May 02, 2011
Michael Moore
George Soros plants countless media sock-puppets who preach about people power and soaking the rich with taxes, yet he offshores much of his tremendous wealth precisely to avoid such taxes. Noam Chomsky preaches that paying income tax is a moral obligation, yet he squirrels away his considerable receivables in tax shelters so his children can avoid having to pay inheritance tax. Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation, again and again and again condemns those who are not “paying their share,” yet she battled the IRS all the way to the Supreme Court to avoid paying her own inheritance taxes.
When she isn”t having her face cosmetically lifted by giant tractors that use towing hooks to stretch back her jowls, Nancy Pelosi receives huge campaign contributions from labor unions. Yet she employs over a thousand workers, none of them unionized, in the restaurants and vineyards she owns with her husband.
I”d have more faith in the vociferous anti-gun bloviating of Rosie O”Donnell, Dianne Feinstein, and John Kerry if none of them felt the need to personally own guns or hire bodyguards who were packing heat.
And I”d be much more open to listening to what they had to say about diversity and integration’s virtues if they didn”t ALL send their kids to private schools and live in neighborhoods that are whiter than a January snowflake.
I”d also be much less disposed to hating their quivering guts if, in the name of some ill-defined notion of “tolerance,” their policies haven”t systematically eviscerated nearly everyone who occupies economic strata that fall somewhere between Malibu and small African villages. These are the armchair globalists and professional social tinkerers who treat the world like a toy chemistry set. They cheered when our manufacturing base was shlepped overseas to all those diverse and multicolored Third World countries. They simultaneously welcomed a dozen million “undocumented” foreign-language-speaking and culturally spicy brownfolk from south of the border, yet they seem perplexed why America’s laboring classes are more fractured and defeated than they”ve been in over a century. Perched safely at the wealth continuum’s upper extremes, they scream about America’s growing income disparities, either unaware of, or indifferent to, the fact that it was their very policies that helped turn us into a banana republic.
Observe the thin-lipped smugness in the face of James Cameron”director of history’s top two highest-grossing films”as he wears face paint and hugs indigenous Brazilian tribespersons. In Cameron’s world there are only two kinds of people”the authentically destitute and the astronomically wealthy who fetishize the idea of such authenticity. Everyone else in between those two extremes can go die. They don”t exist. Or they won”t for long, anyway.
I haven”t seen Avatar”I”ve likely seen fewer post-1975 Hollywood films than any living American”but from what I understand, it depicts a world split between evil rich white people and noble poor blue people. From what I can gather, Cameron has convinced himself he’s a noble poor blue person, at least in “spirit.” Like nearly everyone employed in the mythmaking business, he weaves fictional morality tales that justify his existence.
One day maybe I”ll write a screenplay about a low-paid limo driver assigned to shepherd around a condescending, tantrum-throwing, latte-sipping progressive TV pundit who incessantly scolds the driver about his backwards cultural attitudes and how much his limousine contributes to global warming. Uninsured and underpaid, the driver receives a terminal cancer diagnosis one day. That night, as his client hectors him about converting his limo into a hybrid, he turns around and shoots him dead. Justice? That’s for the viewer to decide, but I”d pay to go see a movie like that.
