In many societies, being fat is a sure sign of wealth and financial success. Ours is apparently no different,
The bars were sponsored by liquor companies, the kitchen by Lufthansa. One room had marble walls, another, cashmere. Hundreds of guests plucked hors d’oeuvres from Plexiglas trays, but when I reached for a passing tray of pigs in blankets, the waitress tried to stop me. “These are for Michael,” she said.
That would be Michael Moore, filmmaker, who was enthroned nearby on a crowded sofa nibbling from a skewer, which did seem less in harmony with his everyman sneakers and populist persona than a sausage wrapped in fried bread. The Monday night party in Manhattan, which spread over two luxurious penthouse suites, was sponsored by Esquire and tricked out with the magazine’s advertisers’ products. The guests were there to celebrate Moore’s latest movie, which had just had its New York premier uptown.
Capitalism, A Love Story, takes aim at nothing less than the whole capitalist system. It uses all the trademark Mooreisms familiar from earlier works like Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11: Stakeouts, clever editing and innuendo, with the extra-wide filmmaker himself shambling up to corporate headquarters as a self-declared representative of the people. In voice over, he calls capitalism “a system of taking and giving, mostly taking,” and he interviews two priests who call it evil. He praises socialism, and near the end of the film concludes of capitalism that “we have to replace it with something, and that something is called democracy.”
If this were a different kind of movie, it might make sense to point out here that neither capitalism nor democracy nor socialism exist in pure form, and that pretty much every nation in the Western world, including the U.S., combines elements of all three. But Moore, to borrow a phrase coined by a physicist, is “not even wrong.” He makes jokes and tugs at heart strings. He shows pilots who can’t make a living wage, corporations that take out life insurance policies on their workers and families who are thrown out of foreclosed homes. It’s a litany of economic disasters, but it’s not an argument. I’ve heard him compared to Leni Riefenstahl, which is apt insofar as he is a brilliant propagandist. (He’s also fond of cueing Wagnerian-sounding music at dramatic moments.)
It’s been observed that Moore, crusading leftist and now explicit anti-capitalist, has made piles of money from his movies. In a question-and-answer session after Monday night’s screening, an audience member asked Moore if he wouldn’t concede that U.S. capitalism was better than Soviet Communism. Moore replied that the question was “bullsh–” and refused to answer directly, saying that his movie was not about that but about “democracy versus greed.” The hazard of being a professional polemicist, I suppose, is the risk of boxing oneself into intellectual corners. He couldn’t tenably claim that the Soviet system was good for its people, but if he conceded that capitalism had a few things going for it he would have undercut the revolutionary rhetoric that is his bread and butter.
This should drive home the point to us all that whenever you have someone loudly proclaiming that he’s “for the people,” he’s really for his own wallet and his own ability to wield power, first and foremost. Now, apply that to the conglomeration of cretins who inhabit the Obama administration. Hypocrisy becomes an art form for those on the Left.
As Sgt. Schultz once said on Hogan’s Heroes, “I am too poor to deserve to be this fat.”
Michael Moore doesn’t have that problem.
