Here Comes Trouble: Stories From My Life by Michael Moore

Author:Michael Moore [MOORE, MICHAEL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781455508570
Google: mJNqEXEf40MC
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2008-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Though I lived an hour from the border, I knew little of Canada. I had not spent any time there as a child. My mother’s father was a Canadian, but as a young man he left Canada for Michigan, and so our contact with his native land was limited.

Our Canadian relatives would make the occasional jaunt over to see us, and we would go over there less. Maybe our parents were worried we weren’t ready for international travel? Maybe Canada didn’t have indoor plumbing yet? I dunno. It was a distant land, it was “foreign,” and the Queen of England was on their money. Beyond that, we never gave it another thought.

Because borders can’t stop airwaves (television used to be transmitted free of charge through the air), we got to watch a lot of Canadian TV on CKLW, Channel 9, from Windsor, Ontario. Most of the programming on the Canadian Broadcasting Channel consisted of nature documentaries and comedy shows in black-and-white with ironic humor we didn’t understand. There were Mounties and lumberjacks and lots of shots of prairies. They had a great Sunday afternoon classic movie show, there was the thrilling Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday night, and there was the Canadian news.

And it was there, one night as a youngster, that I stumbled across the truth. I paused on Channel 9 as I was turning the dial, and the news was on. They were covering the Vietnam War, but there was something wrong with what they were showing. They were broadcasting images, not from South Vietnam but from North Vietnam! The enemy! Why were they doing that? They were showing the destruction caused by our bombing civilian villages. One elderly woman was in tears showing her hut, which “the American planes had bombed.” No we didn’t! Stop saying that! We’re the good guys! They’re the Germans!

But not on this night. And I couldn’t take my eyes off the CBC after that. And I wasn’t the only one. If you lived within sixty miles of the Canadian border and had a decent antenna or set of rabbit ears you could get The Truth about the Vietnam War from the Canadians, right from the beginning. This messed me up a bit because I had no clue that our own government would lie to us. I mean, that would have been un-American. And yet, here was our boring, friendly neighbor whispering across the hedge each night that we were doing a bad, bad thing. I felt like I did when Santa Claus turned out to be just my dad, or when I learned that Cheez Whiz wasn’t really cheese—but at least both of those things still brought happiness to my childhood. This revelation was nothing like that. This was a smack across my tender sixteen-year-old face, and I didn’t like it one bit.

Thanks to the Canadian channel, I came to fear and hate this war. I felt like I was the only one in the neighborhood who had found the secret

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