Art/Culture

Sicko Is A Question

Posted by on July 2, 2007 at 10:19 pm. NO Comments :

In the first act of Sicko, Michael Moore introduces the audience to several unfortunate souls who have had to suffer both poor health and poor access to care. But that is not what the film is about. As it proceeds we meet individuals who have been mistreated by giant corporations that promised to protect their well being, but betrayed them when need arose. But that is not what the film is about. Moore takes us on a world tour of nations that offer services not provided in the U.S. They see these services as birthrights for fellow citizens who are human and in distress. But that is not what the film is about.

Most people’s expectations for Sicko probably encompass scenes that are part lecture to school the audience on the dry statistics of health care policy, and part screwball satire to illustrate points that Moore has preselected. But that is not what the film is about either.

While there is an abundance of information imparted in the course of the film, and there is much of the trademark humor for which Moore is famous, the most surprising ingredient is a generous portion of heart. This film is, at its core, a moving drama about genuine people whose hopes and fears are alarmingly similar to yours and mine if we were struggling with critical health issues – and some of us are – and all of us will.

But if there were one theme that could be rendered a conclusion, it would be that “we can do better.” Many critics of the film allege that Moore is merely bashing our current system and recruiting foreigners to help him do it. But I don’t see it that way. I see Moore asking us all a question: Why has a nation as great, as rich, as compassionate as this one is, fallen short with regard to caring for every ailing neighbor. I think Moore is baffled as to why other nations are able to accomplish something so fundamentally necessary for survival while our nation cowers before greedy conglomerates as if they were the ones deserving of sympathy.

After seeing this film, I left the theater feeling that I had experienced something that was enlightening, depressing, and inspiring, all at the same time. And I hope I also came away with a sense that there is work to be done to improve our country and ourselves. In that regard I think it is vitally important to heed the words of Tony Benn, a former member of the British Parliament who was interviewed by Moore:

We must not succumb to our fears and frustrations. There is too much at stake to allow ourselves to be led off the path.

Strange Culture: The Criminalization Of Art

Posted by on June 16, 2007 at 3:00 am. NO Comments :

On May 11, 2004, Hope Kurtz died in her sleep of heart failure. The next morning, her husband Steve, an artist and a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, woke up and summoned the police. What followed is the subject of the film “Strange Culture” which was featured yesterday at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.

When the police arrived at the Kurtz’ home they found a collection of petri dishes and biological specimens. Steve explained that it was part of an art project he was preparing for exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. While all of this could have been easily verified, the police, and the FBI agents they called in, decided that Steve was a bio-terrorist and arrested him as he was still trying to cope with having just lost his wife of twenty years.

Steve’s artwork as a member of the Critical Art Ensemble was often controversial and dealt with subject matters that were likely to rile authorities and wealthy and influential corporations. And although the government realized that there was nothing threatening in the articles confiscated from his home, they are still continuing to prosecute him on charges related to his acquisition of the specimens used in the art project. There is more background on this case at the Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund.

This is another particularly sad and disturbing example of how the rights of artists, and all Americans, are being suppressed in the name of security. It is a stark reminder that we must never allow these merchants of fear to silence us, and that we must continue to fight for the freedom to express ourselves and to challenge those in power who would prevent us from doing so.

Michael Moore On The Media

Posted by on June 15, 2007 at 3:27 pm. NO Comments :

Appearing on ABC’s Good Morning America to promote his new film “Sicko,” Michael Moore discussed the media’s complicity with the horror that is Iraq:

“Had ABC News, NBC News, CBS News been more aggressive in confronting the government with what they were telling us back in 2003 about Iraq, you might have prevented this war,” Moore said. “3500 soldiers that are dead today may not have had to die had our news media done its job.”

Well said, Michael. Now how about making the media the subject of your next film? What could possibly be more important? There is no problem that our society faces that can be fixed without fixing the problem of the media first. And as you point out, lives are truly at stake. Without an informed populace it is impossible to move policy and politicians to effect real change on health care, the environment, civil rights, Iraq, or any other issue. The media is the forum for educating people on a mass scale. Unfortunately, it is also the forum for deceiving and sedating them, which is how it is used most frequently these days.

Paris Hilton: Bustin’ Out

Posted by on June 7, 2007 at 2:33 pm. 2 Comments :



It’s official! Justice in America has jumped the shark. Every prisoner with a rash should be paroled immediately. Every con who finds their cell too cold, or doesn’t care for the food should be sent home. Anyone who still thinks there isn’t a class division in legal matters should be institutionalized (they can have Paris’ cell).

Yet the “law-and-order” right-wing elitocrats will wave off Paris’ mockery of justice as trivial, even as they continue to call for the pardon of Scooter Libby. Paris might have killed a family of five that night she was driving drunk, but hey, she’s a Hilton. Libby might have tipped off international enemies as to the identity of our agents and sources, but hey, he’s a loyal Bushie.

Justice is blinded by the bling.

Update: Radar dug up campaign contributions to Lee Baca, the sheriff who ordered Hilton’s release. Contributors include Paris’ grandfather, William Barron Hilton and Rupert Murdoch.

The War Prayer

Posted by on May 28, 2007 at 10:34 pm. NO Comments :

From the Washington Monthly:
In 1904, disgusted by the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and the subsequent Philippine-American War, Mark Twain wrote a short anti-war prose poem called “The War Prayer.” His family begged him not to publish it, his friends advised him to bury it, and his publisher rejected it, thinking it too inflammatory for the times. Twain agreed, but instructed that it be published after his death, saying famously:

“None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.”

“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.
O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells.
Help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead.
Help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain.
Help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire.
Help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief.
Help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it.
For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!
We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts.
Amen.”

Happy Memorial Day.

The Daily Show To The Media: Be More Honest

Posted by on May 23, 2007 at 10:13 am. NO Comments :

In October of 2004, I wrote an essay entitled, “The Real Fake News.” It was premised on my observation that Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, commonly labeled “fake” news, provided more accurate representations of news events more often (and more compellingly) than the so-called “real” news. And conversely, the “real” news was rampant with plagiarists, fabricators, and shills of both the ideological and paid-for variety.

Since that time, The Daily Show’s popularity and reputation has grown and it continues to embarrass its establishment media elders. Its success is still largely misunderstood by most analysts. The most egregious error is made by those who view the program as political satire. While politics is a part of the recipe, it is not the main ingredient. TDS is, first and foremost, media satire.

Rachel Smolkin, managing editor of the American Journalism Review, has written an article that explores, “What the Mainstream Media Can Learn from Jon Stewart.” To some degree she grasps the conceptual territory covered by TDS, correctly holding that…

“Much of the allure of Stewart’s show lies in its brutal satire of the media. He and his correspondents mimic the stylized performance of network anchors and correspondents. He exposes their gullibility. He derides their contrivances.”

Smolkin could take it a little further by noting that even when politicians are being skewered, it is within the framework of how they are covered by television newscasts. The very structure of the newscasts themselves is often targeted by Stewart’s drollery. A particularly fertile subject is the disintegrating concept of “balance” as currently practiced. Smolkin quotes USC’s Annenberg School for Communication associate dean, Martin Kaplan, who poignantly articulates the problem with modern journalism:

“Every issue can be portrayed as a controversy between two opposite sides, and the journalist is fearful of saying that one side has it right, and the other side does not. It leaves the reader or viewer in the position of having to weigh competing truth claims, often without enough information to decide that one side is manifestly right, and the other side is trying to muddy the water with propaganda.”

Hub Brown, chair of the communications department at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, puts it even more succinctly:

“The truth itself doesn’t respect point of view. The truth is never balanced.”

How true. The truth always takes its own side, and without the slightest hint of partisanship. But, for some reason, reporters are reluctant to acknowledge truthfulness for fear of being branded as partisan. How did the media get so twisted as to believe that accepting reality as it is has come to be regarded as an expression of partiality? This is the attitude that is mocked by Stewart’s offspring, Stephen Colbert, when he declares that, “truth has a well-known liberal bias.”

To the extent that TDS has transended this problem, it is a beacon for the very reporters it is ridiculing. But rather than expect them to decipher the correct interpretation of these signals, I’ll let Smolkin sum it up for them:

“…the lesson of “The Daily Show” is not that reporters should try to be funny, but that they should try to be honest.”

Adoption of that simple advisory would produce a wholesale transformation of American media. If I could implement just one revision of contemporary journalistic practice it would be to liberate reporters from the absurd notion that they are proscribed from differentiating truth from fiction when covering controversial issues. In fact, I consider such differentiation to be an obligation of ethical journalism. The surreal irony is that this approach is understood and practiced by fake reporters on a comedy program, but not by their ostensibly real counterparts. We can only hope that this lesson will eventually seep through.

Sicko Gets Thumbs Up From…Fox?

Posted by on May 19, 2007 at 2:52 pm. 1 Comments :

Michael Moore’s new film, “Sicko,” got a critical boost today from an unexpected source. Roger Friedman, the Fox411 entertainment reporter, lavished praise on the film in his online column:

“Filmmaker Michael Moore’s brilliant and uplifting new documentary, “Sicko,” deals with the failings of the U.S. healthcare system, both real and perceived. But this time around, the controversial documentarian seems to be letting the subject matter do the talking, and in the process shows a new maturity.”

Maybe this is not really all that unexpected. Friedman also reviewed Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” saying…

“It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail.” He continued, “…a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty – and at the same time a indictment of stupidity and avarice.”

I wonder how Friedman managed to evade security at the Fox compound and seed the conservosphere with such disinformation. It appears he may have risen from a covert assignment at Murdoch’s New York Post before infiltrating the mother ship.

Friedman is not, however, out of danger. Having predicted last September that Sicko will be “a huge, huge hit…another cultural phenomenon,” Friedman, is directly challenging Fox’s heavy artillery, Bill O’Reilly, who has his own security force, and has already declared Sicko a failure that won’t make any money. Of course, O’Reilly also famously mis-forecast that the double-platinum selling, 5-time Grammy winning Dixie Chicks’ CD “Taking the Long Way” would flop.

We’ll know in a couple of months who prevails. My money is on Friedman.

Banksy Speaks For Me

Posted by on May 18, 2007 at 4:50 pm. NO Comments :

Banksy is perhaps my favorite living artist in terms of message. His work is profound and inspiring. So are his words from this recent interview.

On the persistence of vision:
“I originally set out to try and save the world, but now I’m not sure I like it enough.”

On selling out:
“I love the way capitalism finds a place – even for its enemies. It’s definitely boom time in the discontent industry.”

My sentiments exactly!

Michael Moore And U.S. Government Conspiring to Promote Sicko

Posted by on May 11, 2007 at 9:58 am. 2 Comments :

It is now being widely reported that the U. S. Treasury Department is investigating filmmaker Michael Moore in connection with his upcoming documentary, “Sicko.” The feds are alleging that Moore made an illegal trip to Cuba with a group of 9/11 rescue workers who are suffering from health problems related to their relief efforts. But only News Corpse has the courage to reveal the truth:

Michael Moore and the U.S. government are now working together! Despite the protestations published on Moore’s website that the investigation of Michael Moore is “politically motivated,” the more significant revelation is this:

“Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in just one week and opening across the U.S. on June 29th, ‘SiCKO’ will expose the corporations that place profit before care and the politicians who care only about money.”

This kind of publicity is worth millions and is almost never available for documentaries. Are we supposed to think the timing of this investigation is a mere coincidence? How stupid do they think we are? There are only two possible explanations for this investigation being commenced at this time:

  • The Bush administration, with the permission of its pharmaceutical benefactors, is actively promoting the film and its message.
  • The Treasury Department made a clumsy mistake in the execution of their official duties.

The clockwork-like efficiency of this administration effectively rules out option two, so that leaves us with option one: Collaboration!

I never thought I’d see this day, but the evidence of conspiracy is overwhelming. We have to wake up to reality, people. Follow the money!

Update: For good measure, the conspirators have recruited the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post to further advance their plot. The Post is alone in reporting a number of shocking sidebars to this disturbing story that the rest of the media is actively suppressing.

For instance, they describe the film as “an attack on American drug companies and HMOs that Moore hopes to debut at the Cannes Film Festival next month.” This is obviously disinformation as the film has actually already been selected as an official presentation at Cannes.

The Post further reports that, “the sick sojourn, which some say uses ill 9/11 workers as pawns, has angered many in the responder community.” And we all know how reliable “some say” are as witnesses.

Then there is the testimony of Joe Picurro, an ailing relief worker who said, “I would rather die in America than go to Cuba.” I’m sure that’s a sentiment with which all Americans can relate.

But the icing on the conspiratorial cake is this:

“Although he has been a critic of Cuba, Moore grew popular there after a pirated version of his movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” was played on state-owned TV.”

That’s right, Moore is popular in Cuba! The Post’s disclosure of this classified intelligence seals the case that they are in cahoots with the government’s scheme to help Moore generate valuable controversy and media attention. This should put an end to any stray skepticism.