Mikey and Me

It isn’t a secret nor should it be a surprise that i am not a fan of Michael Moore. As a Documentary artist… i find him to be more of a skilled propagandist. His deft approach to issues being so blatantly one-sided that nobody would ever suggested his work be considered fair and balanced. But i don’t begrudge anyone their biases.

Agendas on the other hand…

A friend encouraged me to watch Piers Morgan interview Mike regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Aside from the 45 minutes of my life i’ll never get back, i must confess it wasn’t a total waste of time. Mike was very casual yet passionate, affable and engaging – very hard to dislike. But very easy to disagree with.

It’s been almost a week since i watched but i remember one thing i found objectionable, and one thing indicative of our broader problem of being narrow minded and incurious:

Piers asked Mike who he blamed for our current financial crisis and predictably he answered, “Corporations”. i suppose it would first be  helpful to define what one means by “corporations”. A simple search of the word reveals that there is far more corporate activity than most would be willing to admit. It has become vogue to assault the “big corporation” (BC) these days as a greedy, deeply flawed, self-interested, zealot bent on getting ahead at the expense of all those outside its family. On some level that describes every group or legal gathering of humans under the sun. We gather for a cause usually recognized as bigger than ourself, more important than ourself, and requiring more membership than ourself to accomplish goals. But at the heart of every corporation is self-interest.

Piers probed a little by asking Mike if he blamed at the government or the individual for any of our problems and he emphatically said, “no”. This was my biggest point of disagreement with Mike. His agenda – whatever it is – is as shifting and muddled as OWS save for this one ax to grind with BC. One can only assume Mike’s goal, given his penchant to espouse the glorious egalitarian impulses of Communist Dictatorships, is to remedy our current woes by growing and empowering the biggest BC in the western hemisphere. It would be terribly inconvenient to cast any blame on his savior of choice or on the populist machinery he masterfully manipulates. So the government and the individual are out-of-bounds categorically regardless of their obvious complicity.

It would have been sweet if Piers had the acumen to push this issue, you know, like ask a follow-up by injecting some information into the conversation. People make up the groups and corporations and they usually get what they ask for either directly or through the law of unintended consequences. Since it is people – in the U.S. – who have the power and the prerogative to elect government representatives to set the boundaries of commerce, it is we through our own ignorance or misguided self-interest who are mostly to blame for our present predicament. If you have a 401k or are using the stock market in any way to pad your retirement years, to possibly bring them sooner, you’ve taken the bait of entitlement, envy, and the kind of greed that when multiplied produces money-making juggernauts and Wall Street money changers.

My second issue is that a person in the audience brought up a great point that went by the way-side – again – because of its utter logic and disutility. We are victims of our own advancement. Remember when we used to dream of an age when life would be simpler and a lot less sweaty? The prospect of robots and devices to free us from toil was laughably distant. Yet here we are. We are there.

Industry that has benefitted so much from information processing and delivery has been able to shrink so much, so rapidly that its ripple is producing a wave of discontent. It has freed us from half our work effectively making only one man productive and the other… unnecessary.  This isn’t like the automobile; when the horse-and-buggy industry went caput people moved to the assembly line. There was a time when folks lived on less and weren’t so close to the guilded sidewalks of Easy Street. Today we are fat and lazy and view what was once a priviledge as a right. No matter what action is taken to right the listing ship there will be winners and losers and you don’t have a right to be either.

But that second point is secondary to the broader, more salient aforementioned one. Mike wants to be able to pick winners and losers by rigging the game. We are suffering now because that is the status quo and more of it will cause greater and perhaps permanent ruin. He sounds like he’s advocating a different path, but he’s really just suggesting we dismount our limping steed and saddle up a bull. i expect nothing less from him.

Appropriate.

Advertisement

« CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS