In Sicko, Michael Moore’s new film, a young Ronald Reagan is shown
appealing to working-class Americans to reject “socialised medicine” as
commie subversion. In the 1940s and 1950s, Reagan was employed by the
American Medical Association and big business as the amiable mouthpiece
of a neo-fascism bent on persuading ordinary Americans that their true
interests, such as universal health care, were “anti-American”.
Watching
this, I found myself recalling the effusive farewells to Reagan when he
died three years ago. “Many people believe,” said Gavin Esler on the
BBC’s Newsnight, “that he restored faith in American military action
[and] was loved even by his political opponents.” In the Daily Mail,
Esler wrote that Reagan “embodied the best of the American spirit – the
optimistic belief that problems can be solved, that tomorrow will be
better than today, and that our children will be wealthier and happier
than we are”.
Such drivel about a man who, as president, was
responsible for the 1980s bloodbath in central America, and the rise of
the very terrorism that produced al-Qaeda, became the received spin.
Reagan’s walk-on part in Sicko is a rare glimpse of the truth of his
betrayal of the blue-collar nation he claimed to represent. The
treacheries of another president, Richard Nixon, and a would-be
president, Hillary Clinton, are similarly exposed by Moore.
Just
when there seemed little else to say about the great Watergate crook,
Moore extracts from the 1971 White House tapes a conversation between
Nixon and John Erlichman, his aide who ended up in prison. A wealthy
Republican Party backer, Edgar Kaiser, head of one of America’s biggest
health insurance companies, is at the White House with a plan for “a
national health-care industry”. Erlichman pitches it to Nixon, who is
bored until the word “profit” is mentioned.
“All the incentives,”
says Erlichman, “run the right way: the less [medical] care they give
them, the more money they make.” To which Nixon replies without
hesitation: “Fine!” The next cut shows the president announcing to the
nation a task force that will deliver a system of “the finest health
care”. In truth, it is one of the worst and most corrupt in the world,
as Sicko shows, denying common humanity to some 50 million Americans
and, for many of them, the right to life.
The most haunting
sequence is captured by a security camera in a Los Angeles street. A
woman, still in her hospital gown, staggers through the traffic, where
she has been dumped by the company (the one founded by Nixon’s backer)
that runs the hospital to which she was admitted. She is ill and
terrified and has no health insurance. She still wears her admission
bracelet, though the name of the hospital has been thoughtfully erased.
Later
on, we meet that glamorous liberal couple, Bill and Hillary Clinton. It
is 1993 and the new president is announcing the appointment of the
first lady as the one who will fulfil his promise to give America a
universal health-care. And here is “charming and witty” Hillary herself,
as a senator calls her, pitching her “vision” to Congress. Moore’s
portrayal of the loquacious, flirting, sinister Hillary is reminiscent
of Tim Robbins’s superb political satire Bob Roberts. You know her
cynicism is already in her throat. “Hillary,” says Moore in voice-over,
“was rewarded for her silence [in 2007] as the second-largest recipient
in the Senate of health-care industry contributions”.
Moore has
said that Harvey Weinstein, whose company produced Sicko and who is a
friend of the Clintons, wanted this cut, but he refused. The assault on
the Democratic Party candidate likely to be the next president is a
departure for Moore, who, in his personal campaign against George Bush
in 2004, endorsed General Wesley Clark, the bomber of Serbia, for
president and defended Bill Clinton himself, claiming that “no one ever
died from a blow job”. (Maybe not, but half a million Iraqi infants died
from Clinton’s medieval siege of their country, along with thousands of
Haitians, Serbians, Sudanese and other victims of his unsung
invasions.)
With this new independence apparent, Moore’s deftness
and dark humour in Sicko, which is a brilliant work of journalism and
satire and film-making, explains – perhaps even better than the films
that made his name, Roger and Me, Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit
9/11 – his popularity and influence and enemies. Sicko is so good that
you forgive its flaws, notably Moore’s romanticising of Britain’s
National Health Service, ignoring a two-tier system that neglects the
elderly and the mentally ill.
The film opens with a wry carpenter
describing how he had to make a choice after two fingers were shorn off
by an electric saw. The choice was $60,000 to restore a forefinger or
$12,000 to restore a middle finger. He could not afford both, and had no
insurance. “Being a hopeless romantic,” says Moore, “he chose the ring
finger” on which he wore his wedding ring. Moore’s wit leads us to
scenes that are searing, yet unsentimental, such as the eloquent anger
of a woman whose small daughter was denied hospital care and died of a
seizure. Within days of Sicko opening in the United States, more than
25,000 people overwhelmed Moore’s website with similar stories.
The
California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organising
Committee despatched volunteers to go on the road with the film. “From
my sense,” says Jan Rodolfo, an oncology nurse, “it demonstrates the
potential for a true national movement because it’s obviously inspiring
so many people in so many places.”
Moore’s “threat” is his
unerring view from the ground. He abrogates the contempt in which elite
America and the media hold ordinary people. This is a taboo subject
among many journalists, especially those claiming to have risen to the
nirvana of “impartiality” and others who profess to teach journalism. If
Moore simply presented victims in the time-honoured, ambulance-chasing
way, leaving the audience tearful but paralysed, he would have few
enemies. He would not be looked down upon as a polemicist and
self-promoter and all the other pejorative tags that await those who
step beyond the invisible boundaries in societies where wealth is said
to equal freedom. The few who dig deep into the nature of a liberal
ideology that regards itself as superior, yet is responsible for crimes
epic in proportion and generally unrecognised, risk being eased out of
the “mainstream”, especially if they are young – a process that a former
editor once described to me as “a sort of gentle defenestration”.
None
has broken through like Moore, and his detractors are perverse to say
he is not a “professional journalist” when the role of the professional
journalist is so often that of zealously, if surreptitiously, serving
the status quo. Without the loyalty of these professionals on the New
York Times and other august (mostly liberal) media institutions “of
record”, the criminal invasion of Iraq might not have happened and a
million people would be alive today. Deployed in Hollywood’s sanctum –
the cinema – Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 shone a light in their eyes,
reached into the memory hole, and told the truth. That is why audiences
all over the world stood and cheered.
What struck me when I first
saw Roger and Me, Moore’s first major film, was that you were invited
to like ordinary Americans for their struggle and resilience and
politics that reached beyond the din and fakery of the American
democracy industry. Moreover, it is clear they “get it” about him: that
despite being rich and famous he is, at heart, one of them. A foreigner
doing something similar risks being attacked as “anti-American”, a term
Moore often uses as irony in order to demonstrate its dishonesty. At a
stroke, he sees off the kind of guff exemplified by a recent BBC Radio 4
series that presented humanity as pro- or anti-American while the
reporter oozed about America, “the city on the hill”.
Just as
tendentious is a documentary called Manufacturing Dissent, which appears
to have been timed to discredit, if not Sicko, then Moore himself. Made
by the Canadians Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine, it says more about
liberals who love to face both ways and the whiny jealousies aroused by
tall poppies. Melnyk tells us ad nauseam how much she admires Moore’s
films and politics and is inspired by him, then proceeds to attempt
character assassination with a blunderbuss of assertions and hearsay
about his “methods”, along with personal abuse, such as that of the
critic who objected to Moore’s “waddle” and someone else who said he
reckoned Moore actually hated America – was anti-American, no less!
Melnyk
pursues Moore to ask him why, in his own pursuit of an interview with
Roger Smith of General Motors, he failed to mention that he had already
spoken to him. Moore has said he interviewed Smith long before he began
filming. When she twice intercepts Moore on tour, she is rightly
embarrassed by his gracious response. If there is a renaissance of
documentaries, it is not served by films such as this.
This is
not to suggest Moore should not be pursued and challenged about whether
or not he “cuts corners”, just as the work of the revered father of
British documentary, John Grierson, has been re-examined and questioned.
But feckless parody is not the way. Turning the camera around, as Moore
has done, and revealing great power’s “invisible government” of
manipulation and often subtle propaganda is certainly one way. In doing
so, the documentary-maker breaches a silence and complicity described by
Günter Grass in his confessional autobiography, Peeling the Onion, as
maintained by those “feigning their own ignorance and vouching for
another’s… divert[ing] attention from something intended to be
forgotten, something that nevertheless refuses to go away”.
For
me, an earlier Michael Moore was that other great “anti-American”
whistleblower, Tom Paine, who incurred the wrath of corrupt power when
he warned that if the majority of the people were being denied “the
ideas of truth”, it was time to storm what he called the “Bastille of
words” and we call “the media”. That time is overdue.
