More Moore

Reader Bob Boldt sent in a review of Sicko. Although his words appear in the comments (quite a few posts down), I would like to give them greater play, because Moore's film deserves our continuing attention. All words below the asterisks are Boldt's.

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I finally had the pleasure of watching Michael Moore’s Sicko. I won’t go into details or an extensive review now except to say that it is certainly the best thing he has done to date. In spite of having lost some of its impact by being perhaps a half-hour too long, Sicko is doing what documentaries are best meant to do - using unscripted footage of real people and events to distill the truth in a capsulated form - to open our eyes and raise our awareness. The camera work was slightly improved over his past projects - although still terrible by even the most forgiving “commercial” documentary standards. I think he even pried a few bucks from his wallet for a Steadycam rental in the Paris scenes. I guess - like Cassavetes, bad cinematography will remain pretty much a trademark with Moore.

For me, the most revealing part of the film came during an interview with former MP, Tony Benn [1]who said that democracy mandates things like universal health care. He said that rulers prefer to keep the people in a constant stare of fear, poverty, ill health, low self esteem, depression and despair in order that they may be more easily managed. Later an American in Paris says that “In a democracy the people do not fear the government, the government fears the people.” That is the only way that democracy ever works. That is the only way it can work.

I think that the hidden message, or at least the message that must be teased out from Sicko is this: Our poor health care system (at least the way a majority of lower and middle class Americans experience it) is more than just a well designed Capitalist shell game to take from the poor to give to the rich - to harvest big bucks from the rubes. It is, on a more profound level, a magnificent piece of social engineering and crowd control. You are not going to rock the boat if doing so will put your career and family in jeopardy. How many people in this country hold jobs just for the illusion of healthcare for themselves and their loved ones?

Daniel Ellsberg, not too long ago, made an eloquent plea for whistleblowers to come forward. [2.] He begged them to lift the lid of secrecy about the plans concerning the build up to the Iraqi war He spoke to the members of the military and especially the compliant Pentagon bureaucracy to act as he had done in his Pentagon Papers revelations, to bring forth the documents that can indict this administration. Is it any wonder no one comes forward? Why do you suppose only the safely retired generals have the temerity to question Bush’s war policy? Who is brave enough to risk job and career and family for one stupid act of bravery and patriotism? And it is just the military that demands obedience, and silence. Multiply this by the millions of wage slaves all across this land and your will see the dystopian vision of 1984 perfectly incarnated.

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The peculiar brilliance of Moore’s strategy is that it is directed at working-class people. The blue-collars in this country have been perhaps the most singularly disenfranchised of all. These were the people who deserted the union halls and the Democratic Party to march lemming-like to the Gipper’s pipe-song. These are the ones who give the phone boards of Limbaugh and Hannity that constant Christmas glow. They rant against taxation for the rich, socialized medicine and delight in cutting their own throats. These are the people Michael Moore is targeting. I know the progressives and the intellectuals love him. He could care less if he is idolized by the left and excoriated by the right. His message is for the worker at McDonald’s and Wal-Mart, the unemployed steel worker, the secretaries and all the other grist for the millers. These are the masses that must be moved and Michael is the man to move them.

I do not despair. The truth is coming out whether our masters like it or not. All the heat and pressure of this most interesting of times is distilling the real issues into a heady reductive brew. Never have the contradictions of power and the hypocrisy of those who would sell us and our future out for their own gain been more obvious or set in higher relief. This discontent does not reside only in the enlightened. It is gnawing as well at those the elites would call the “great unwashed”. That is why there is so much displaced anger in the land and why I’m sure guys like Limbaugh and Hannity must feel at times distinctly uneasy in their precarious. seating atop this tiger. After all, they will be the first ones eaten when their “ditto heads” begin to awaken. These people will not listen to the “liberal media,” academics, the politicians, or even their ministers. They will listen to guys like Michael Moore.

The most difficult journey a human being can make is from the zone of comfort to the frontier of action. This is a transition we Americans must soon effect if there is to be any hope for our society or for the world. We have to lay aside so many comfortable assumptions that have stayed so long that, like the air we breathe, we no longer even recognize them as separate from ourselves. “Drive your Chevrolet; in the USA; America’s the greatest land of all!” [3.] Dina Shore belted out of the speakers of our TVs over a half a century ago. Still today the tune springs more effortlessly into my mind than the Lord’s Prayer or the pledge of allegiance. This land we love is crumbling around us. We have shirked our responsibilities long enough: tilting at windmills not building them; watching Reality TV in place of good documentaries; accepting HMO membership as a substitute for a responsible, healthy life.

I am a believer in the power of the gods. As a professed atheist, I suppose my argument might be dismissed as a mere belief in metaphor. Yet there is a force here I cannot confidently explain away. The more the monotheists suppress these gods (and the forces they control) under their theocratic banner, the stronger they become. One of the most powerful of all the gods is the apparently unassuming trickster-god: Elegua [4.]Coyote, Till Eulenspeils, Br'er Rabbit, etc. His delight is in the upsetting of our best laid plans. His specialty is the destruction of the schemes of the rich and powerful - those pompous egos who think themselves invincible - the titanic Richard Cheneys of our world. I tell you this whole house of cards is coming apart on them. The gods - especially the gods of mischief and chaos, are already fouling all their little projects. Our rulers are as yet too blind to even notice the strands tightening around their ankles, preparing them for the great fall. Soon now it all will come crashing down. Every day I view with delight some new scandal. Even though I mourn the death of any one - from Saddam Hussein to Pat Tillman, I still view each disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan with hope. Finally the downy cheeked recruits and the third mission soldiers alike are awakening to the reality of the futility of this “search abroad for monsters to destroy.” This slogan of American Imperialism is even less tenable today than it was when Quincy Adams warned us off it 200 years ago.

From Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, The Iceman Cometh , The Wizard of Oz to A Face in the Crowd, literature and film are replete with examples of sudden transformations - of the instantaneous, catastrophic dropping of the illusions and the metamorphoses of a demagogue into plaything of the gods, hustler and pathetic confidence man in a single revelatory event. We are not beyond this happening today. In spite of all their power and seemingly unbreakable hold on the means of persuasion and mass hypnosis they are not immune from error and horrid miscalculation. The people only seem to slumber, only seem to be beyond shock and awe. They have been greatly bloodied of late and are growing steadily more tired of the diet of putrid meat the lackeys at the Wall Street Journal, The Weak-ly Standard, Fox and The NYT expect them to wolf down without first smelling it.

That is why the strident cries of the political hacks who would cheerlead on this dying , toxic administration in its final hour end up only amplifying its death rattle. That is why the loyal opposition candidates who, in spite of all their inept attempts at manipulation, still seem so wooden and devoid of conviction.

To my mind we have two things we must do with this emerging consciousness. First, Like the addict who awakens one morning and can no longer excuse the excrement and the filth he is lying in and vows to change his way of living at all cost, we must throw off these appetites and these rulers who have so for long punished us, soothed us and given us our fixes. And yet it is not enough just to clear the ground. Second, we must have a plan to build anew and not just fall back into some equally pernicious comfort - some new addiction. The tearing down will be painful not the least for the reason that the institutions we will be smashing must first be smashed within ourselves. We must take the AA (Amerika Anonymous) pledge. This is a difficult task and not everyone can do it. Most are content merely to go along and get along. All that is needed is that a few of us, those of us who have had this vision beyond the present hopelessness, must lead with courage and with love. We know there is a better way. This close to the brink of doom, there is no other way.


Notes:

[1.] Sicko interview clip with Tony Benn:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbUzKlmp-x8

“Choice depends on the freedom to choose and if you’re shackled with debt you don’t have the freedom to choose. People in debt become hopeless and hopeless people don’t vote. I think if the poor in Britain or the United States turned out and voted for people who represented their interests it would be a real democratic revolution. So (they are for) keeping people hopeless and pessimistic I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all, frighten people and secondly demoralize them. An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern and I think there is an element in the thinking of some people: ‘we don’t want people to be educated, healthy and confident because they would get out of control.’ The top one percent of the world’s population owns eighty percent of the world’s wealth. It’s incredible that people put up with it. But they’re poor, they’re demoralized, they’re frightened and therefore they think perhaps the safest thing to do is to take orders and hope for the best.”

[2.] Ellsberg said that he hopes someone with access to documents about the U.S. government’s plans for war with Iran will come forward. “By taking that risk,” he said, “they’d have a high chance of averting a catastrophe that would lead to the deaths of tens, hundreds of thousands of people and disastrously reduce our security.”

Ellsberg at a speech to the 46th annual General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations in Portland, Ore., June 20–24, 2007.http

www.uuworld.org/news/articles/31475.shtml

[3.] “Shore pioneered the prime-time color variety show with the Chevrolet Sponsored The Dinah Shore Chevy Show starting in October 1956 on NBC and running on Sunday nights until the end of the 1963 season. Dinah Shore helped make the low-priced Chevrolet automobile the most widely selling car up to that point in history.”

“See the USA in your Chevrolet
America is asking you to call
Drive your Chevrolet through the USA
America's the greatest land of all

On a highway, or a road along the levee
Performance is sweeter, nothing can beat her
Life is completer in a Chevy”

http://www.vintagechevrolet.org/articles/VCO_2001019_dinahshore.htm

“I started singin’,
"bye-bye, miss American pie."
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.”

American Pie - Don McClean

[5.] ELEGUA: Trickster God of Crossroads, Beginnings and Opportunity.

He's the Guardian of the Crossroads of Life. Whenever there are decisions to be made, he provides opportunities and second chances. If you're lucky. As a Trickster God, the childlike ELEGUA can sometimes make things even more complicated. At a whim he can turn a simple choice into a vast conundrum of paradox.

He's also messenger to the higher Gods, particularly OLORUN, and he does like to be noticed. He's partial to cigars and rum, but he is very good with children. His day is Monday — so you can start the week well under his ministrations. His colour coding is red and black.

http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/african-mythology.php?deity=ELEGUA</span>