Michael Moore's provocative, polemical new documentary, "Capitalism: A Love Story," is a sermon on the theme that love of money is the root of all evil.
With a machine gun's worth of bullet points, Moore illustrates outrageous corporate practices (Citibank and American Express profiting from secret life insurance policies on their bottom-rung employees; a for-profit juvenile jail in Pennsylvania that bribed judges to keep its cells filled; sweetheart home-loan terms for politicos regulating the bank industry). The moral is spelled out by several Catholic clergymen: Capitalism is "a sin."
Following last week's sneak preview of his film at the Lagoon Cinema in Minneapolis, Moore said, "You can't regulate evil. You have to eliminate it." That's why he made the film: to rouse viewers to take political action.
"I'm getting older, and I want to see change in my lifetime. I don't do anything anymore because it's the cool thing to do or the righteous thing to do. I want actual action and change to occur."
If it seems unlikely that the United States would change its capitalist stripes, it's no crazier than Nelson Mandela getting out of prison in South Africa, let alone becoming that nation's president, he said, or the United States electing a black president.
"If I could wave a magic wand, if I could change one thing in Washington, D.C., it would be to remove money from our electoral process," Moore said. It rankles him that standing up for his convictions, controversial though they may be, inspires his adversaries to brand him "un-American."
"That hurts when I so clearly love this country and do what I think are the true patriotic things one should do: standing up for what I believe in and trying to make things better for my fellow citizens. They want to convince the average American that I want to take them down some path of godless communism. I'm the opposite of godless. I still go to mass.
No comments:
Post a Comment