It's All A Very Clever Plan!
By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Featured Stories | Hollywood — Comments (11) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Kevin Drum has Michael Moore all figured out:
It's true that I wish Michael Moore were a wee bit more scrupulous with the facts in his films, but I sometimes wonder if he doesn't insert random distortions into his movies deliberately. With rare exceptions, after all, they're small things that could just as easily have been presented correctly without damaging his narrative at all. But the end result is the kind of publicity money can't buy, and it's the sweetest kind of publicity of all: the kind that's subsidized by his enemies, who helpfully boost ticket sales by furiously denouncing his films for weeks on end.
Got it? It's not that Moore is being disingenuous. It's just that he is being a diabolically brilliant salesman! What . . . what genius!
But fear not. Kevin Drum assures us that in SiCKO, Moore is being scrupulous with the facts. And you can take Kevin Drum's word for it. Because even though, in the past, Moore was disingenuous in order to get publicity, this time, he is being entirely honest and straightforward. Kevin Drum assures us of that, after all.
Of course, when Republicans or conservatives are disingenuous with the facts, they are not being brilliant salespeople, capable of "getting [their] mortal enemies to do all [their] publicity for [them." Because we all know Republicans and conservatives aren't that smart.
This heads-we-win-tails-you-lose rationalization has been brought to you by the Reality-Based Community. In the meantime, read Michael Tanner, who in Kevin Drum's world, is a dupe. Oh, and I guess this is just some more of that calculated disingenuous behavior designed to attract some free publicity. But don't worry. We can still trust what Michael Moore has to say about health care.
Right?
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It's All A Very Clever Plan! 11 Comments (0 topical, 11 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
while I don't think Moore's lies are diabolically placed in his movies to get attention, I do think Moore purposefully seeks to poke his detractors with big sticks, because it does get him more publicity.
Although the problem is that I think Moore believes his lies, therefore it kind of negates Drum's whole reasoning behind Moore's motivations for playing with the truth.
Moore does like to get a rise out of his detractors. I think he simply is beyond the point of caring if he does it by lying or not which, as you point out, pretty well nullifies Drum's argument and, in my view, calls Drum's ability to distinguish fact from fiction into question.
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling
Michael Moore is the kind of incisive social commentator that academic liberals like to hear about when they're driving home from "work" and fretting about global warming.
He's their postmodern version of a genuinely socially-responsible comedian, a producer and director of incisive and hard-hitting filmographic schlock that helps them out in their "much more serious" day jobs, and a conversation starter in and of himself. He's a national asset in their view, Streiff.
Limbaugh, OTOH, is a scourge and a pariah who must be expunged from the airwaves. That isn't said very often in public, but it is said quite plainly in private.
If Michael Moore was more scrupulous with the facts he would lose most of the people who support him, including many people whose tacit support comes from the "highest reaches" of academia and who see him as a funny and harmless gadfly.
I went to breakfast with this woman about a year after 9/11 and the conversation turned to Michael Moore while I was driving to the restaurant. Her absolutely non-ironic assessment of him was (she was beaming): "Oh, I think he's so funny!" Everything Michael Moore says to her at that point was a really cool, slightly subversive and lucrative inside joke, which is how a lot of academics in law schools around the country actually view themselves.
To tenured academic libs. like this one, Mike Moore is a kind of populist hero: the guy who shows that the CEO of GM doesn't know how to change the oil on a car, the guy who makes Charlton Heston sound like an idiot after the editing is done, the same guy who makes documentaries that Psy.D. clinicians watch together when they want to understand the world and treat their patients "more comprehensively."
If Michael Moore was actually scrupulous with the facts, he'd lose all of these people. He'd be less of a populist BS purveyor and mockumentarian who fits into their general program of liberal education -- and that's why he's never going to be: he gets academy awards and gleeful recommendations from deans of law schools for being "funny."
Right now, at the UNC, and her heartfelt opinion of Michael Moore, as expressed to me was that he was an impressive and so funny! social commentator. Her judgment wasn't as a law professor, just as a sympathetic person, but that alone should tell you something important about the way academia works in this country. Her comments were completely unsolicited: I decided that instead of listening to AM Talk while driving her to breakfast at a vegetarian/vegan restaurant in Evanston, Illinois, I'd put on NPR instead (so she'd feel comfortable).
Such are the people at the higher administrative levels of our educational establishment who either implicitly or explicitly support Michael Moore, or just think he's so funny!
What about Limbaugh, you might ask? Well, if anyone would really like to know, they can email me. But the basics of it is that she hated him and was looking for a way to get him yanked off the air because he was "dangerous."
No joke, Rush. But you already know that.
They are indeed dangerous.
BTW I live 6 miles from Chapel Hill, and I have always said it makes Berkeley look like Goldwater country.
It's a very long and pretty sad story, but one of the other things this professor thought was that UNC *wasn't* as liberal as Berkeley. In her view, I guess, UNC is stodgy and conservative. But that's only in comparison to Duke, so she was really missing the mark there.
Don't get me wrong -- Lolly is a genuinely pleasant person to be around: she's extraordinarily intelligent, she's a great conversationalist, she's stylish in her clothing and her personal je ne sais quoi, she's a lot of fun and she has a terrific sense of humor and a very good fashion sense. But she's also a Yellow Dog Democrat and probably a little more than that, and unapologetically so. I like her as a person but I don't mind disagreeing with her emphatically on the people she thinks are so funny! if you get my drift.
It's obvious that healthcare needs reform. I don't have it, I know lots of people that don't have it and many other's scared shitless about not having adequate coverage if something happens to their children. My Grandmother's estate was pretty much gutted by health expenses the last year and a half of her life.
Meanwhile corporations are left carrying the baggage. It's an insane situation.
Moore steps in, tells some lies and sets the situation back even further.
All insurance is socialism. There's no getting around that. I pay money to my car insurance company, you have an accident and my money goes to you. Reminds me of George Baily's building and loan.
All utilities are similar to insurance, and sort of socialism. In St. Louis, Anheurser Busch, despite having it's own water plant are forced to buy a certain amount of the local water supply to subsidize the public.
Insurance and Utilities have the common socialistic characteristics, the more persons or nodes in the system the lower the per capital cost. That's why group health insurance is cheaper than individual health insurance. Therefore, the cheapest and most efficient insurance would be a single private oligopoly set of insurance companies networked in a similar arrangement as the phone company regime we have today.
Healthcare isn't a commodity, but health insurance is. It's also a utility. We ought to just manage it like we do all utilities. Regulated private monopoly/oligopoly. Like we did with the phone network, we just have all the healthinsurance provides merge. The drop in cost will be so great so as to pay for the control premiums. Indeed that would make everyone in the largest possible 'group' in the world, driving cost down low enough that almost anyone can afford it. Then just take it out of people's pay checks. The only roll employers will have is to make sure the decuction occurs. If companies want to they can pay up to half the employees insurance deduction or offer boutique insurance programs.
This is the best of all worlds: (near) universal (near) healthcare insurance for Democrats, private for-profit insurance for Republicans, and everyone already has a degree of comfort with how it works because of our experience with the phone system.
The current system is a horrible tax on American business, and inhibits would be entrepreneurs from leaving their jobs and starting businesses. We need to get this issue out of the way
Don't over analyze Moore. Moore is an attention whore. He is Rosie ODonnells Twin. They hate themselves so they lash out at the world. You see it every day from insecure people. He'd make a movie with lies about his mother if it was popular. He has just hit a genre that he can sell. He'll keep making sensationalized movies about the day's pressing issues. I'm sure he'll do one about social security/poverty, evil oil, and guaranteed one about illegal immigration.
Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for you. Washington Elected Elite
1. that Michael Moore is a pathological liar who lies with no more reason than a desire to stay in practice.
2. that the really big lies Moore purveys are such a part of Drum's rather exotic world view that he doesn't notice them.
3. that both 1. and 2. happen concurrently.
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling