Alan Keyes and the Mosh Pit.

[coloradodem2005]

got a better way to choose the president.
—Michael Moore, The Awful Truth

Here's the premise. In 1999-2000, filmmaker/satirist/activist Michael Moore, as part of his television series The Awful Truth (airing on the Bravo cable channel), took a look at the slate of potential presidential candidates for the 2000 election and noticed that the men (of course, they were men) being offered the American public were essentially the same. Using the main contenders vying for the Republican and Democratic nominations (Gary Bauer, Bill Bradley, George W. Bush, Steve Forbes, Al Gore, Orrin Hatch, Alan Keyes, and John McCain), he noted that they were all for many of the same things: cutting taxes, the death penalty, expanding the Pentagon, increasing military spending. So Moore made a short documentary about an alternate way of picking a president when the differences seem minimal (the original idea came from a viewer).

The candidates appear to love pretending they are "of the people" and able to relate to the common man. Film clips are shown with Bush showing his quasi-bilingualism ("¡Silencio!") and perhaps more disquieting (from the man Moore refers to as the "Manchurian Candidate") McCain: "I'm just like Luke Skywalker trying to get out of the Death Star!"1 So it was decided: "If you want my vote, you gotta mosh."

Why not? A mosh pit is "that one place where America's youth can express their deepest feelings by beating each other stupid" and there's "no better place to put the candidates." So he implements his plan. He gets a flatbed truck which orange netting on the sides to hold the group of "degenerate" but registered Ames and Des Moines Iowa high school students (who skipped class to participate and were probably not insured, Moore confesses via DVD commentary) and gets the band Rage Against the Machine to offer them a song to mosh to (according to Moore, it's "Guerilla Radio" and the band members are friends of his).

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http://www.everything2.com/index.pl

In honor of his entry in the Illinois Senate race.

[NightTrain]

1. I saw that on Bravo!

God, I love Michael Moore!