You Can't Have It Both Ways

Following is a response to John Kricfalusi's recent blog critique of Michael Moore's new film, CAPITALISM -- A LOVE STORY.

The original intent was to post this as a response there, but it turned out to be too long, and tough to shorten. I don't know if JK has the patience to read it or the intent to publish the link to it --which will be the only way anyone reads it...

I haven’t seen this movie, since, as you say, I already know essentially what’s in it --but there are many, many people out there who will not know what’s in it. I’m not sure that those people will see it, since most of those people have been trained to reflexively hate Michael Moore. Probably like Fahrenheit 911, its main function will be to allow liberal progressives to feel validated by a major media event, once a year or so.

Be that as it may, I think that if a person had a sufficiently healthy appreciation for the great wall of shills, liars, fakers, and obfuscators employed at considerable expense by the moneyed interests on the right, in an effort to return us to the golden age of robber barons, why would his first choice be to pick on Michael Moore? There are so many far more worthy targets of ire and wrath --that is, if you want to keep score by vileness of deed. You’ve got Hannity, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Beck, Ingram, Mike Reagan, and at least a half-dozen others all getting fat by spewing hour-upon-hour of daily propaganda and outright lies like bilge pumps, in a very successful effort to turn the American population against itself. --And that is before we get to the multi-million-dollar sleaze work being also done by public relations agencies on behalf of big business. In contrast, Michael Moore stands virtually alone on the national stage as someone even trying to tell some truth of any kind to the American people. The only way to get any inkling of the sickening depths of the fakery on TV with which we are all pounded is by watching the comedy shows, The Daily Show, or, The Colbert Report.

I think if you are going to use something as a platform from which to attack liberal progressive ideas, you need a higher benchmark than Michael Moore, who is by trade something of a sensationalist and not always careful about details. He means well, but he will never be the most articulate spokesperson on any topic.

What I would recommend is that you visit ThomHartmann.com and start reading. Another good source is RandiRhodes.com. Then you will better understand what liberal progressive critical thinking really is, and then you will be able to argue against that reality if you so choose, instead of creating straw men to argue against --such as liberals who want everyone to give all their money to the government, and who want to prevent anyone from prosperity.  This is core propaganda of the right, developed during Reaganomics --and it has been employed in some form before --to make you so afraid that liberals will take all the money that you hope to have someday, that you will instead vote the criminals in and let them take all the money that you have right now, along with all the money that you hoped to have someday! We have all just lived through this cycle, and there was another quite famous one in 1929, so I hope I don’t have to prove it to anyone.

Instead you will find the idea that this country was begun in contrast to what was happening in Europe, as a commonwealth. You will find someone who understands that the founders of this nation were opposed to dynastic wealth, and who understands why this was so, and what it has fundamentally to do with American values. You will find someone who believes that it makes more sense to spread the wealth amongst ourselves than to give it all to the people who already have almost all of it. You will also understand who it most benefits that this elemental American idea has gone largely missing from modern political dialogue (it's certainly not you).

You will not really find liberal progressives who think all the fault lies with CEO’s. Liberal progressives understand that corporate structure and privilege is all problematic, and that the problem predates even hippies (at least who I would call hippies)-- who were some of the first comtemporary people to show any awareness of the problem.

There are no liberals who want everyone to go to ineffective schools. Smart liberals don’t like the state of schools as they are any more than you do. They do believe that everyone should have the opportunity to better themselves. They like giving tax money for things like community colleges, where, among other things, common people can learn a useful trade without going broke.  Liberals believe everyone should have access to betterment. From there we can argue about what specifically would be better --but the more corrupt and influential segment of the wealthy, and the political party that represents them, wants only to create an inexpensive, ignorant, desperate, labor pool.  There are really only 2 kinds of conservatives; the very rich people who hate us, and the gullible who have been lured by a false agenda and who fail to understand the hidden one, even though it’s not very well-hidden. That is neither misstatement nor overstatement. No other rational conclusion exists.

At the risk of stepping on whatever welcome I might enjoy here, it seems to me you should figure out which side of this fight you belong on. You should figure out which side gives you at least a toe-hold. Picking on Michael Moore seems silly since he’s one of maybe 3 people with any national prominence in film, radio, or television who will continually advocate on behalf of common Americans.

I have met some very open-minded people with liberal arts degrees. They like to read books and discuss ideas. People with business degrees --not so much. Engineers can be intelligent but rigid.  They like an ordered universe and tend not to understand political nuances such as being lied to repeatedly by every source they trust on a daily basis.  That makes it hard to have rational discussions with them. In fact, of people who went to college, the people most likely to get along with others not like themselves, and to use their brains sometimes to question some of the messaging being piped into it, probably have liberal arts degrees.

“…He left out the fact that we used to make innovative and quality products that people naturally liked and then after the Hippies we stopped doing that.”

For someone who is touting critical thinking you seem to me to be making some sloppy mistakes yourself. Just because 2 things happen at approximately the same time, it does not mean that they are related. Several times I have seen you make the claim that hippies ruined everything, but not once have you attempted to establish causality. It’s as if you think the correlation is obvious. It’s not. How do you establish that nothing else made it happen? I don’t know why an otherwise rational man would want to demonize a group of people --one whose boundaries, beliefs and membership are all so ill-defined. I can think of all kinds of people who might be called hippies, by various people for various reasons, and they don’t all believe the same things. The last time it came up, Mike Fontanelli responded that somebody who “played hippie” in college and then sold out with a fat corporate paycheck --is a hippie. That is not a hippie; that is a sellout. He can’t have it both ways. If you or Mike F. wanted to make the case that America was ruined by sellouts, I would probably agree with you at least as far as that goes toward explaining things. But you have to sell out to something, which means that something was already corrupt.

What is a hippie to you, and what and who exactly do you mean when you say it? Is hippie just code for liberal? Is it code for wuss? For asswipe? The belief system which you attribute to hippies is fragmented and hyper-selective. How was this hippie agenda spread? How was it able to infect and overthrow American industry?

This tactic is normally employed by enemies of social progress and the true source of divisiveness --the antisocial wealthy --and those who unwittingly do their bidding by way of emotional attachment to unsupported yet strongly held beliefs. You say that sloppy hippie thinking ruined the country but it would be easier and more precise to argue that it was already rotting from the inside due to sloppy thinking --something which gave rise to hippies --than that hippies arose spontaneously from the mist and made it all happen by themselves.

I know that you are not as naive as some of your rhetoric would make it appear, and your more recent post evidences that. Still I felt compelled to address some of the shortcomings of your post.