If Gore's movie is about what it will take for us to survive as a species, Moore's is about what it will take for us to survive as a nation.
I was just listening on the radio about how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's defining phrase, "The New Deal", was actually just a single mention near the climax of his first Democratic Convention acceptance speech.
For those of us who are old enough to remember when nobody even imagined Ronald Reagan could be elected President, remember "the common good?" Lower case, but covering everybody?
France does. England and Canada do. Cuba...be prepared to wonder if we've really got it so good. You know, that American exceptionalism thing, that lock on material wealth, at least in the big spreadsheets, that gives us a little license to be smug?
Nobody is working at Moore's level in agitprop documentary. Feature film level, and our audience erupted many times, applauding at the end. He even manages to make George Bush, in the brief shot that opens the movie, entertaining.
Think of it:
1989 Roger and Me
2002 Bowling for Columbine
2004 Fahrenheit 9/11
2007 Sicko
That's a serious body of work. And the in-theater experience of the new one is so good because the stories and the people are great. Although he narrates throughout, Moore keeps his physical presence out of the first half of the movie, building to the picture's great set piece when the filmmaker rents a yacht and takes three 9/11 workers, heroes who can't get the proper treatment in the U.S. for ailments suffered during their volunteer rescue effort, to Guantanamo and then Cuba in search of a cure.
Per former British Labour Party hero Tony Benn, governments should be scared of the people, not the people afraid of the government (V), as Cheney/Rove/Bush have made us. He says the two biggest tools of repression are fear and demoralization. We know what he's talking about. Now Americans need to be pissed enough that we scare our government.
The fact is that everyone knows the U.S. health care system is a nightmare. Moore does a big service digging back to actual Nixon/Ehrlichman moment in 1971 (on tape, natch') when they greenlit starting our current system -- putting our national health care system on a profit basis.
I once read that master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa said his job was to expose the troubles of mankind, that as an artist it was not his job to provide the solutions. But in his practice Moore goes further and, by example and a simple, elegant "common good" summarizing polemic, points the way.
Without overly saying it Moore is basically saying we just have to nationalize the whole thing. Single payer = free and guaranteed health care for all Americans, on demand. Close down and delist Kaiser Permanente, Blue Cross and Blue Shield.
We're the last industrialized Western nation to lack it. We're the wealthiest nation in the world.
If the rest of them get to live a life free of the constant worrying about their family's cost and coverage, why not you and all your fellow Americans?
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