So last night my good friend Larry and I went to the red-carpet premiere of “Capitalism: A Love Story,” Michael Moore’s new film. We didn’t dress well enough to get on that red carpet, but neither did Michael Moore and he got on it.

I am and I’m not a fan of Mr. Moore’s work. Actually, given that ambivalence, I guess I’m not. He’s a good entertainer, and I agree with some of his points, and I always enjoy it when truth is spoken to power. But I’m insistent on one point:  that it’s truth. As we know right from the beginning of Mr. Moore’s body of work, “Roger & Me,” he plays with the truth to comic effect or just to score points. This is fine with comedy; this is not so good with documentary. So I don’t know into what category these films belong; I like my documentaries to be grounded in truth.

To Michael Moore’s way of thinking, the near collapse of the American economy last fall was the result of a nefarious plot originally cooked up during the Reagan presidency and served to variation by everyone in Washington, DC since then. Evidently, every Treasury secretary, plus the major investment houses, plus the Congress, plus the banks, have all been in on it. They have colluded to:  strip important regulatory commissions, imbalance the tax code, privatize government functions, cripple labor unions, disseminate fear, and do whatever else it takes so that it can all result in their backing their armored cars up to the U.S. Treasury and leaving with billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Now, it’s almost irrefutable that all these things have happened to some degree; it’s the collusion that I question. Throughout the film, Moore insists upon cause-and-effect relationships that are impossible.  The Democrats can’t agree with themselves on anything — how did they agree to this scheme? If you’ve ever sat on a committee of any sort, you know what I’m talking about. To quote Jean Paul Sartre, “Hell is other people.”

Leaving the difficulty of interpersonal relationships aside, he draws bizarre conclusions. According to Moore, somehow or other, the tax code is to blame for Hurricane Katrina. I thought the hurricane was a natural disaster, but hey, I only know what common sense tells me. If he’s implying that the death and suffering that followed result from poor response, then I’m unclear what that’s got to do with his overall theme, especially while there’s plenty of other addresses one can situation that blame:  local, state, and federal officials. Even if all those authorities had had the best response in history, almost no conceivable amount of engineering was going to save New Orleans, a city that resides below the water level on a flood plain. The lack of government response was appalling. But is it irresponsible to live in a flood plain? Is it irresponsible to rebuild on cliff faces where mudslides are common? Or to build in forestry areas where wildfires routinely rage? Ultimately, we can’t afford a government response to all of this. In Michael Moore’s mind, if you walk into a building and it’s on fire, then clearly you caused this fire. Where there’s smoke, there’s blame.

Much of his film centers around the collapse of the housing industry. His reading:  The fiends ensnared people into finance schemes they couldn’t afford, then made off with all the loot while the economy crumbled. Well, yes and no. I know a number of bankers, and I have to tell you, they’d rather be collecting mortgage payments right now than trying to hawk underwater houses no one wants. During the real-estate bubble I saw two different things that Moore never touches upon: people who bought houses they couldn’t afford to use as investments, and people who refinanced their homes so they could pull out money and buy more stuff. I think those two scenarios covers almost everyone I know who owns a home. What sold most of those big plasma TV’s? The real-estate bubble.

I could go on in this vein, but it was exhausting enough trying to parse it all in real time during the screening as the movie flitted from one far-flung outrage to another in a desperate attempt to string them all together. It was gut-wrenching to watch farmers get evicted from their home, and it was appalling to learn that employers were collecting life-insurance claims on dead employees, and it’s sickening to see the state some people have been left in by the trampled economy, and it’s an outrage that CEOs of bellied-up corporations get rewarded with enormous payouts, and it’s maddening to be reminded yet again that every Western industrialized nation but one — ours! — has a national health-care plan. But every fault should start with the first question:  “What did I do, and what can I do about it?” And the first part involves acknowledging your own role in the ruination.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Politics, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.