I think I feel Sick-o

 

I cannot get over this one part of Michael Moore's "Sicko". It's where he and his truly innocent pawns (and if I were sick and had my savings wiped out because of the failure of my insurance, I would be one of them) boat on over to the Guantanamo Bay prison's buoy line. He yells at the guard tower that he has brought Americans for medical treatment there because he says the enemy combatants get better treatment than his  crew have as citizens. Of course, the tower guards don't let the boat through. The audience laughs.  "That Michael, he really showed the Amerian Government how silly and horrible it is!" But that's not the part I can't get over. Cause I know that government, local, state and Federal is often silly. I had somehow, previously been given to understand, I think via the diatribes of Moore clones, though perhaps not Moore himself, that Guantanamo is a torturous type place that needs to be closed. But then I hear that the medics there worry about the cholesterol levels of their charges. What is true? Maybe I agree that that is kind of ridiculous.Which of course, is the problem with the whole docu-proselytizing concept. Unless you go in with an armload of information about everything Mr. Moore touches upon, you come out a propagandist's convert. Like all good propagandists, and I guess we are all at some level propagandists when we tote fiercely our own philosophies, Moore takes the glistening kernel of truth and threads it through emotional tales and opinion until it is no longer recognizable.  And this is in a movie (I hadn't seen his others) that folks said was pretty even handed. I guess so, because Hilary did not get off scot-free.

I wanted to be with Michael all the way down the road---I guess I am just a compassionate conservative (no longer really Republican, since I can't tell my old party from the other big one. I kind of see the two parties as one, suffering the fate of those cross breeds, like the Liger, maybe an Eledonk) and I agreed going in that the health care system needs major change. Maybe it was a small recent experience (and I am hoping that it stays small) in which my own primary care physician tried to dissuade me from a needed out patient surgery with the threat that it wouldn't be covered, the surgeon being out of network. So Michael, I really wanted to agree with you! But then you give us a sanitized version of Canda's, Britain's, France's and Cuba's systems (btw those Cuban fireman who wished that they could have helped after 9/11, do you think Castro would have let them go?) And the Guantamano stunt, I just can't let that go.

So, I went home and perused the net, not a perfect source of information, I know, but what is these days in the world of variable truth. I looked first for something objective. Failing that, I decided to look at the comments of those I thought would be more aligned with Michael. The CNN review, that was picked up by lots of other papers, or services, mentioned that the numbers were mostly accurate, but that more context was needed. Somewhere I heard that context is everything. And even the World Socialist Website that I ran across provided a very thoughtful critique. The title gives you the tone, "Michael Moore's Sicko: very limited conceptions, very limited results."

I cannot resist a few tidbits from the article, which, for that context lacking in Mr. Moore's movie, can be found at wsws.org.

"One is not unmindful of Moore's past contributions, but he has launched himself into the social and political arena with his films, demanding to be taken seriously, and ought to be judged accordingly. . ."

Aside from a number of genuinely moving encounters with casualties of the American health insurance industry, the film offers little that is truly revealing. Moore explains at one point early in his new work that he appealed on his web site for 'health care stories' and received 25,000 responses. This certainly points to the dimensions of the crisis, but how much additional research and thinking have gone into the film?

Sicko is disjointed and uneven, and breaks no new ground;  Moore dwells on certain points, especially those he thinks will amuse, often cheaply, while passing far too quickly over major issues. The work is static, beginning and ending at the same intellectual point. Moore doesn't appear to know much more at the conclusion than he knew to begin with, and neither do we.  A generally facetious tone prevails, which quickly irritates. This is done, wrongly, in the name of making a wide or 'popular' appeal. Even the title is foolish."

That's just from the second, third and fourth paragraph of the review. There are quite a lot of paragraphs after that, one of which somewhat addresses, though obviously from a different political perspective (if only I was as sure of my political perspective as everyone else I meet and read), that boat ride, "Moore's presentation of Guantanamo implicitly legitimizes the argument of the US government that the internment camp is a necessary co of the 'war on terror'". That's one way of looking at it. To some other political views, it calls into question the entirety of the platform that America and its treatment of prisoners is bad, when in fact it is not merely humane, but virtuously so, if Mr. Moore is to be believed. But who knows because the truth in the movie and in the world is so flexible.

I appreciate that Mr. Moore is an advocate. As so many of the reviewers point out, he is not pretending to be otherwise. I am a lawyer by profession and everyone opines about the propensity of lawyers to stretch the truth in their advocacy. But even lawyers often get into trouble with judges, when they fail to cite precedents that would blow their positions out of the water in an effort to bamboozle the judge, or the other side. They call that misrepresentation. They call that, in an arcane phrase, moral turpitude, even when done in the name of advocacy.

That's what scared me about the movie. I agreed with a few points, mostly the need for radical change in an industry that (in my small case) allowed a charge of $10,300 for an emergency room visit, and paid $2,000, when I was there less than an hour and got nothing more than tylenol, a penicillin prescription and a referral to another doctor, but I really can't look to Che Guevara's daughter in Cuba as the measure of what ought to be done here, where by the way, droves of people still come, legal, and illegal, oh, I mean, undocumented. But that's another movie somebody I am sure is goingto make and call it a documentary.

 

Tags: Sicko, truth, eledonk