Pharma-Hype 9/11?

(On coincidence, modern medicine, modern media, and Michael Moore.)

I’ve been around long enough to know that there’s no such thing as coincindence.

I logged into Alternet.org today (they’re my homepage, though they’re not carrying Molly Ivins these days and I’m not happy about it) and was therefore completely unsurprised to find a well-known filmmaker is planning a documentary on our thoroughly f*cked up, so-called “health care system.” (If you haven’t read the last few entries of this blog yet, please do so now.) That filmmaker turns out to be Michael Moore. My ambivalence knows no bounds.

I appear to be one of the rare few who is not completely polarized by Mr. Moore’s views and the films based upon them. While I admire him for having the guts to do a “show and tell” session on some of the deepest corruption in our current government (Farenheit 9/11) and his ability to take on the NRA and other special interests (Bowling For Columbine), I am less than impressed by his willingness to use innuendo as fact. I can understand his tactics in using gut-wrenching, below-the-belt emotionalism to get his audiences ready for his message (the sounds of 9/11/01 juxtaposed against a black screen — horribly effective), while at the same time resent the reality that this emotional manipulation was the context for the facts and innuendo thereafter presented.

Most seriously of all, I understand the fact that the truths Michael Moore told needed to be told, but deeply resent that Mr. Moore himself became the focus for the way he presented those truths, rendering them completely inaccessible to those who most needed to hear them.

Hence, my ambivalence. Michael Moore is taking on Big Pharmacy, Big Insurance, Big Government, and other corporate interests to expose what is quite possibly one of the most inefficient, costly, and ineffective “health care” systems imaginable. Having spent the last three months inside that system on behalf of my son, I am acutely aware of just how stupid, arrogant, frustrating, and dangerous modern medicine can be. If Mr. Moore can restrain himself to simply showing all this, factually, without resorting to innuendo and inference, he might be just the person who can get Americans mad enough to turn the tide of ignorance, liability, and corporate interest that currently dominate modern health care.

If as in the past it turns out Michael Moore becomes the focus (for more innuendo-as-fact and other misrepresentations of the truth), then I wish he’d stay the hell out of it. It’s going to be a long, tough haul to wean our representatives away from their corporate “Big Medicine” donors as it is. We won’t need Michael Moore to make it even worse.

Quote of the Day: A full-spectrum approach to human consciousness and behavior means that men and women have available to them a spectrum of knowing — a spectrum that includes, at the very least, the eye of flesh, the eye of mind, and the eye of spirit. -Ken Wilber
Metaphors For Life’s website