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Calling Michael Moore heavy-handed would be like saying Elaine Stritch speaks frankly. Neither phrase fully captures their forceful bluntness.
Moore launches hyperbole into a new orbit of rhetorical excess. Consider a 485-word Facebook Note he posted this week about GM's ignition switch debacle.
Language choices include "decapitated body parts" and "the criminals at General Motors." And that's not even the frothiest foaming in Moore's latest attack on the corporation he first snapped at in Roger & Me, a 1989 documentary that launched his career as an activist film director.
Here's how the Flint firebrand opens his provocative post:
I am opposed to the death penalty, but to every rule there is usually an exception, and in this case I hope the criminals at General Motors will be arrested and made to pay for their premeditated decision to take human lives for a lousy ten bucks.
Yes, you read that right -- Moore suggests that GM executives committed a capital offense by responding inadequately and tardily to the potentially fatal risks of sudden ignition shutoff.
They did a "cost-benefit analysis" and concluded that paying off the deceased's relatives was going to be cheaper than having to install a $10 part per car. They then covered up their findings and continued to let millions drive around with the defective part.
"They knew they wouldn't get caught, and if they did, no one would ever serve any time," writes the Flint firebrand.
Moore's wide-angle field of fire encompasses the federal government ("Bush's business-friendly Transportation Department") and capitalism:
The cause of this tragedy is an economic system that places profit above everything else, including -- and especially -- human life. GM has a legal and fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to make the biggest profits that it can. And if their top people crunch the numbers and can show that they will save more money by NOT fixing or replacing the part, then that is what they are going to goddam well do. F*** you, f*** me, and f*** everybody they sent to their deaths. That pretty much sums up their "culture". They knew they wouldn't get caught, and if they did, no one would ever serve any time.
I hope someone in the Obama administration will get out the handcuffs, the SWAT teams or the U.S. Army if need be, march into GM headquarters in downtown Detroit and haul away anyone who is there who had anything to do with this. And if they already left town, hunt them down and bring them in to face justice.
There's a sizable audience for this sort of stuff. The rant has been shared more than 1,400 times, is near 3,600 likes and has 400 comments.
Actually, not all comments are from fans. "You are an idiot," says the most recent. And Joe Bradford of Lewisburg, Tenn., asks:
Would you support the death penalty for a thug on the street who kills someone for a "lousy ten bucks?" Or do you only want to kill when it is a rich person who has caused a death?
Moore hasn't replied yet.
