On Demagoguery: Does Michael Moore’s Sicko really contribute to the cause?

I’ll start with saying I agree with most of Michael Moore’s conclusions. The sum total of his political biography, or filmography, as it can only be determined by the ideas sold in his films and interviews, is really not as radical as it is portrayed by a painstakingly moderate media. What are radical are his means and methods. The assaults on Moore’s films, though, appear to be about his ideas, because they are so often perpetrated by those extremely conservative hacks, who think Moore is far out of line with mainstream thought, and that they are speaking from a common sense American point of view. I don’t think anyone really believes guys like Bill O’Reilly, Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter, have their fingers on the pulse of anything other than the veins of income churned up by their intolerance. Let them run trash pieces all night long. It’s not controversial to suggest gun control in a country that leads the world in gun violence. It wasn’t too far out of line to criticize the Bush administration and the Iraq War, though he may have been a bit early on the assertion that the war was a mistake (It has taken the mainstream a while to catch up.). And he is really not stepping out of bounds to criticize a healthcare industry that everyone agrees is broken. He begins with fairly common sense ideas, and sets out to get at those ideas by treading a path that is radical, and arguably, his biggest fault.

Moore is a master in the craft of propaganda—not documentary. He would have been easily employed during World War II, making films that sold the war, with images of heroic men lining up to fight evil with smiles on their faces, Rosie the Riveter doing her part in the factory. Films that portrayed the eagerness of all Americans to do their part by buying war bonds. In those campaigns, images were put together to create an affect, a mood, which in that time, needed to be support and patriotism. In Sicko, the same cast is on display. It’s not an irony that Moore often digs into the archives for examples of old propaganda used to sell policies and government actions he attacks. He understands this science very well, and more importantly, understands that it is in fact very possible to lead and direct an audience’s train of thought. In an insulated theater, reality is entirely irrelevant.

Propaganda is advertising, not documentary. The rules are simple: show people happy about the policies you endorse, and show them suffering from those you attack. The goal is to create certain emotions and equate them with certain ideas, an effect that cannot be achieved if Moore simply lets his camera sit and observe. He does not let his story unfold before him, but rather, shapes it like so much clay into a vision.

Most of us go into seeing Sicko well aware of the key ideas. We already know it’s an attack on the American healthcare industry. And we know that the controversial idea he’s promoting is a socialized healthcare system. These aren’t things we learn from the film. We learn them from the media storm that surrounds the movie, so after filing into the theater, we sit back and wait for the arguments. That is how I saw it, at least, unable to avoid the media hype. Knowing the subject, the conclusions, and many of the stunts he is going to use, it allowed me to train a more scrutinizing eye on how he gets form A to B. And where Moore is a champion, he succeeds again, and where he’s always disappointed, he outdoes himself.

Many attempts have been made to attack his legitimacy; I’ve heard people talk about how Moore lives in a million dollar Manhattan home, how he makes these films for profit. But his background is that of a very common American, and his films are highly successful in their focus on very common Americans. Though his career might have taken him out of Flint to live a more privileged life, a person doesn’t forget where they are from. Connecting to the mainstream community on all of these issues (gun control, war, and healthcare) is the most promising feature of his films. He finds people that are real, and on their worn faces, teary from the suffering they’ve faced, is written the problem, in a language that cannot be misinterpreted.

Moore unabashedly connects the audience with the problem, and as a champion for their cause, he sets about finding an answer. This is the two-step approach he’s used in all of his films, though Sicko is by far the most simplistic in its approach, because he goes from the problem straight to the conclusion. If Moore had ever taken a philosophy class, he’d know that Logic 101 says you have to support your conclusions on solid, inarguable premises. But Moore is more of a visionary than a debater. It’s as if he wakes up, is filled with the inspiration to bring universal healthcare to this country, and sets out to make a film selling it. A documentary filmmaker would not only establish the public’s disillusionment with the healthcare industry, but would investigate the reasons it has failed, and begin investigating possible solutions for improvement. For Moore, he already had the conclusion before shooting began–socialized medicine is the answer—the next step is finding the evidence to support it. That’s a hell of a lot easier to do with a conclusion in place. Documentary film is typically not about anything until the shoot is over, when the editors and directors sit down and see what it is they’ve filmed. If they are honest, they show what they saw, not what they wanted to see. But already knowing what his film is, Moore can more precisely point the camera.

The reason this is particularly irksome is not that socialized medicine is a bad idea. In fact, it’s a great idea, a necessary one, and deserves serious attention from academics, politicians, healthcare professionals, and the public. But Moore doesn’t do justice to the problem. In many cases, he insults the intelligence of the audience—the public—much in the way the politicians he attacks do. What this country needs on issues like healthcare is change, but the public needs to be part of that change. We do not need demagogues propagandizing to us in order to garner support, then telling us they’ll handle it if we’ll just trust their expertise. Sicko asks this of its audience, granting us only enough emotional prodding to get that support, but not bothering with including us in the investigative process. For Moore, a few Americans unhappy with their healthcare, and a few French citizens very pleased, is evidence enough. Not so.

Even if the French have a successful healthcare system, the pioneers of that system must have carefully investigated the issue, processing the financial, social, and political implications of such a system first. If you are going to sell it to the American public, it deserves the same scrutiny. The first place Moore fails in doing this is his presentation, or rather omission, of the opposing arguments. It isn’t so much that the opposition deserves credence, but rather, that a proposal of socialized healthcare reaches a new level of credibility if the opposition is properly represented, investigated, and countered. Moore would have you believe the only opponents to universal healthcare are insurance and pharmaceutical fat cats, who get rich from the corrupted system and then use that capital to buy off the representatives that could otherwise change things. That much cannot be discounted; the numbers are there, just follow the paper trail of political contributions. But this isn’t the entire population of opponents, or skeptics, of socialized medicine. There are, in fact, philosophical, economic, and social arguments that deserve attention. A proper study would include those arguments. It’s the duty of both politicians and political activists (of which Moore is a soldier) to educate the public on the issues, not panhandle for support based on faith rather than knowledge. I don’t want to have to believe in socialized medicine. I want to know it works.

No system is absolutely perfect, and addressing its faults does not bring down the belief in it, if in fact the system is primarily built on a strong foundation. What if it is true that Canadians wait in longer lines for the doctor than Americans do? Rather than omit the fact, why not simply include the fact and say what most people are thinking: I’d rather wait in a line than not have any doctor to go to at all, which is the case for 45 million people. Of those, many do choose to wait in a line, at some shabby free clinic, with overworked and underpaid doctors in a dangerous part of town, hoping they make the cut off before getting turned away. It would seem that Moore is so insecure in his belief in socialized medicine that he’s afraid his arguments will crumble under a bright enough light. So rather than present the more favorable systems of Canada, England, and France with a completely fair lens, he shies away from casting any negative light whatsoever. He’d have you believe the French system is absolutely perfect. I doubt that, but better than ours is good enough for me.

But even after we see how badly the system can destroy peoples lives, and how content the French, Canadians, and British are with their healthcare, and taking for granted they are both accurate portrayals, it still remains to be seen how these systems will work. The French have socialism in their blood, a national political philosophy with its roots in their revolution. Americans have capitalism in our blood, similarly rooted in our revolution, which was brought on by men not upset over the greed of an aristocracy (as with the French), but rather, upset over a monarchy’s hindrance to the colonies’ ability to maintain a free market without undue taxing. We have a shoddy history with socialism; a serious movement toward it sprung up and died within a few decades at the beginning of last century. It’s hardly a significant part of our political discourse. And if it is to become part of our political reality, it will mean some change, both in terms of our economy, and in how we think about government. These changes may very well serve us for the better, but they will nevertheless be significant changes. Our national debate about healthcare needs to include discussion of these changes, from bureaucratic arrangement, to political philosophy, to taxes. One of the great fears is that universal healthcare will require exorbitant taxes that will bankrupt the government. Though this argument may be formed at the very top economic class, it trickles down to the more middle class Americans, many of whom believe strongly in lower taxes and small government. You can’t defeat the argument by branding it as a mantra of the rich tycoons. It’s a mantra for nearly all Americans. Sicko implies that universal healthcare is free. In fact, that word is repeated throughout the movie. “It’s free….and it’s free…wow, free!” The point is taken, though it’s a misleading point. Nothing is free. Free at the time of your doctor’s visit doesn’t mean free in general. These countries he visits pay for their healthcare system, mainly through higher taxes, but also in a drastically different arrangement of budget allocations. Recognition of the necessary tax increase, and/or budget rearrangement doesn’t constitute the denigration of the system. Moore owes it to his audience to dig deep into the current system’s workings, and into a possible universal system’s workings, so that as citizens we can know what we are supporting, or opposing.

Perhaps due to his financial and critical success as a filmmaker, Moore has lost sight of what it means to convince an audience. He’s such a megalomaniac, he expects the audience to sympathize with those families in the beginning of the film, and immediately follow him on his path to a more European system of medicine. Nothing illustrates this more than the much publicized and criticized stunt in Cuba. What is so irritating about this purely dramatic exploit is not his assertion that Cuba has a free and good healthcare system. I have heard Cuba’s system portrayed both positively and negatively from many different sources. It is true that they spend a great deal of their budget on healthcare and well known that they send doctors overseas to aid other countries. In fact, one of the untold stories of Hurricane Katrina regards the medical aid Cuba offered to help in New Orleans, which was subsequently turned down by our government, so often concerned first with geopolitics than the welfare of its citizens. But, you know, America is not unique in that respect. Governments often mistreat their own citizens out of concern for their political standing in the world. And Cuba plays the same game. By exporting their superior medicine overseas, they bring a positive light on a country the United States has been trying to demonize for years. It would make sense for them to do this, despite not treating their own citizens with the same medicine. You cannot judge a country by its foreign affairs, whether positive or negative. You have to get inside of Cuba, and even if they have a superior medical system, few people know the truth. Amnesty International, not a conservative organization by any stretch, has consistently criticized Cuba’s lack of free press, and political freedom. But Moore expects us to believe he can walk into Cuba as an American journalist, and get to the truth. Pop quiz: what do you do when someone comes to you from a country that has been consistently critical of life in your country? Well you provide him with proof that it’s not such a bad place. And that’s exactly what appears onscreen in Sicko, a representation of medicine in Cuba as they’d like you to see it. Would Cuban doctors really turn away a group of Americans in front of American cameras, so that Moore can go back to America with a film about the detriments of the Cuban healthcare system? They don’t know Moore in that country, and obviously, like any good housekeepers, tidy up when company comes over.

But the Cuban stunt is part of the emotional fervor Sicko is expected to kick up. As I was watching, I often wondered what kind of audience he was aiming for. Do I know more, or as much, or less, than the ideal audience member? Perhaps Moore is not interested in investigating the issue, but simply wants to churn up anger, get people peeved about the system. If so, he’s too late for that stage. People have been peeved for sometime, and we are entering the desperation point, where we need the ideas lain out on the table, not demagoguery. I think people are reminded on a regular basis of the story Sicko is telling. Most Americans may be only distantly connected to the issues in Moore’s previous films, but healthcare is crawling under the skin of everyone. With so many people uninsured, underinsured, or closely related to someone suffering from the system, the anger and frustration is there. As the most successful documentary filmmaker in history, Moore owes more to his supporters, and more to this country than unproductive demagoguery of the kind that has split this nation into a polarized mess.