Michael Moore Does Cuba — Again

George Moneo, who has the giant's share of the male intelligence at Babalú and 100% of the wit (excluding the great Humberto Fontova, who is there for window-dressing), offers us the incredible story of media whore Michael Moore's junket to Cuba in search of medical miracles for an airbus full of 9/11 survivors suffering from a variety of conditions which are either known or suspected to have been caused by their exposure to dangerous substances in and around the vicinity of Ground Zero. Most of the victims handpicked by Moore as extras (or, better yet, props) in his great opera of man's exploitation by man acquired those life-threatening conditions because of their rescue work at the WTC site. In other words these genuine American heroes are being used by a genuine American conman to hype and promote an even greater conman's medical Potemkin's village, and specifically, the great pharmaceutical conglomerate which Castro owns in Cuba and which is the 2nd-largest source of his income (after exile remittances). That is one corporation that Moore is not reluctant to shill for. No other medical concern in the world exploits humans as does Castro's privately-owned (by himself) and many-tiered "socialized" public health system. We all know that Castro uses Cuba's doctors as slaves for hire; less known, however, is the fact that in the 1980s Castro cornered the world's blood plasma market by "harvesting" the prison population of the island and even sold subjects for vivisection to East Germany, which continued Mengele's experiments for 35 years after Mengele.

George Moneo admits to being left speechless by such a monumental spectable of human exploitation — indeed, of exploitation layered upon exploitation — perpetrated by Moore as a stunt for his latest cinematic libel. I wish I could be left speechless by anything, but too much acquaintance with the human condition has made me immune to the effects of its vanity and venality.

With Moore as with the Estefans, it is the Almighty Dollar that rules and explains his actions. Moore is a critic of capitalism who uses the system to enrich himself by attacking the system. He is, in other words, the very thing he hates, and he vents that self-hate by attacking others like himself who, without any discernable talents and much hubris, were apt at using other men as stepping stones and battering rams in their insatiable quest for more and more riches. What makes Moore particularly odious among an odious lot is that he is also an egomaniac and poseur. Others in his confraternity are content to enjoy their tainted riches in segregation or isolation from the rest of humanity. In his tastes and lifestyle Moore is no different from them (if somewhat more unconventional in his toilette). Where he does differ from the billionaire's club is in his hate for his own; but this hate is in nowise redeeming because he hates them for their success not for what injustices they may have perpetrated to achieve it. Moore hates the rich but does not love the poor. It is in fact ridiculous to expect that one will follow the other as night does day. The only thing that Moore loves about the hoi polloi is that they are hoi polloi. He loves the "chic" of being poor and marginalized; loves it enough to copy the externals of nihilism while keeping the internals well-fed and pampered.

Moore makes no secret of his infatuation with Castro (he certainly has much in common with bola de churre), nor does Castro exactly conceal his reciprocal infatuation with Moore. In fact, Castro ordered Moore's Fahrenheit 911 to be shown in every theatre in Cuba for a week and then had it broadcast on prime time on national television. Speak of a captive audience, the kind of audience that Moore always wanted for his screen myopics. Castro pirated Moore's film and Moore did not object. If any corporate entity, private (HBO) or public (PBS), had done what Castro did, Moore would have puffed and ranted and his lawyers sued for "intellectual [sic] theft." But because it was Castro's corporate state that stole his property, Moore has no objections. The idiot seems to think that there is no money to be made from Castro, so he's content with the "glory" of being lionized by Mouseheart.

Moore knew how to repay Castro for his oleaginous attention. "These Cuban exiles," Moore pontificated in Downsize This, "for all their chest-thumping and terrorism, are really just a bunch of wimps. That's right. Wimps! When you don't like the oppressor in your country, you stay there and try to overthrow him. You don't just turn tail and run like these Cubans. Imagine if the American colonists had all run to Canada – and then insisted the Canadians had a responsibility to overthrow the British down in the States! ... So the Cubans crybabies came here expecting us to fight their fight for them. And, like morons, we have."

I guess that the Jews who didn't or couldn't run from their oppressor are Moore's heroes and he wishes that Cuban exiles had followed their example. He is not the only liberal pacifist who thinks this: the great Mahatma Gandhi advised the Jews to commit collective suicide before the Holocaust as a great moral lesson to the rest of us.

And, of course, Moore knows nothing about American history, such as the fact that the Americans expected and got the French to fight for them. In fact, it was the French who won the definitive battle of the American Revolution at Yorktown (with 1.2 million livres from Cuban sympathizers of the American cause and several hundred Cuban volunteers). And the French, by the way, did not demand that the Americans lease them in perpetuity a naval base on Chesapeake Bay. Neither does this ignoramus know that hundreds of thousands of Americans did run to Canada in the wake of the American Revolution when the rebels burned their homes, confiscated their properties and tar-and-feathered them (which was usually lethal, since it involved applying hot boiling tar to the entire body and then finishing the job with a layer of feathers). In the wake of Cuba's War of Independence there were no retaliations against Spaniards who had fought against the Cuban rebels (and even put their relatives in the world's first concentration camps). In fact, pre-Castro Cuba (whose population peaked at 6.6 million in 1958) admitted more than 1,000,000 Spaniards as immigrants after the War, including Fidel's father Angel Castro.

If each had to live his life over again but could not follow the same course as the first time, Moore would surely chose to live Castro's life and Castro Moore's. Their affinities are so many that one could chronicle either's idiosyncracies and the portrait serve for both. In fact, I should not be surprised if Moore were some day to do an "autobiographical" film about Fidel. To look into Fidel's soul Moore need only examine his own. But hurry, Michael, the Cuban Faust won't have his for long and you want him to be able to enjoy your tribute in life.


POSTSCRIPT:

I beg you on bended knee to visit this website and meditate on how Nature copies art:

http://korlapundit.blogspot.com/2004/10/infamous-monsters-of-filmland.html


POSTSCRIPT 2:

Charlie Bravo has a wonderfully funny post about Michael Moore and the "G-2 Diet." Just go to the bottom of this page and click the link to Killcastro: A War Blog.