I'm sick of hearing people talk about Michael Moore.

Or, let me be more specific with that statement.

I'm sick of hearing people talk about Michael Moore who have had no actual experience in the reading of any of his texts, be it film, book or other entity. And, it's one of the most depressing things when a laundry list of who's who among America's most influential people right now have not seen Fahrenheit 9/11: John McCain. John Kerry. Pres. Bush.

My first experience with the hefty man in a Michigan cap was during a class here at Penn State, English 200, which is a class about literary theory. The point of English 200 was to learn how to talk intelligently about books and novels, but the professor I had set it up a bit differently. We learned this complex stuff, but through a lens that introduced us to an equally challenging situation in our world, globalization. Hence, we watched an appropriate Moore film about the outsourcing of jobs in his hometown of Flint, Mich., The Big One. If you've ever seen The Big One, you know that Moore has never hidden his viewpoints and isn't afraid to ask difficult questions to critical people in our culture. It takes cajones to walk up to Phil Knight or Charleston Heston and ask why they feel the way they do about things. It's a hilarious and deeply depressing moment to watch Knight guiltily admit that he has Nike shoes made in Indonesia, because it is cheaper there.

As it is a hard thing to swallow when Heston dodges questions about why he went to Flint, Mich., to promote the National Rifle Association when a little girl was killed years before in the town. I'm a fan of anybody who creates a stir, and in terms of the definition of a patriot, I think that Moore fits the bill.

Patriot: (noun) An outsider in the hegemonic scheme; a non-college graduate makes it big by questioning those in power; a self-made man who loves his country and tries to fight for his opinions; more self-made than ol' W; perpetuating a viewpoint that has been seen; making our common sense look nonsensical; throwing tea in the ocean; taxation without representation; all that bull-jive bro.

I saw Bowling for Columbine twice in the theater, and feel that Moore deserves any accolades he receives. Albeit, his outburst at the Oscars may have been a bit juvenile, but that's his style. And I'm willing to deal with it.

According to his box office records this summer, other Americans are too. Flash forward to June this year, and more specifically, Fahrenheit 9/11.

You could define the fire-starter Fahrenheit 9/11 in many different ways. First and foremost, it's a giant rhetorical question that asks: Does Pres. Bush's policies implicitly favor an ideology that causes American ethnocentrism and the continued domination of the rich over the poor, all over the globe (hence, our domination of a poorer country, and the people of Iraq)?

Which, hell, is an uncomfortable and difficult question for any of us to answer, because we are all in college, trying to enter in the banality of the middle class and are not explicitly going to enter the underclass of the United States unless we completely and utterly mess up. (At Penn State, the only way I see this happening is if a student just drinks himself to stupid oblivion, in which case, he or she goes back home to middle class suburbia and ends up at a job with help from Mommy or Daddy. This is how wealth stays in the upper crusts of America.)

Part of what shakes us out of our complacency should be hard-to-ask questions that are based on ideas that would perpetuate our culture. So for Moore, questioning our government seems like the common sense thing to do (the Bush administration frowns upon questioning its values, viewpoints and ideas), and everyone should applaud his efforts. He's why our founding fathers protected the right to free speech. The only other people questioning mainstream values are intellectuals, which is were Moore gets his ideas, and quashes them into bite-sized nuggets of leftist thought.

But, disappointingly, now it seems that the media has created an aura of superstar and scandal around Moore. Newspapers, CNN, the little ticker spewing forth its venomous string of up-to-the-minute, you need to know coverage; they all talk about the man as an incredulous George W. Bush-hater. And Moore is partly to blame for this. His unabashed mud-slinging of our president, outspoken behavior and larger-than-life cartoonish appearance all add to the custom-packaged liberal stock character that the media has made Moore out to be.

I mean, the man should at least try to shave once in a while. But personal hygiene is not an issue in an election, unless you count the satirical slow-motion scene of make-up application in Farenheit 9/11 in which countless Republican heads are made to look less-than-real. Because nothing is more real in American politics right now than Moore. He's giving up his chance to win more awards to air his documentary on PBS so the public can hear what he has to say. He's holding people accountable in critical positions.

And, if everything goes right, he'll be standing in the Bryce Jordan Center, telling the inheritors of this world the lies we have been told. Do yourself a favor, and whether you agree with him or not, listen to what he has to say.

Whereas George W. Bush will only be remembered as a one-term president whose daddy helped him to get where he is, Moore will be up there with Emerson, Thoreau or even Lincoln, as a chubby, misfit challenger to the stasis and dangers of contemporary American consumer culture.