MICHAEL MOORE AND SICKO

SICKO is a really good movie.

Michael Moore’s critics, on the right and the left, seem to be mistaking Moore for a lawyer, or professional historian, or professor, or politician.

He might be capable of being all those things and more, but, what he is now and has been since ROGER AND ME, is a filmmaker.

And he makes terrific films.

SICKO, like all his films, made me laugh, made me cry, taught me a few things, and never left me wondering why I bought a ticket to see it.

In fact, never, while watching a Michael Moore movie for the first time in a theater, have I been bored.

If you want to characterize Moore’s filmmaking, I think the best analogy is to the court fools or jesters of the old kings and emperors.

They were the only ones, among the usual court entourage and officials, allowed to expose the official lies and tell the truth to, and/or about, the monarch. But, they had to make it funny.

That’s what Moore does.

Is it a stunt to sail to Cuba to emphasize the point that the so-called “terrorists” confined at Gitmo in defiance of the Geneva conventions and the U. S. Constitution get better healthcare than many ordinary U.S. citizens? Sure, it’s a stunt.

But the point of the stunt is still true. The infant mortality rate and the average lifespan are better in Cuba—even though they’ve been suffering under a U.S. embargo for over forty years, and are a poor “third world” country—than in the richest country on earth.

But then the health statistics for a lot of countries are better than those of the U.S.

Something’s rotten in Washington, D.C., and Moore just points out where the stink is coming from.

Hooray for Moore, and raspberries to anyone too uptight or rightwing brainwashed to pretend his movies aren’t as entertaining and engaging as they truly are, or that his facts aren’t marshaled in the correct fashion or aren’t based on the reality out here in “managed care” land.

It’s no wonder Moore has replaced Teddy Kennedy and Bill Clinton as the man the righwingers most love to hate.

(PS: How come they can find $135 billion a year for the Iraq War (as others have pointed out, that's over a quarter of a million dollars a minute) but can't find the money to provide universal health care?)