The Transcended Film Critic

I was fortunate enough to meet Roger Ebert several years ago atop Nob Hill in San Francisco, a few hours after he co-hosted an advertising award event at the Masonic Center. He was still in his tux and I was with the friend who brought me to the event, and when we stopped to congratulate him on a good job, he immediately turned the conversation to the quality of some of the work shown and, like a bunch of film fans meeting on a street corner, we traded lively views on our favorite spots.

Ebert is the best of the mainstream film critics because he's a populist epicurean, which is to say a popularizer of quality films both contemporary and classic. His Overlooked Film Festival (now called Ebertfest) is always brilliantly curated, and the Great Movies section of his website is full of fascinating gems of classic film descriptions and advocacy.

Every since being diagnosed with cancer and undergoing very difficult surgery, Ebert has been in a long, slow recovery. But he hasn't given up. It surely feels like a second life for him, considering that his partner in the iconic At the Movies show, Gene Siskel, didn't survive the disease. And now he's speaking out on the Obama health plan (in so much as Obama's principles for health care/health insurance reform are influencing the House and developing Senate bills).

He's making the moral case for this much-needed reform.

And he's not afraid to call elements of the plan socialism, because as he writes:

Readers have written about their belief in Federalism, Free Market Capitalism, strict Constitutionalism, personal liberty, Libertarianism, and so on. To one of these readers I wrote something like: "Do you think your views on federalism will be of much interest to unemployed wage-earners unable to obtain coverage for their families?" To another, I wrote: "I hope your philosophy will be of comfort if you develop a serious illness."

As I've said for awhile, the biggest problem with American Republicanism/Conservatism as it exists today is the theoretical nature of all the rhetoric. Nothing is based in hard evidence -- we weren't greeted as liberators in Iraq, we didn't bolster the economy with Bush's tax cuts for the rich, Creationism is not the practical equivalent of Darwinism, and even those who complain about certain health services in Canada and England do not, by and large, wish for a re-privatized system.

Thanks, Roger. I hope you live long enough to see this country implement a public health insurance option that keeps the private companies honest, and a system where when someone loses their job thanks to a high-level corporate cost-cutting decision made by hyper-rich CEOS and SVPs, their family won't suddenly be without proper health care.

Especially if something goes wrong.

Like getting cancer.