on Moore's latest

(button available from A Well-Considered Rebellion)

For your possible amusement, a very brief (and very partial) list of misleading arguments and logical fallacies in Moore’s Sicko:

• The pretense that all Canadians and all Brits are firmly in favor of their health care systems (which evidentially work speedily and fairly). Many Brits that can afford it actually seek health care through the private sector, and Canadians keep electing governments that whittle away at their system.
• Making a big deal out of the fact that one of the interviewed pro-single-payer-healthcare Canadians was a “conservative” without mentioning the fact that “conservative” means something very different in Canadian politics.
• Straight-converting currency as though that was ever really accurate. A 500,000 pound house is not the same as a $1 million house, especially not in London. Most people get paid in their local currency, which is why I would feel terribly rich if I went to Mexico and fairly damn poor if I went to England.
• If a man chops off two fingers and has no insurance, he doesn’t have to choose which finger he will sew on—he has to decide if both or either are worth the cost of sewing them on. It’s a decision between money and finger, not between finger and finger. I suppose this one is fairly irrelevant, but Moore repeated it a dozen time and it wore me down to screeching nerves.
• While increased availability to healthcare almost certainly has something to do with the French living longer than the US, completely discounting lifestyle is squimshy at best. Declaring that the French like fatty foods (ha hah! Frenchies and their cheese!) doesn’t mean anything when the French are more inclined to eat their foods in moderation and simply don’t have the obesity statistics the US does.
• Implying that Cuban hospitals will treat US citizens exactly the same as Cubans while being filmed just because the documentary maker tells them to is cute but, well, idiotic.

I think that Moore is the least honest documentarian whose work I’m familiar with. I’ve heard a good many people defending him with claims such as “all documentaries are one-sided,” but the fact is that’s simply not true. All documentaries have a bias, in the same way that all human documents have a certain amount of bias—that certainly doesn’t mean that one can’t try to be fair to one’s opponents. In my opinion, Moore isn’t even fair to those in his choir; he assumes that they’re too stupid to understand the intricacies of reality and compensates by unrealistically simplifying the universe for them. Thus, in Moore’s world, if single-payer health care systems such as Canada has are good, all Canadians must naturally think that it’s wonderful. (And I’m damn tired of conservative rebutting Moore’s arguments instead of mine when debating issues that Moore has covered.)

Of course, my issues with this film aren’t limited to these easily-identifiable misleading arguments (or I’d be done talking now).

I winced when he exploited of his opponent’s personal misfortunes as a golden opportunity for self-promotion—but it was still well within my estimation of Moore’s character.

(For those who haven’t seen the movie; Moore spends several minutes lingering on the fact that he gave Jim Kenefick, who runs www.moorewatch.com, the money he needed to care for his sick wife. Had Moore done this with less fanfare the act would have been truly classy; but instead he chose to trumpet the news in his widely-distributed documentary. That is, at a point when said opponent was personally vulnerable through no fault of his own, Moore stepped in helped him—but made the price a very public defeat portrayed in Moore’s own terms. It reminded me a little of the Simpson’s bully, Nelson Muntz, who always pops out just in time to point and laugh when Bart suffers any embarrassing misfortune—except in this case Nelson spends a few seconds helping Bart fix his skateboard between “ha ha!”s)

The unexpected and enraging moment of the film was Moore’s introductory montage concerning Hilary Clinton. There are a good many valid and semi-valid critiques one can make of Ms. Clinton, but Moore’s description of her as “sexy” and “sassy,” while perhaps perversely flattering, was uncalled for. Before discussing any of her actions or politics he set the ground for viewing her as something other than strictly a politician and in so doing subtly demeaned her. Even the “smart,” that he threw in, combined with his music choice and photos of her in her twenties, seems more a personals-ad adjective than a compliment. “Here are her good characteristics,” he seemed to say, “isn’t she a firecracker!” Such casting of a woman as a sexual or romantic figure marks her actions, intelligence, and outrage as amusements for men; it becomes ok to laugh at them quietly—because just as “women’s interests” such as decorating and fashion are cute but unimportant, women’s politics are sweet but trivial.

Moore’s very subtle dispersion of Ms. Clinton was cute, and could come off as funny. But in using this tactic to demean one woman, Moore demeaned all women. I don’t usually get riled up over the every day occurrences of soft and subtle sexism, but somehow coming from Moore made it worse. This man seems to have self-consciously set himself up as some kind of leftist guru; and until I saw this film, my biggest problem with him was that he made use of the intellectual dishonesty that, while it enrages me, is pandemic in politics. For once my annoyance with him wasn’t just in the way he was portraying his message; it was, to a degree, with the message itself. I wanted to stand up in the theater and scream Robin Morgan’s “Goodbye to all that” at the screen. Goodbye to our so-called leftist “brothers.”

Whether or not one thinks that Ms. Clinton is (or ever has been) a babe, she has never been just a babe. This is the woman who, in 1969, when invited to be the first student allowed to speak at Wellesley’s commencement, adlibbed a portion of her speech at the podium in order to rhetorically bitch-slap Senator Brooke who had spoken just before her—and who had poo poo’d the actions of the New Left and their ilk. She stood up for all those trying to make the world better and purportedly quoted graffiti from the Bastille; “be realistic; expect the impossible.” And while Ms. Clinton’s public life and political success make her appear a particularly epic figure, I defy anyone to find any nonfiction babe who is just a babe. We are all so much interesting and complicated than that.

I am in favor of a single-payer system—I’d even be done with an out-and-out socialized system—if for no other reason than because corporations currently make the decisions about my health care, and if the government made those decisions they might be mildly more fair (there may be more on this later). But Sicko (not to be too damn cutesy) frankly sickened me. Fuck you Moore; despite all your irritating qualities, I thought you would at least be on my side in the good fight.

“A genuine Left doesn’t consider anyone’s suffering irrelevant or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom (and functioning as objectified prizes or ‘coin’ as well). Goodbye to all that.”

—Robin Morgan

(PS: fun fact—in addition to his documentary franchise, Moore wrote, directed, and produced Canadian Bacon. He has a few other amusingly unexpected, seemingly random bits under his belt, including a few acting credits listed on imdb)