Spent much time ranting about spineless Democrats lately?
Do you know Dennis Kucinich's history of standing up to the banks and saving Cleveland's publicly-owned electric system, for which he lost the next election, but was later reinstated when voters realized he was not only right, but intelligently courageous? That was spine!
Have you seen Sicko? I went with radical wifey Lynda and Berkeley Bus Rapid Transit and nuclear activist Len and we poked each other and whispered in amazement so much that another patron four seats away asked us to calm down. ("Settle!", she said. Where did that strange turn of phrase come from, I wonder?")
We were amazed. Under the phold...
I haven't done a review of Sicko, because I foolishly thought I was seeing everything I needed to know in the cuts, trailers, and reviews by others. But I was wrong, because Sicko is not even mostly about medical care.
Sicko is about the same message that I keep hammering here, the one Kucinich evolved a while ago, the message that Jesus and Spinoza and William James and a whole raft of recent cognitive scientists have told us, like we were maybe selfish children:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Michael Moore's message is the close equivalent of Mommy firmly grasping your shoulders, looking straight into your eyes, and saying "How would you like it if someone did that to YOU?"
Your mommy did, liberal and conservative and libertarian mommies do it. It's the obvious best way to teach cooperation, and it is, of course, the essence of socialism: don't hurt anyone, neither by action or inaction, not by willful ignorance nor impersonal greed; the doctor's creed:
DO NO HARM!
Moore's genius is that he ties it all together. First he gives us people who are uninsured, then people who have done it all right, and get screwed by the system, including doctors who lament their entanglement with a social and medical system that keep them from helping people, and then the Denial Doctors who actively work to put Profit over Principle, and suffer the pricks of conscience, as they work for the Pricks that hire them.
And then Moore DOES THINGS in the real world, takes chances with the ocean (I speak boat, and I've been to Cuba by boat. The Florida Straits are Ocean Water, and those were small overloaded boats.
(Of course, the little part where they cut into the movie and say that the government won't let them tell you how they got there might also hide a big boat taking the mass of people to small boats offshore Isle of Pines, etc.)
The scenes where the abandoned rescue personnel from NYC finally get some treatment without reservation, after the long drumbeat about everyone in the First World but them getting medical care for free, just for paying taxes, is really heartbreaking, as Moore's genius is to make you feel the Other.
That's his message: you're not really human, no matter how many toys you have, how much entertainment, unless you are a member of a cooperative.
That's right. I mean it. What Americans don't GET is that they are raised to be loners, mere consumers, little impulse-buying robots, fed little treats from the hands of the oligarchy, to keep the profit machines humming away, printing dollars so the Rich can have more fun, more power, more status.
And Kucinich says "Real Status is Service to Others!" and Kos says "Ugh!"
You understand why I get annoyed. I write these diaries as diaries, personal expressions of feeling, in hopes of evoking a spirit of cooperation, without exclusion, without meaningless obeisance to unnecessary liberal totems like Democrat and Progressive.
We need each other, and we need to know it, and say it, and do it. It's just our nature. We don't just compete, as Libertarians would have us believe.
First, we cooperate.