Motus Mentis

Michael Moore is on his (presumably steel-reinforced) soapbox once again. In his newest movie, Sicko, he brings his folksy propaganda style to bear on the American health-care system, which is, he alleges, fundamentally inferior to the socialized arrangements in place in other countries, including even the tyrannized and impoverished nation of Cuba (whose “revolutionary” medical infrastructure we glanced at in an earlier post.)

For a different perspective, see this essay in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Post-post-script: Having promptly been taken to task, in an email from a reader, for jumping on Michael Moore in this post, let me clarify: I find Mr. Moore intensely irritating. He fabricates, stages, dissembles, oversimplifies, and flat-out deceives in his movies; he is insufferably smug; and I regard his far-left politics, and thinly disguised loathing of the USA (masquerading, of course, as piously concerned patriotism) with scorn and contempt. He works at the lowest intellectual level, slipping under the radar of informed discourse with his aw-shucks, silly-old-me disingenuousness, and drags along millions of uncritical minds with every one of his self-serving films. He is an enormous polarizing force, and by making his credulous fans think they understand the issues he so insidiously twists and distorts, makes it that much harder to arrive at the reasoned and difficult consensus that is needed in order actually to solve these complex problems. Mr. Moore very shrewdly taps into general liberal dissatisfactions — with economic inequality, gun laws, the simple-minded President Bush and his scheming handlers and the mess they’ve made of Iraq, and now health care — and gives his audience predigested, simplistic pap that reinforces all of their unexamined talking points, without any care to consider that there might be actual reasons why things might be the way they are, or why the answers aren’t as forehead-smackingly obvious as he makes them out to be, or why other folks might have other opinions, or that there might be more than one side to the issues. This is enormously unhelpful, and really can be fairly regarded as left-wing propaganda.

Yes, we have serious issues with health care in this country. Everybody knows that, and many people, rather than simply braying to the mob, and japing for their own fame and enrichment, are actually trying to solve them. Emulating Cuba, it should go without saying, is not the answer.