By Michael Moore.
(…)
It was the night of March 23, 2003. Four nights earlier, George W. Bush had invaded Iraq, a sovereign country that not only had not attacked us, but was, in fact, the past recipient of military aid from the United States. This was an illegal, immoral, stupid invasion — but that was not how Americans saw it. Over 70 percent of the public backed the war, including liberals like Al Franken and the twenty-nine Democratic senators who voted for the war authorization act (among them Senators Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, and John Kerry). Other liberal war cheerleaders included New York Times columnist and editor Bill Keller and the editor of the liberal magazine the New Yorker, David Remnick. Even liberals like Nicholas Kristof of the Times hopped on the bandwagon pushing the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Kristof praised Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell for “adroitly” proving that Iraq had WMDs. He wrote this after Powell presented phony evidence to the United Nations. The Times ran many bogus front-page stories about how Saddam Hussein had these weapons of mass destruction. They later apologized for their drumbeating this war into existence. But the damage had been done. The New York Times had given Bush the cover he needed and the ability to claim, heck, if a liberal paper like the Times says so, it must be true!
And now, here it was, the fourth night of a very popular war, and my film, Bowling for Columbine, was up for the Academy Award. I went to the ceremony but was not allowed, along with any of the nominees, to talk to the press while walking down the red carpet into Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre. There was the fear that someone might say something — and in wartime we need everyone behind the war effort and on the same page.
The actress Diane Lane came on to the Oscar stage and read the list of nominees for Best Documentary. The envelope was opened, and she announced with unbridled glee that I had won the Oscar. The main floor, filled with the Oscar–nominated actors, directors, and writers, leapt to its feet and gave me a very long standing ovation. I had asked the nominees from the other documentary films to join me on the stage in case I won, and they did. The ovation finally ended, and then I spoke:
I’ve invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us. They are here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction, yet we live in fictitious times. We live in a time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fiction of duct tape or the fiction of orange alerts: we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush. Shame on you! And anytime you’ve got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up!
Thank you very much.
About halfway through these remarks, all hell broke loose. There were boos, very loud boos, from the upper floors and from backstage. (A few — Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep — tried to cheer me on from their seats, but they were no match.) The producer of the show, Gil Cates, ordered the orchestra to start playing to drown me out. The microphone started to descend into the floor. A giant screen with huge red letters began flashing in front me: “YOUR TIME IS UP!” It was pandemonium, to say the least, and I was whisked off the stage.
(…)
http://www.npr.org/books/titles/140473072/here-comes-trouble-stories-from-my-life?tab=excerpt#excerpt