A fellow student of mine went to Michael Moore‘s presentation here at San Francisco State Monday night, and she filled me in a bit on some of the events that took place.
There were about 4,000 people in the gym and at least another 1,000 outside that couldn’t get in. Michael was late starting the show inside because he took some time to talk to the folks outside first.
Michael put on a little quiz show routine where he invited a Canadian (supposedly with a low GPA) and several Americans (supposedly with high GPAs) down from the audience to participate. He asked the Canadian questions about the United States (who’s the President and some basic geography questions, etc.) and then some geography questions about other parts of the world like Iraq and Afghanistan. The Canadian got everything right. He then asked the high gpa American students about Canada and the same geography questions about Iraq and Afghanistan — none of which they could answer correctly.
He went on to cite a few studies of Americans from 18-24 years of age where the subjects didn’t seem to know where many other countries in the world were physically located. He made the point that if we were going to be at war with countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, we should probably know where they are on the map.
At one point, he asked the audience to get together and decide who they’d like him to call up on the telephone while he was there. The audience wanted him to call the President of SFSU, but nobody knew his phone number. So their next choice was mayoral candidate Gavin Newsome. Luckily Mayoral candidate Matt Gonzales was in the audience, and he had Newsome’s personal cell phone number handy.
The audience didn’t like Newsome, and Michael asked them why. The audience filled Michael in on the “Care Not Cash” situation, which takes General Assistance payments away in exchange for “services,” many of which have yet to be completely specified (although the payments would cease immediately).
(A Judge has already thrown this legislation out, by the way, on the grounds that it’s illegal to take this money away from people, even if the voters voted it in.)
Michael then called up Newsome and said something along the lines of “I’ve heard about this ‘Care Not Cash’ thing and it seems like you don’t really care at all.” He mentioned the Getty family and said something like “we all know that you’re a Republican in Democrat clothing…I’m in front of an audience of thousands of people right now (he then held up the phone so audience could make noise)…hear that? That’s a whole lot of votes that are not going to be voting for you, Gavin.”
Then he switched his tone of voice to a cheerful one and said “Ok thanks! Have a nice day!”