, I can't remember. I saw it on C-Span. But at the start she was on me,
she's just come off this posting, she's getting a lot of blowback from her
people so she starts off on me again, and then the prompter blows, so whatever.
I'd like to think that a good union man or woman...
Pulled the plug?
[Laughs] Pulled the
plug. But be that as it may, she got discombobulated, and if you follow any of
the news on her now, in the last four days, it's all saying that she's over.
They're attacking her on Fox—Bill Kristol, who was her big supporter... all these
people have abandoned her because of those two things that she said, holding a
sign that used the word fuck and her discombobulatedness when she was going off
on me and then lost the plot and couldn't speak.
On the crosshairs and
the
Os, didn't she get into some
trouble—didn't her website a few years ago have districts with crosshairs over
them across America?
Yes, and she had to pull that off. And in the "fuck you" sign,
she put crosshairs in the two
Os of
my name. And that also was part of the blowback, thanks for reminding me about
that. So using the f-word and she went back to the crosshairs on a human being.
For what it's worth, I'm
looking at the picture now and she's making this real kind of white trashy hand
sign—you know when you put your pinky out and your thumb is out... I don't even
know what they call that. There's a word for it.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
It's like a party time
kind of hand symbol. It's pretty funny.
[Laughs] This is more
like,
let's kill this motherfucker and
PARTY!
[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/M7Is43K6lrg' width='640' height='480']
Michael Moore's Oscar acceptance speech for 'Bowling for Columbine.'
There's something really
trashy and crude about what she's doing with her hands. I've got to ask you one
last question, because I can't end an interview talking about Sarah Palin. You
allow people suffering from PTSD to use your theaters as meeting places. How do
you think the film handled the issue of PTSD, since that topic is so close to
you?
Well I identify with it through the veterans I have helped, but
I also identify with it personally. I didn't have to go through what they went
through in Iraq, but I had to have the kind of threat level that I was under
after my Oscar speech, and after
Fahrenheit
there were half a dozen assaults on me. I had to hire a security team, which
was essentially six ex-Navy SEALs and Green Berets, and they caught this guy
who had made a fertilizer bomb to blow up my house. So I've had my own issues
with this.
I was glad it [PTSD] was part of the film. You know, Clint
didn't try to portray either the soldiers or the veterans as a monolithic, He-Man
operation. They were all kinds. And I think that they are... I know that this has
actually triggered some good stuff with people wanting to deal with PTSD issues,
and I think that the movie will engender wanting to help the returning
veterans. I hope it does good things on emotional levels. But on the cognitive
brain level, Americans who watch this film have to really commit to never
again. Never will we allow a situation like this to happen again.
And there's very little attention paid... the big funeral they
have at the end with the caravan, it looks like something you'd give to
somebody who had died in the war. The war he died in was the war at home—the
war of the returning veteran who wasn't getting help. But it's also the war of
an American culture, specifically a Texan culture that says,
Sure, give anybody a gun. Let's go to the
range. Oh, he has PTSD? No problem, have a gun
. The American gun, the
American culture and attitude toward guns, killed Chris Kyle. And it's dealt
with very briefly in the film. We're only told of how he died. Clint doesn't
show us the scene where he picks the guy up and they go to the gun range, and
show the scene at the gun range, and show that after all he goes through in
Iraq, he dies this way from a fellow Army guy. Not from some liberal, some
protester, but from one of his own. The whole thing is wrong, the whole war was
wrong. It was immoral; it was illegal. The Pope said this was not a just war,
and it is completely—look at the statistics of the guys who have come back in
terms of spousal abuse.
Prescription drug abuse...
Oh my god. It's just... And I get this feeling from people, Out of sight out of mind. I don't want to
think about it.
But if the film gets them to think about it, it will have
done a good thing, but if they go away from the film thinking
Can't wait for that next war so we can get
more of those bad guys
, well I'm sorry folks but we're not going to learn
our lesson until we're willing to say
We
were the bad guys
, we were the guys
who did the wrong thing here
. People were defending their homes and that's
why they were killing us. As we would kill them! If a group of Iranians or
Iraqis or Canadians were coming down your Main Street in the town you're in,
tell me you'd act any different.
It's even more
complicated than that, because not only were they killing the American
soldiers, they were killing each other. And frankly, in a way, maybe it's kind
of perfect that this film comes out now, at a time when ISIS has brought the Iraq
war back into people's consciousness, and exposed the complexity there that
nobody really knew existed when we went into Iraq because they didn't pay
attention or learn about it. It's interesting the film is coming out now, when
everything is kicking up again, because we pulled this thing apart. The mess is
now, and yet to come.
We did pull it apart, and I'm not saying Saddam Hussein was a
good a guy, but clearly he understood that the only way for Iraq to not fall
apart was for it to be a secular country, not a religious country. If religion
was going to be introduced, there would be a civil war. And he was right.
That's what's happening right now.
Would we be showing a film that constantly refers to Native Americans as savages?
I have to say before we close that the portrayal of Iraqis,
Arab, and Muslim people in this film is really offensive. We're talking about
this in our home in Michigan, there are a lot of native people here, and would
we be showing a film that constantly refers to Native Americans as savages? I
mean the word is said one too many times in that film. The first time I heard
it I was like
OK, I get it, soldiers talk
this way
, but when it kept getting repeated, then I heard Clint Eastwood
talking, not the soldiers. He really needed to drive that point home. He needed
to drive it home, story-wise, that the other sides were savages, that they
would put a drill into a boy's head. That he really needed.
The first thing I wrote about his conflation of Vietnam with
Iraq is that this whole thing about sending children out with grenades or the
women or whatever, that was part of the Vietnam mythology. And it did happen in
Vietnam a few times, but it scared everybody, made everybody think that the
Vietnamese were animals. Well that didn't really happen in the Iraq war. The
kids were not booby-trapped; the kids were not doing grenades and all that. In
Palestine there were women who were suicide bombers, there was the woman who
tried to be a suicide bomber in Jordan, but they're trying to negotiate the
release right now. But that wasn't the Iraq war; it wasn't that kind of thing.
We lost so many guys and so many limbs because of cell phones
and IEDs they could put on the road and explode. And then Rumsfeld refused to
upgrade the Humvees from General Motors, so they were just tinfoil on the
bottom for the first couple of years. Guys there started retrofitting the Humvees,
they would just get scrap metal and bolt it all over the fucker so they could
live because the Pentagon wasn't giving them vehicles they were going to
survive in. So it was offensive to hear that word spoken throughout by—not by
bad people, but by good people, which made it seem that it's OK to say these
words about these Iraqi "savages."
It's also maintained a feeling about Arabs and Muslims that
makes me feel uncomfortable. But you know, I'm not saying we try to whitewash
this thing, there are some serious problems. Even with the guy with the
fertilizer bomb, I can cite you one example of that in ten years against me. If
I lived in other countries it would be a little bit more often. So I don't want
to compare this to that, but I just
posted a thing
on Facebook tonight
because I've been asked for this in the last couple of
days with Clint Eastwood—did he threaten to kill me. So Snopes finally did a
thing on it yesterday, and said yes, this is true, it happened in 2005 at
Tavern on the Green. I think everybody took it as a joke or half joke, but it
was one of those weird things where he wasn't expecting a laugh, and then when
people did laugh, he didn't like it, so he was like
Hey, I mean it. I'll shoot you. Then it got really quiet, like, what the fuck is wrong with him? There
are certain things you don't make a joke about. You don't say to a woman,
Hey, I'm gonna rape you, and then
nervous laughter,
No, I mean it! I'm
gonna rape you!
Don't say that please. That's not cool.
Let's just close here,
with one last thing. Not every film can tell every story. Surely there are many
Iraqi stories that are not being told in this film, but that last shot of the
film where Chris walks out the door and we know what's going to happen next,
what about the untold story of that killer? Should we know about these guys? Is
anyone telling that story of the psychologically shattered Iraqi vet coming
home?
No, it's not being told. Nobody thinks about it in their
day-to-day lives. People don't want to think about how serious this problem can
be. We're going to pay the price for it if we don't address it. We're already
paying the price for it. It's a great problem and should be a top, top
priority.
Where do people go to
learn more? Do you want to send them somewhere?
The veterans hotlines that have been set up by veterans groups.
There's a documentary short that's nominated for the Oscars this year called
Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1. It's
so powerful. It's based in a veterans hotline just up the river from here. So I
think that anything you can do to support on a local basis and encourage
psychologists, psychiatrists to donate whatever time they have. Don't depend on
the VA for it. Then there are really good groups like the Iraq and Afghanistan
veterans of America and others who are really trying to be good advocates for
veterans, and I think that people should join that group. They should support
it, and I think also we should make our representatives make this a priority.
There's a problem with our healthcare system in that we don't treat mental
health as an equal partner in this. We should be equally concerned with
fighting mental health as well as physical health.
How many veterans commit
suicide per day?
It's 22 a day.
That's staggering.
The percentage of homeless who are veterans is staggering. If
young boys in high school could be shown
here's
how your country thanks you for your service
... I wrote a blog last year
saying I want everyone to stop saying to soldiers and vets "thank you for your
service to our country." They don't want to hear that, they want you to shut
the fuck up and do something. Make sure there's mental health available. Put in
politicians who won't send them to war for no reason. You know, if you want to
thank them then that's how you can thank them.
More information on PTSD and veteran support groups can be found at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Follow Eddy Moretti on Twitter @eddymoretti.