Despite my disagreements with him, I’m saddened at documentarian Michael Moore’s civil divorce. Raised a Catholic, his marriage likely is sacramental, which means he still would be married whatever decision is made by the courts of the civil government he loves so much and seeks to expand ad infinitum.
Yet I also have some schadefreude as the immense wealth of this socialist is paraded through the media.
Moore has filed numerous court documents griping about how his wife embarrassed him by blowing $2 million on a massive compound on picturesque Torch Lake in Northern Michigan. My family used to vacation up there in the 1960s and early 1970s, so I can appreciate how they would love the area. If you haven’t been there, this is Hemingway Country, beautifully depicted in “Big Two-Hearted River” and other Nick Adams stories.
Moore doesn’t realize it, but by blaming his wife, he’s turned himself into an orotund Ferdinand Marcos, whose wife, Imelda, owned 3,000 shoes, as was revealed during the 1986 People Power Revolution.
According to Celebrity Net Worth, Michael Marcos – excuse me, Moore – is worth $50 million. Not since Lenin partied in Zurich just before returning to Russia to launch the October Revolution has a leftist had such a good time.
Here’s my review of some of his movies:
“Roger & Me” (1989) put Moore on the documentary map and made him rich. In what became his patented style, the fat and disheveled Moore, imitating the proles he claimed to be defending, followed then-GM President Roger Smith to various board meetings. Moore asked why GM was abandoning Moore’s native Flint, leaving hundreds of thousands of people unemployed, the city’s coffers empty and large numbers of those who didn’t move on unemployment and welfare.
Smith never answers. But it’s significant that Moore even was allowed near Smith, something verboten today. Moore was right to attack the corporate oligarchy then gaining even more control over the country. But he overlooked the part played in the auto industry’s troubles caused by his beloved government, in particular the vast over-regulation by the centralized autocracy in D.C.; and the United Auto Workers union’s unreasonable demands and leftist support of the D.C. regulations and other socialist measures.
A better explanation of the industry’s problems in that era was Brock Yates’ 1983 “The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry,” which fingered three major culprits: industry, unions and government. For example, he pointed out that, when the feds forced pollution controls on the industry in the early 1970s, the Big Three and American Motors had to develop technological solutions such as catalytic converters independently to avoid U.S. antitrust violations; but the Japanese auto companies combined under government supervision in a crash program to develop efficient catalytic converters, saving billions of yen that allowed lower prices.
As Steve Sailer pointed out, “Roger & Me” actually was a case of Moore, as a haughty college-schooled leftist, attacking the proles he left behind. The most memorable scene was where he films a lower-class white woman skinning a rabbit. No doubt the leftists – who in 2014 now almost totally dominate our society – cringed at that one. “Ewwww! Those sick lower-class white people. Must be preparing for a lynching.”
Yet almost everybody’s recent ancestors killed and cut up animals for protein. My late father, who grew up in Detroit in the 1920s and 1930s, recalled how he and my grandfather would go into the basement of their home on Sherwood St., cut off a chicken’s head, then throw the chicken under a pail as it thrashed around until it bled out. By the 1960s, by Mom just went to Kroger and bought chicken under a plastic wrapper.
The city I grew up in, Wayne, just west of Detroit, was more fortunate than Flint; its Ford plant occupies about one-sixth of the city and still is humming. Aside from its foolishness, when I see Moore’s film now, it makes me nostalgic for a Michigan long gone.
“Canadian Bacon” (1995). Despite an interesting premise, America invades Canada, and the otherwise funny John Candy, this fictional film was terrible. Moore returned to documentaries.
Moore then did a TV series I didn’t see.
“Bowling for Columbine” (2002) attacked gun rights, keying off the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. The film is free here. Numerous gun-rights groups refuted major parts of it. It had no effect on America’s pro-gun culture, which continues to rise as a response to the Bush-Obama superstate.
In an op-ed after the 2012 Newtown massacre, Moore compared the atrocity to the lynching of Emmett Till and My Lai; and called for gun controllers to exploit the killings to advance new restrictions. But he conceded, “We’ve done nothing since Columbine – nothing….”
“Fahrenheit 9/11” (2004) became the highest-grossing documentary of all time and made Moore even richer. I praised the movie at the time in an Orange County Register editorial because, despite many flaws, it exposed the murderous folly of the war. It showed the Bush family’s connections to the Saudi Royal Dynasty, the horrors our troops faced, the horrors the Bush regime inflicted on Iraqis and the cluelessness of the American political class.
The funniest part was when Moore tried to get congressmen to read the bill OK’ing the war (which, I would add, was not a declaration of war, as required by the Constitution). Then he drove around Washington reading the bill over a loudspeaker on top his car.
Too bad Moore didn’t do something similar with the 2010 Obamacare atrocity he supported six years later, which ran to more than 1,000 pages and already has racked up more than 20,000 more pages in regulations by the federal bureaucracy.
The “Fahrenheit 9/11” documentary spiked early opposition to the war – although Bush handily won re-election that November anyway, with Republicans keeping the House and winning back the Senate.
But if Republicans had listened to Moore – yes, this is true – they would have shut down the war posthaste. Because as the war dragged on, voters revolted against it and dumped the GOP from Congress in 2006. In 2008, voters shunned the unstable ultra-hawk John McCain for Barack Obama and not only kept Congress, but garnered a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, which allowed them to impose Obamacare without any Republican support.
So anyone who supported the Bush wars also ended up giving us Obamacare.
“Sicko” (2007) attacked America’s admittedly ailing and way too expensive health-care system, instead backing the much worse – but cheaper – socialized systems of Canada, Great Britain and even Cuba. John Stossel dissected Moore’s paralogy in a five-minute segment. Basically, Cuba’s supposedly great health care goes only to the Communist Party elite and tourists, with regular comrades getting horrible care.
But even a glance at Cuba’s GDP per capita, $6,106 in 2011 – compared to $47,882 for the United States – shows there’s no way it could support a superior health care system.
Yet “Sicko” probably solidified among leftists their obsession with socialized medicine that led, thanks to GOP foolishness on the wars, to Obamacare in 2010. Not that multi-millionaire Moore—soon likely to have his wealth halved to a measly $25 million—would himself sign up for it, especially if he goes for Lap-Band surgery.
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