10-08-09 Capitalism: A Love Story

Noncommerical schedule complicated: listen closely and have your pencil ready. Two programs Friday: the Laurel and Hardy fan club with the postponed September program, Air Raid Wardens, plus : “Chickens Come Home,” a cartoon, and Buster Keaton in “The Boat,” 6:30 in Calvary Methodist Church, 2525 North Rock Road; and Friday from 7 to 11 will be the first of a series of showings of Surreal and Green Art Festival movies in the Commerce Gallery, 508 South Commerce: other showings will be 7 to 9 Tuesday and Friday next week: that’s 7 to 11 this Friday, 7 to 9 Tuesday and Friday next week, Commerce Gallery, 508 South Commerce, if you like weird and unusual. Then on Sunday we have the usual Blank Page movie at 917 West Douglas, L’Atalante, a 1934 French romance by the seldom-seen director Jean Vigo that Leonard Maltin says anticipated neorealism. And modesty almost led me to omit my own introducing the Vincent Price version of House of Usher at 2 Saturday in the Main Library downtown, followed by the movie itself.

Or you might choose to go see Michael Moore’s latest, Capitalism: A Love Story.

Michael Moore, bless him, is always on serious issues and always on my side. I wish I could more heartily support him.

But the first two thirds of Capitalism wiped out credibility, and the final third, while valuable in basic ideas, was incomplete and confused.

Capitalism starts out by portraying such an economic paradise as might fit the civilizations who didn’t get involved in World War II: they did indeed have secure jobs and good pay, and it lasted a while, if you were a white heterosexual male. But even Moore mentions labor unions and the feminist movement, though he slights the racial equality movement, none of which should have been necessary coming out of such streets paved with gold as Capitalism starts out with. And at the end, Moore says we need to replace Capitalism with Democracy, without, one, recognizing that Capitalism is an economic system and Democracy is a political system, or, two, explaining what the workers’ paradise he started out with was, if not either capitalism or democracy. He does make a good case for the restoration of the regulation of the financial world that was put in during the Depression, but he doesn’t seem to realize that that’s all he does; the capitalism-plus-regulation he started with should be what he also ended with, according to his own reasoning. And such questions as whether regulation will work in an age of globalization, when corporations are so huge that no one country can control them. Or whether the enormous expense of politics in our country can allow power to anybody but the very rich are never brought up. With a reliance on narration that no previous Michael Moore movie has shown, Moore could have done a lot more reasoning to support what he is trying to say. But he seems far more interested in amusing than in informing, which may be the only way to reach as large an audience as Moore does. Propaganda may be essential at this moment, and Moore is pretty good at propaganda.

But he seems to be relying on an audience that accepts whatever he says without thought about it, and I hesitate to recommend that. And let’s face it, I don’t find his pranks all that funny at my age.

I wish everybody would give careful consideration to Capitalism: A Love Story’s message about deregulation, and then check some more reliable authorities on everything it brings up. Michael Moore is a valuable man, but you need to treat him with caution.