Does Michael Moore Hate Working People?

And does the self-proclaimed defender of the working and middle classes actually know anything about them and how they live?

My questions were prompted after a “letter from Michael Moore” popped into my inbox. It was promoting the DVD launch of his documentary Capitalism – A Love Story.

Mr. Moore acknowledges that some may not have watched it in the movie theater because they were working too hard but then blames poor ticket sales on the behaviour of the very workers he pretends to defend in his documentaries.

He seems to detest working people and how he thinks they behave in the movie theater.

But for those of you who didn’t get to the theater, what’s your excuse? Didn’t want to sit through 20 minutes of TV ads up on the screen before the movie started? Don’t like sitting next to people who have 6 important cell calls to make during the film? Feet get stuck to the floor after two hours of people spilling their 164 oz. sodas, thus preventing you from getting up when the film’s over?

So in Mooreland the workers of the world are boorish, inconsiderate slobs who eat and drink to excess and mess up their theaters.

It is clear Michael Moore despises his audience, but perhaps even more tellingly, he does not even seem to know how they live or even what the inside of a movie theater looks like these days.

For one, I travel a lot across America and in the movie theaters I go to most people seem to enjoy the trailers.

Honestly, when was the last time people made a phone call, never mind six, in the theater beside you? It simply doesn’t happen anymore (if it ever really did).

And feet stuck to the floor? In most movie theaters nowadays you could eat your dinner of the floor. Michael Moore likes to portray workers in some kind of Dickensian nightmare struggling against uncaring bosses who will work them to death in hellish conditions. In Mooreland there are no air conditioned offices and factories or on-the-job trainings and promotions.

And in Mooreland, the movie theaters are thirty-year-old caricatures that were inaccurate even then.

So I beg the question: Does Michael Moore actually know any working people and how they behave? Or does he just despise them and their habits from so far away that he doesn’t even know what their habits are? And given his strange assumptions about the interior of movie theaters, it seems fair to ask, does Michael Moore even go to the movies any more?