I’ve often been disappointed in Michael Moore’s movies, though I appreciate what he’s trying to do: wake America up.
To my eye, “Where to Invade Next” is his best movie, more consistently entertaining than others I’ve seen. The movie questions why America is the way it is and explores alternatives many European countries and Tunisia offer.
He focuses on a particular issue in each country and shows how its way of doing things is much better than ours. For example, in France children learn to eat excellent, healthy food in a civilized way in school lunches. Finland has the best school results in the world, yet kids only go to school four hours a day and have very little homework. The Finns encourage kids to play, which is a great way to learn. Other examples include Slovinia’s tuition-free higher education, Portugal’s drug policy and Norway’s humane prison system. There are many others, presented in a clear, crisp way.
Michael Moore has learned to make good movies.
This movie got me thinking about the legacy of the New Deal. From the end of WWII until 1980, the collective wealth in the U.S. was widely shared. The working and middle classes were cut in on our collective prosperity, though hatred of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal was commonplace among the wealthy.
With the rise of Ronald Reagan and the Republicans in 1980, the owners and their corporate partners began to take back control of the wealth of America they were forced to share during and following the Great Depression.
After WWII the United States became the dominant empire in the world, harvesting massive wealth from the Third and Fourth worlds. Looking for new markets, they began to see the American people as a lucrative target. In the “good old days,” people had to go to a bank to borrow money and a banker would often say, “You can’t get a mortgage. You don’t have the income to pay us back.”
In the 1980s, credit cards became widespread. If you pay them off each month they’re a very good deal, but tens of millions of people have rung up massive debts and have to pay usurious interest rates, which the banks love.
A recent article in the Atlantic said 47 percent of Americans couldn’t come up with $400. In the vernacular, they “don’t have a pot to piss in.” Most of the people we know are upper-middle class and they (we) still have money to eat in restaurants and buy a car now and then.
Lots of people (some say 20 percent) are doing even better, making $100,000 to $500,000 a year. So they don’t want things to change, and they have power.
With massive cuts in state spending, many subsidies for college education have been eliminated. The bankers came to realize that college tuition was a new way to turn young people into cash cows. College debt, added to credit-card debt, has created time bombs that don’t bode well for our future.
Our prevailing economic model requires endless growth, so we’re devouring our planet. To keep things going, we have rampant consumerism, but we’re choking on our stuff.
There are alternatives, and the Europeans have found many of them. It’s enlightening to see it all laid out, clear as day. Though the current system is unsustainable, the famous phrase, “Apres moi, le delu … ” prevents us from implementing any real change. That’s where Michael Moore’s movie goes against the assumption that Americans have to best way of doing things.
Along with consumerism, our rarely questioned militarism has turned into perpetual war that enriches our military industries and destroys the civilizations of the countries we invade. When they fight back, we bomb them. Our America First nationalism prevents politicians from questioning our massive subsidies to “the military industrial complex.”
We’ve been taught to hate government spending, but guess what? The U.S. military is a government program.
The economic system is going to collapse again. It is inevitable, since the same ideological fools who were running things in 2008 are still running things. This is detailed beautifully in “The Big Short,” a great movie that’s a must see. It’s very funny, but it’s scarier than any horror movie.
The people of Venezuela and Brazil, of Uganda and India, are used to poverty, so they know how to cope with it. But after over 70 years of prosperity, the American people are being wildly misled by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. My fear is that the heavily-armed American people are going to have a collective nervous breakdown that could generate a very misguided rebellion. The rise of Donald Trump is just the beginning.
No one wants to call a spade a spade, but we’re digging our own graves.
The consumer society has consumption. Cough cough Kafka. …
Doug Wilson is a Unitarian Universalist minister who directed UU Rowe Camp and Conference Center for 39 years.