Michael Moore’s latest, “Capitalism: A Love Story”, is his most ambitious film to date and establishes him firmly as our nation’s class clown. It demonstrates once again why his films play better at the multiplex than they do in academia: they’re entertainment, not serious critiques. It’s not that he doesn’t do his homework, it’s just that the homework that he does do is much too selective, which makes it easy for his opponents to make stick the ‘liberal hack’ label that they keep handy for whenever one of his films is released.
In “Capitalism”, Moore does a fine job of showing when and how the United States took turns for the worse both politically and economically, by weakening the unions and changing the way the rich are taxed and by allowing our political system to be overrun by corporate influence. But then he wanders into class clown territory, reaching the facile conclusion that capitalism is evil and socialism is good, pointing to Germany and Japan as examples of socialist utopias.
The problem is that most of those who sit a few rows back from the class clown realize that neither pure capitalism nor pure socialism is the best way to run a society - the solution that works for all of the most successful democracies in the world is a well-balanced mix of the two. Go ask England, go ask France, go ask the much-lauded Norway. All of these, and Japan too, are capitalist to their core, but with strong moderating doses of socialism thrown in, in just the places that more socialist programs are needed here in the States: health care, the tax code, the social contract. To paint the world in black and white, evil vs. good terms is to make the class clown’s choice to get a quick laugh or a quick tear at the expense of intellectual rigor.
Mr. Moore veers into sadly laughable territory at the end of his film, when he makes an earnest, straightforward call for revolution. If he had done as much homework on revolutions as he did on FDR and the history of organized labor, he might have saved himself the embarrassment that I believe such a fruitless call will ultimately cause him.
Historically, as any college history textbook will tell you, revolutions occur when the economic pain to which the lower classes have become accustomed begins to haunt the middle class. Mr. Moore would have us believe that this is happening and that a backlash has begun, with his inspiring stories of resistance by a foreclosed upon and evicted family in Miami and a group of factory workers in Chicago. The fact is that conditions are not nearly bad enough amongst most of the middle-class people in this country for a revolution of any sort, economic or political, to have a chance of taking hold. Even lower middle class people in the United States today are enormously wealthy from a global historical perspective; they have cars, houses, more than enough food, and far too many distractions (television, games, etc - the masses’ latter-day opiates) to be bothered with anything resembling revolt. The growing ranks of the unemployed, for the most part, even have unemployment insurance, something unheard of in, say, France in 1789 or Russia in 1917.
What’s more, the very fact that Mr. Moore can make an open call for revolution and still walk the streets as a free man shows that, for all its many faults, our government is not even in the same category as Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany, where such statements already would have earned him a prison cell or a shallow grave and his film a place on the bonfire rather than in theaters across the country.
But what if, as he hopes, thousands or even millions of people follow the examples shown in the film and become squatters in their own homes or hold sit-ins in their factories to demand better treatment? This could in fact lead to real reform. Millions of squatters could force concrete reforms of predatory mortgages and even of the banking industry as a whole. Millions of factory workers demanding better conditions or the implementation of FDRs Second Bill of Rights could bring back stronger unions and lead ultimately to a new political climate in which we could align our socialism/capitalism mix with the more successful democracies of Europe. Of course I want this to happen, with every fiber of my progressive being. But do I think that it will? No, not while the middle class is busy playing Wii and watching television while gorging themselves on factory farmed McFood.
And that Mr. Moore can make such a call to his middle class audience in the multiplex which has just paid ten dollars for a movie ticket and another ten dollars for a small popcorn and a bottled water or soda, shows his naivete - nobody with enough disposable income to be sitting in the theater to receive this message, mid-recession, no less, can be seriously expected to go home and rattle the door of their economic cage loudly enough for anyone to notice.
All of this notwithstanding, class clown of the most powerful nation on Earth is not such a terrible position to hold, especially when the corrupt politicians, the straight-A students who should have the real power, are nothing more than teacher’s pets. Of course the teachers in this analogy, the real owners of power, are the corporate plutocrats that Moore correctly identifies. It’s not his evidence that’s flawed - few deliver it better than he - it’s his conclusion and accompanying call to action.
The day may come when things get bad enough for real change in this country, but that time has not yet arrived. Many of us are mad as hell, but we’re going to take it for a long time to come, because the middle class is not starving, homeless or being imprisoned en masse. If you want proof that we’re not yet ready for such change, look no further than the man who should have been awarded a trademark on the word by using it so often, Mr. Obama. He certainly talked the talk during the campaign, but as Moore points out, he then appointed an industry insider, Tim Geithner (who had previously turned down a chance to run Citigroup) as his Secretary of the Treasury, aligning himself firmly with the status quo, which has only been confirmed during the health care debate.
As Moore frequently points out, the central irony of his career is that the very corporate megaliths that he targets for his attacks support the distribution and advertising of his films. The irony of this latest film, if he’s to be believed, is that he really thinks he’s delivering a Trojan horse with the power to initiate the overthrow of the system through that corporate-owned distribution network. Unfortunately for Mr. Moore, class clowns don’t start revolutions, members of the intellegentsia do. Robespierre, Lenin, Jefferson, Adams - academic intellectuals all.
![](http://karneyhatch.com/karneyhatchdotcom/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/karneysacramento.jpg "\\"Overdrawn!\\" Screening at the Guild Theater in Sacramento.")