This is what irritates me about people who complain about Moore - yes, he makes a big self-aggrandizing show out of himself, but I fail to see how it invalidates any of his actual political points. Christopher writes this in the comments of the previous post, and it's a fair point as far as it goes. The problem with Moore's ego isn't that it somehow negates the rightness of his arguments—it doesn't—but that it inevitably makes the cultural conversation on these issues about Moore rather than about any actual policy. And this isn't Moore's fault, exclusively, either, insofar as this is the strategy that is always used by our corporately owned media outlets and the conservatives who dominate them to diffuse all criticism of the American corporate state (See also: $400 haircuts, Al Gore's big house, etc)—but it's happened to Moore a bunch of times now and you'd think he would have started to learn his lesson.

What drives me crazy about Moore, whom I've always admired, isn't that he becomes the target of this sort of discourse but that time after time he seems to intentionally go out of his way to create scandals for the media's idiotic talking heads to chew on, and in effect provide people with excuses not to listen to anything he says.

I watched it last night, and Sicko is in many ways a great political film. There's a documentary reversal about twenty minutes in that's probably one of the best I've seen, in which Moore briefly profiles four young women in what seems to be the movie's next segment, only to suddenly reveal that three have already died from lack of care and move on. The stories Moore tells can be truly gut-wrenching and infuriating, and they resonate because every person in this country has seen the ways in which insurance companies lie, cheat, and steal their way out of paying people what they're owed. The segment on Rep. Billy Tauzin in particular had me ready for a lynching. And the comparisons to Canada, Britain, and France could be enough on their own to genuinely change minds on the issue; each looks more and more like paradise alongside corporate America's betrayal of the country and its people. This movie puts the lie to the so-called "ownership society" and the ideology of "personal responsibility" as effectively as just about anything ever has.

Even the already infamous trip to Cuba in the movie's final third works in the sense that it's incredibly moving, tapping as it does into the mess of feelings and regret surrounding 9/11 and the perpetually denied dream of universal siblinghood. But it's also, plainly, the film's Achilles heel—if you wanted a reason to tune out, if you wanted a rhetorical stick to beat Moore with, here it is, gift-wrapped. And Moore follows the Cuba episode up with a stunt to my mind is even worse rhetorically—a brief coda in which he "anonymously" pays a year's health-care premium for one of his biggest Internet detractors to make some sort of point about community and everybody pulling together. Great thing to do, obviously, except that the placement in the movie makes it seem like the nastiest anonymous donation in history, and because now it's the other only thing people will talk about, and because it really has nothing to do with the fact that our health care system is FUBAR and everything to do with Moore's bottomless desire to be idolized.

Whether he's right or not, he's just handing ammunition over to his enemies for no good reason, and that's the problem.

My hope for Sicko is that the movie does for social programs what An Inconvenient Truth did last October for global warming, and I think there's real hope for that. It is, as I said, a moving and great film, even a brilliant one. And Americans are fed up with their health care, fed up with plutocracy, and ready, I think, to finally join the twentieth century and the rest of the Western world on this. What we need now is leadership on the issue, not more hilarious cowardice from the Democrats or self-inflicted wounds from liberal spokespeople—which will only happen if Sicko starts conversations that aren't about Michael Moore.