Here Comes Trouble (4 page)

And then there was Lee James Headley. Sitting alone at his home in Ohio, Lee had big plans. The world, according to his diary, was a place dominated and being ruined by liberals. His comments read like the talking points of any given day’s episode of
The
Rush Limbaugh Show.

And so Lee made a list. It was a short list, but a list nonetheless of the people who had to go. The names on it were former attorney general Janet Reno, Senator Tom Harkin, Senator Tom Daschle, Rosie O’Donnell, and Sarah Brady. But at the top of the list was his number one target: “Michael Moore.” Beside my name he wrote, “MARKED” (as in “marked for death,” he would later explain).

Throughout the spring of 2004, Lee accumulated a huge amount of assault weapons, a cache of thousands of rounds of ammunition, and various bomb-making materials. He bought
The Anarchist’s Cookbook
and the race-war novel
The Turner Diaries.
His notebooks contained diagrams of rocket launchers and bombs, and he would write over and over: “Fight, fight, fight, kill, kill, kill!” He also had drawings of various federal buildings in Ohio.

But one night in 2004, he accidentally fired off a round inside his home from one of his AK-47s. A neighbor heard the shot and called the police. The cops arrived and found the treasure trove of weapons, ammo, and bomb-making materials. And his hit list. And off to jail he went.

I got the call some days later from the security agency.

“We need to tell you that the police have in custody a man who was planning to blow up your house. You’re in no danger now.”

I got very quiet. I tried to process what I just heard: I’m… in… no… danger… now.

For me, it was the final straw. I broke down. I just couldn’t take it anymore. My wife was already in her own state of despair over the loss of the life we used to have. I asked myself again, What had I done to deserve this? Made a
movie?
A
movie
led someone to want to blow up my home? What happened to writing a letter to the editor?

It seemed that my crime was bringing questions and ideas to a mass audience (the kind of thing you do from time to time in a democracy). It wasn’t that my ideas were dangerous; it was the fact that millions suddenly were eager to be exposed to them. And not just in the theater, and not just at lefty gatherings. I was invited to talk about these ideas on…
The View!
On
The Martha Stewart Show
. On
Oprah
—four times! Then there’s Vanna White, turning the letters of my name on
Wheel of Fortune.
I was allowed to spread the ideas of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, of I. F. Stone and the Berrigan brothers, everywhere. This drove the Right totally batshit crazy. I didn’t mean for that to happen. It just did.

And so the constant drumbeat against me grew louder, with conservative talk radio and TV describing me as something that was subhuman, a “thing” that hated the troops and the flag and everything about America. These vile epithets were being spoon fed to a poorly-educated public that thrived on a diet of hate and ignorance and had no idea what the word
epithet
meant. Here’s Bill O’Reilly making a crack to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, live on his Fox News TV show, in February of 2004:

“Well, I want to kill Michael Moore. Is that all right? All right. And I don’t believe in capital punishment—that’s just a joke on Moore.”
Ha ha.

As the months wore on, even after Bush’s reelection, the campaign to stop me only intensified. When Glenn Beck said over the airwaves that he was thinking of killing me, he was neither fined by the FCC nor arrested by the NYPD. He was, essentially, making a call to have me killed, and no one in the media at that time reported it. No FCC commissioner condemned it. It was simply OK to speak of me in this manner over the public airwaves.

And then a man trespassed on our property and left something outside our bedroom window when I wasn’t home. It terrorized my wife. He even videotaped himself doing this. When the police investigated, he said he was making a “documentary.” He called it
Shooting Michael Moore.
And when you went to his website, and the words
Shooting Michael Moore
came on the screen, the sound of a gunshot went off. The media ate it up, and he was asked to be on many TV shows (like Sean Hannity’s).
“Coming up next—He’s giving Michael Moore a taste of his own medicine! Moore now has somebody after him!” (Cue sfx: KA-BOOM!)
He then provided video and maps of how to not only get to our house, but how to illegally get onto the property. He failed to mention, though, what the ex-SEALs would do to you when they caught you.
³

And now a man from Ohio had drawn up plans and gathered the necessary materials to do to our house what Timothy McVeigh did in Oklahoma City.

“He’ll be going away to prison for a long time, Mike,” the security chief reassured me. “The reason that he and others always fail is because of the systems you have in place.”

“And because he had a nosy neighbor who called the cops,” I added.

“Yes, that too.”

I will not share with you the impact this had, at that time, on my personal life, but suffice it to say I would not wish this on anyone. More than once I have asked myself if all this work was
really
worth it. And, if I had it to do over again,
would I?
If I could take back that Oscar speech and just walk up on the stage and thank my agent and tuxedo designer and get off without another word,
would I?
If it meant that my family would not have to worry about their safety and that I would not be living in constant danger—well, I ask you, what would
you
do? You know what you would do.

For the next two and a half years, I didn’t leave the house much. From January 2005 to May 2007, I did not appear on a single television show. I stopped going on college tours. I just took myself off the map. I wrote the occasional blog on my website, but that was pretty much it. The previous year I had spoken on over fifty campuses. For the two years following that, I spoke at only one. I stayed close to home and worked on some local town projects in Michigan where I lived, like renovating and reopening a closed-down historic movie palace, starting a film festival, and trying to sleep at night.

And then to my rescue rode President Bush. He said something that helped snap me out of it. I had heard him say it before, but this time when I heard him, I felt like he was speaking directly to me. He said, “If we give in to the terrorists, the terrorists win.” And he was right.
His
terrorists were winning! Against me!
What was I doing sitting inside the house? Fuck it!
I opened up the blinds, folded up my pity party, and went back to work. I made three films in three years, threw myself into getting Barack Obama elected, and helped toss two Republican congressmen from Michigan out of office. I set up a popular website, and I was elected to the board of governors of the same Academy Awards that had booed me off the stage.

And then Kurt Vonnegut invited me over to his house one night for dinner. It would be one of four dinners I would have with him and his wife in the final year of his life. The conversations were intense, funny, provocative—and they
resuscitated me,
literally breathed life right back into me, and brought me back to a place in the world.

He told me he had been observing for some time “the crucifixion” (as he called it) that I was experiencing—and he had a few things he wanted to tell me.

“The extremes to which the Bush people have gone to get you, they directly correlate to just how effective you’ve been,” he told me over his third after-supper cigarette one night. “You have done more to put the brakes on them than you realize. It may be too late for all of us, but I have to say you have given me a bit of hope for this sad country.”

One night I went to his house and he was sitting out on the stoop by himself waiting for me. He told me that he had stopped contemplating the “meaning of life” because his son, Mark, had finally figured it out for him: “We’re here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” And that’s what he was doing for me.

Vonnegut had, in his final years, turned to writing nonfiction.

“This has been my greatest challenge,” he told me, “because the current reality now seems so unreal, it’s hard to make nonfiction seem believable. But you, my friend, are able to do that.”

We went for a walk to meet his wife and some friends for dinner. I asked him if any of this—the writing, the movies, the politics—was worth it.

“No, not really,” he replied in typical Vonnegut style. “So you might as well quit complaining and get back to work. You have nothing to worry about. No harm will come to you.” And then, realizing I might not be buying it, he added with the voice of God: “SO SAYETH I!” I stood there on East Forty-eighth Street looking at this mad son of Mark Twain and broke down into laughter. That was all I really needed to hear. If not the voice of God, then at least a gentle plea from Billy Pilgrim. And so it goes.

That night he gave me one of his drawings with the inscription, “Dear Iraq: Do like us. After 100 years let your slaves go. After 150 let your women vote. Love, Uncle Sam.” He signed it, “For Michael Moore, my hero—KV.”

I came back alive. I chose not to give up. I wanted to give up, badly. Instead I got fit. If you take a punch at me now, I can assure you three things will happen: (1) You will break your hand. That’s the beauty of spending just a half hour a day on your muscular-skeletal structure—it turns into kryptonite; (2) I will fall on you. I’m still working on my core and balance issues, so after you slug me I
will
tip over and crush you. It won’t be on purpose, and while you are attempting to breathe, please know I’ll be doing my best to get off you; (3) My SEALs will spray mace or their own homemade concoction of jalapeño spider spray directly into your eye sockets while you are on the ground. I hear this is excruciatingly painful. As a pacifist, please accept my apologies in advance—and never, ever use violence against me or anyone else again. (SERMON ALERT)

Only cowards use violence. They are afraid that their ideas will not win out in the public arena. They are weak and they are worried that the people will see their weakness. They are threatened by women, gays, and minorities—
minorities
,
for chrissakes! You know why they’re called “minorities”? Because they don’t have the power—YOU do! That’s why you’re called the “majority”! And yet you’re afraid. Afraid of fetuses not coming to term, or of men kissing men (or worse!). Afraid someone will take your gun away—a gun that you have in the first place because you’re…
afraid
!
Please, please, for the sake of all of us—RELAX! We like you! Heck, you’re an American!

One night in Aventura, Florida, I took my new buff self, along with a friend, to the mall alongside the William Lehman Causeway to see a movie. A young guy in his thirties passed by me, and as he did, he had this to say: “Shithead.”

He continued on his walk. I stopped and turned back toward him.

“Hey! You! Come back here!”

The guy kept walking.

“Hey, don’t run away from me!” I shouted louder. “Don’t be a chicken. Come back here and face me!”

“Chicken” is a dish not well served to the gender with testosterone for their fluid. He abruptly halted, turned and headed back toward me. As he got five feet from me, I said the following in a gentle voice:

“Hey, man—why would you say such a thing to me?”

He sneered and steeled himself for a fight. “Because I know who you are, and you’re a shithead.”

“Now, there you go again, using that word. You haven’t the foggiest idea who I am or what I’m really about. You haven’t even seen
one
of my movies.”

“I don’t need to!” he replied, confirming what I already suspected. “I already know the anti-American stuff you put out there.”

“OK, dude, that’s not fair. You can’t judge me based on what someone else has told you about me. You look way smarter than that. You look like a guy who makes up his own mind. Please watch one of my movies. I swear to God, you may not agree with all the politics, but I can guarantee you that (1) you will instantly know that I deeply love this country; (2) you will see that I have a heart; and (3) I promise you’ll laugh quite a few times during the film. And if you still wanna call me a shithead after that, then fine. But I don’t think you will.”

He calmed down, and we talked for at least another five minutes. I listened to his complaints about the world, and I told him that we probably have more that we agree on than disagree on. He relaxed even more, and eventually I got a smile out of him. Finally, I said I had to go or we were going to miss our movie.