The only real noteworthy thing of late was providing some transportation help and a botany workshop for the hopefully soon-to-be-reactivated Stumptown Earth First!. Which was nice both for it being an excuse to get up into the mountains and for the opportunity to interact with other anarchists.
I had been spending altogether too much time on the Craigslist politics forums, and gets just sooo crushing to the spirit to be continually in the presence of those who wholeheartedly buy into what I’ve come to regard as so much establishment bullshit. (Which goes for both “sides” of what typically passes for debate.)
Despite all that can be said in criticism of the crowd (and I’ve said my share of it), many of the oft-derided twentysomething anarcho-punk “lifestylists” are a lot more sophisticated and nuanced in their outlooks than the common stereotypes might have one believe. Sure, we have our differences, but they’re differences amongst allies, not differences between completely different outlooks.
It was a nice recharging of my mental batteries.
Interesting, but I liked it less than Bowling for Columbine, probably because I’m already quite familiar with the issue and the approach Sicko takes is not quite as original as the approach Columbine does.
That said, it still needed making. It is an unashamedly biased film, showing only the good points of various universal health-care systems in response to the bad points of the American medical-industrial complex.
News flash: This is Planet Reality we’re talking about. Every system has its warts. The problem is, most Americans have been treated to reports on nothing but the warts of various foreign systems by the corporate media over the years.
It needed to be shown that there’s actually clean, well-run hospitals and skilled, well-paid doctors in the rest of the world. It needed to be shown that waiting endlessly for care is the exception and not the rule. It needed to be pointed out that even a free marketeer like Margaret Thatcher had no intention of getting rid of universal health care, so universally popular is the concept.
And, yes, Moore did almost certainly get played like a fiddle by the Cubans. How nice for them that the inner Communist Party ruling elite has that modern hospital in Havana at its disposal. I strongly doubt the average Cuban ever sees the interior of it.
And crosses is going the wrong way.
At first, I was suspicious of the claims he wanted to muzzle foreign visitors. All the ones I saw at first were in domestic, establishment sources. And their almost universal chiming in in favor of the 2002 coup d’etat was evidence yet again of the insufficient distance between the allegedly independent media and the US State Department.
But, alas, no: after a little searching, I found pieces by The Independent and the BBC, both normally reliable sources, which said pretty much the same thing. And supposing it is all a Western establishment media conspiracy, I can’t quite fathom why Al Jazeera would be in on it, too.
How tragic. The guy actually had a case against RCTV, which had played an active role in attempting to impose a military dictatorship on Venezuela, and whose license was up for regular renewal. But now it looks like Chávez is the one trying to impose a dictatorship.
Such is the danger of building a revolution based on state socialism led by a single, charismatic leader.
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